What was Il Terrazzo?
The spring of 2008 was the season the Phoenician stopped being the Phoenician. On April 5 it served the last supper at Mary Elaine’s, the rooftop French room that had been Arizona’s most decorated restaurant for two decades. Eight weeks later, on June 2, 2008, it opened Il Terrazzo — and the two events belong in the same sentence, because one was the end of formality and the other was what the resort decided to do instead.
Il Terrazzo was not a new room. It was The Terrace, the resort’s traditional American three-meal restaurant since the 1988 opening, converted into an Italian one — “specialties from all across Italy,” in the language of the day, meaning a menu that roamed the regions rather than committing to one. The terrace stayed, looking over the pools and lawns toward the Valley with Camelback at your back. The kitchen went to Victor Casanova, a chef de cuisine who had just left a sous-chef job at New York’s Ocean Club, and an October press dinner that year set the register: saltimbocca with fingerling potatoes, ricotta gnocchi in lamb ragù, a fresh-baked chocolate-cherry bread. Rustic, generous, unfussy.
That was the point. The Phoenician’s $70 million renovation was built around “dressing things down,” and Il Terrazzo was the dressed-down version of what the resort had always done well — breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a Sunday brunch, served on a terrace most hotels would kill for, with a menu nobody needed a jacket or a glossary to enjoy.
It ran nine years. Chef Tandy Peterson led the kitchen in its last stretch, and when the Phoenician’s next renovation closed Il Terrazzo on May 3, 2017, Peterson stayed to open Mowry & Cotton in the rebuilt space. The Italian chapter was over. The terrace, as always, survived.
Dinner on the terrace
The view did the heavy lifting, and the kitchen knew not to fight it. Il Terrazzo’s terrace faced the Phoenician’s pool complex — the resort’s famous mother-of-pearl-tiled pool among them — with the Valley opening up beyond and Camelback’s flank behind you. Sunset seatings were the currency. Inside was handsome and hotel-safe; outside was where regulars ate, and the smart reservation asked for the rail.
The menu was a tour, not a thesis. Regional Italian across the map — the saltimbocca pointed at Rome, the pastas roamed — rather than one province’s cooking argued to the last detail. The pastas were the strength — the ricotta gnocchi in lamb ragù from the opening menu became the dish people came back for — and the entrées were built for a resort clientele that wanted a grilled fish or a veal chop done straight. Sunday brunch was the sleeper. Billed as “contemporary,” it lacked the champagne-fountain excess of the old Golden Swan brunches across town, which was its virtue — a proper Italian-accented spread on the terrace for a fraction of what the Phoenician’s ballroom holidays cost, and rarely crowded because the resort’s own guests slept through it.
Prices sat a full tier below the flagship. J&G Steakhouse, which took Mary Elaine’s rooftop in 2008, was the special-occasion room; Il Terrazzo was the second night, the family dinner, the lunch after a spa morning. A level-three check with a level-five view was the deal, and Phoenician regulars understood it perfectly.
Logistics were resort logistics: valet at the porte-cochère, a walk past the marble, and reservations that mattered on winter weekends and Sunday mornings but almost never on a Tuesday.
The casual middle of a formal resort
Il Terrazzo occupies an interesting slot in the Phoenician’s dining history because it was the first restaurant the resort built on purpose for the post-formal era. Mary Elaine’s had been Charles Keating’s 1988 monument to excess; Windows on the Green was the Southwestern room of the 1990s boom. Il Terrazzo was a 2008 idea: take the all-purpose American room, give it a cuisine everyone already loves, hire a young New York chef, and let the terrace sell it. It was the same logic that produced casual Italian rooms at resorts across the country that decade, and the Phoenician executed it competently.
What it lacked was a reason for locals to drive up Camelback Road. Scottsdale in the 2010s was drowning in good Italian — Marcellino in Old Town, Veneto Trattoria at Hilton Village, the North Italia wave — and a resort Italian with a valet charge and no chef’s name on the door was always going to be a guests-first proposition. It served that audience well for nine years, which in resort time is a full career.
The end was a renovation, as it usually is. The Phoenician’s 2016–2017 overhaul rethought nearly every restaurant on the property, and the research all pointed toward livelier, more communal dining. The resort closed Il Terrazzo on May 3, 2017, gutted the space, and built Mowry & Cotton — open kitchen, wood fire, floor-to-ceiling glass over the rebuilt pools, community fire pits on the patio, a menu of regionally sourced and cured American cooking. Keeping Tandy Peterson at the stove was the one continuity. Everything else changed, down to the name.
Honest assessment: Il Terrazzo was never a great restaurant and never pretended to be. It was a well-run, well-sited hotel Italian that gave the Phoenician a nine-year bridge between the age of purse stools and the age of fire pits. If you ate gnocchi on that terrace at sunset, you got exactly what you paid for — which, at the Phoenician, is rarer than it sounds.