What was the Jokake Inn Tea Room?
Scottsdale’s resort dining tradition did not start with a chef or a hotel company. It started with a woman pouring tea in a mud house.
In 1926, Sylvia Evans began hosting tea parties in the adobe home her husband, architect Robert T. Evans, had just built on twelve acres of desert below Camelback Mountain — land given by his mother, the landscape painter Jessie Benton Evans. A young Hopi visitor looked at the adobe and called it Jokake, “mud house,” and the name stuck. By 1927 the tea parties had grown into a proper tearoom for the desert-touring trade, and by 1928 the tea guests were refusing to leave; the tearoom became an inn, expanding casita by adobe casita until it was one of the defining winter resorts of the Camelback corridor.
The dining room grew with it. The Jokake became known for Southwestern cuisine alongside outdoor adventure, art and rest, and its guest book read like a society column: Zsa Zsa Gabor, Ava Gardner, Frank Lloyd Wright, and members of the Rockefeller and Vanderbilt families. In 1936 Robert Evans designed the bell tower building, the inn’s signature structure and the setting for afternoon tea — the ritual that, for generations of guests, was the Jokake.
Sylvia ran it through her 1940s divorce and sold in the early 1950s to Chicago hotelier Charles Alberding, who kept the inn operating into the late 1970s. Then Charles Keating assembled the land, and in 1988 The Phoenician rose over the site. The tearoom, the casitas and the girls’ school are gone. The bell towers, restored in 2019, still stand on the resort’s lawn — the oldest surviving piece of Scottsdale’s hospitality story.
What a season at the Jokake tasted like
The Jokake ran on the winter calendar, and so did its kitchen. Guests arrived for weeks or months rather than nights — Eastern and Midwestern families escaping the cold, artists drawn by Jessie Benton Evans’s circle, later the Hollywood and industrial names that made the register famous. A 1949 Chicago Tribune profile sold it as a complete destination, and the on-site Jokake School for Girls let a family winter in the desert without interrupting a daughter’s education. Dining, in that model, was a rhythm: breakfast before the ride, tea in the afternoon, dinner at dusk.
Afternoon tea was the ritual. It was the inn’s founding act and its signature to the end, held in the bell tower building after 1936 — adobe walls, deep shade, the towers framing Camelback as the light went gold. Tea was where the inn’s social life happened, where the season’s gossip moved, and where a newcomer learned who else was wintering below the mountain.
Dinner was Southwestern before that meant anything. Period descriptions credit the Jokake with Southwestern cuisine decades before the term became a marketing category — regional cooking for a clientele that had come specifically for the desert, served in an adobe dining room rather than a Continental one. Its corridor peers, Camelback Inn from 1936 and El Chorro from 1937, worked similar ground; together they defined what a winter dinner in the Valley was supposed to feel like.
The setting did the rest. The premise was that the desert itself was the luxury — adobe rather than marble, mountain views rather than chandeliers — and the dining room sold that idea plate by plate.
From tea parties to The Phoenician
The Jokake matters because it was first. Before the Paradise Inn opened next door in 1946, before the Casa Blanca Inn put a dome over its dining room, before the 1950s resort boom lined Lincoln Drive with pools, a painter’s family was serving tea in an adobe house and discovering that people would pay to stay. The template — small, artful, seasonal, built around the desert rather than in spite of it — became the corridor’s founding style, and the Jokake’s dining room was where it was first tested on paying guests.
It was also a family enterprise in a way the later corporate resorts never were. Jessie Benton Evans provided the land and the artistic gravity; her son designed every adobe structure, including the towers; Sylvia ran the house and, with partner Lucy Cuthbert, the tearoom that became the business. When Sylvia continued after her divorce and eventually sold to Alberding, the inn passed from family stewardship to hotel-chain ownership — the same transition that, decades later, would carry the Jokake Inn site into Keating’s hands and then to the Phoenician’s succession of owners.
The end was not dramatic. The inn simply ran out of era. By the late 1970s the Camelback corridor was moving toward scale — hundreds of rooms, golf, convention space — and a modest adobe inn with a tearoom could not compete for the guests it had once defined. Keating’s 1985 vision for a multi-million-dollar luxury resort swallowed the property, and The Phoenician opened in 1988 with the bell towers kept as ornament. The 2019 restoration turned ornament back into monument.
Honest assessment: the Jokake’s cooking is unrecoverable — no menus survive in the sources we trust, and “Southwestern cuisine” in 1930s usage meant something simpler than the term suggests today. What is recoverable is the idea, and the idea was enormous. Every resort dining room in this guide, from the Chaparral Room to Mary Elaine’s, descends from a tea party in a mud house. The towers are still there to prove it.