What was La Champagne?
Some restaurants matter for what they served. La Champagne matters for who was cooking.
La Champagne was the formal French dining room of the Registry Resort, the flashy property that opened in 1977 on the northeast corner of Scottsdale Road and Indian Bend — the glitziest address of the McCormick Ranch building boom, a resort that later wore a Radisson flag, closed in 2005, and was razed in 2007 for condos. What survives clearly of the restaurant is one fact, and it is a big one.
In the 1980s, La Champagne’s chef de cuisine was Christopher Gross. He had left Phoenix for London in 1978, cooked in Paris at Chez Albert, a two-star Michelin restaurant, done a pastry stint in Normandy, and worked the line at L’Orangerie, the old-school French room on La Cienega in Los Angeles. When he came home, the Registry gave him a kitchen. Decades later he described what happened next plainly: the room “got a ton of attention” — reviews from critics in New York and Los Angeles and national magazines, including Food & Wine, who came to a Scottsdale hotel to eat a young Arizonan’s French cooking.
That attention became a career. Gross left for Le Relais at Pinnacle Peak and Pima, was named one of Food & Wine’s 10 Best New Chefs in 1989, opened Christopher’s at 24th Street and Camelback in January 1990, and won a James Beard Award in 1995. He is, by most reckonings, the most decorated chef Arizona has produced, and today he cooks at the Wrigley Mansion.
La Champagne was where it started. The room is gone, its dates are fuzzy, and its menu is a collector’s item. Its alumnus is still on the pass.
What dinner at La Champagne was like
Honesty first: the record is a chef’s recollections, a few auction listings of menus and matchbooks, and diners’ memories — so this is the shape of the place, not a menu transcript.
It was the Registry’s statement room. The resort was built in the late-1970s style that defined the Scottsdale Road strip — big, bright, unembarrassed — and La Champagne was the part of the building that asked you to dress. The name alone announced the register: French, formal, with a wine list built to justify it. This was the same era in which the Camelback Inn ran the Chaparral Room and independents like Voltaire and La Chaumière held down classical French in the neighborhoods; a resort of the Registry’s ambition needed its own.
The kitchen was the difference. What set La Champagne apart, in Gross’s own telling, was that it cooked like a restaurant run by a chef rather than a hotel food-and-beverage department. He had come from a two-star Paris kitchen and a Los Angeles room staffed almost entirely by French cooks, and he brought that discipline to a Scottsdale hotel at a moment when the city’s fine dining was still mostly continental by rote — steak Diane, tableside flame, sauces from the previous decade. Critics noticed, which is why critics from outside Arizona came.
Price and scale. Level four for its day — this was a special-occasion room in a resort that charged special-occasion rates — and small enough that the chef’s hand showed on every plate. If you ate there during the Gross years, you tasted the beginning of modern Arizona fine dining before it had a name.
The kitchen that launched a career
The reason to remember La Champagne is that Arizona’s fine-dining lineage runs through it. Before the Phoenician opened Mary Elaine’s in 1988 and turned a resort kitchen into a James Beard factory, the idea that a Scottsdale hotel restaurant could draw national critics was untested. La Champagne tested it, in the 1980s, with a local kid who had gone to Paris and come back — and the critics came. That proof of concept mattered to every ambitious resort kitchen that followed, from the Golden Swan to Marquesa, and it mattered most to Gross himself, who parlayed the notice into Le Relais, then Christopher’s, then a Beard medal.
It also marks the end of something. The Registry was a 1980s creature — the era’s resort arms race built it, and the era’s taste for gilt and formality filled its French room. By the time Gross left, the Valley’s culinary energy was shifting from resort dining rooms to chef-owned restaurants in the Biltmore corridor and, eventually, Old Town. Christopher’s opening in January 1990 is a fair marker of the hinge: the chef who made a resort room famous chose to make his own name on his own door. The resorts would spend the next twenty years learning that lesson the hard way.
The building’s fate sealed the record. The Registry became a Radisson, faded, closed in 2005, and was demolished in 2007; the northeast corner of Scottsdale and Indian Bend is residential now, and there is no plaque. Without a standing room or a long press archive, La Champagne’s history has come down to a chef’s interviews and the collectors who trade its menus and matchbooks online. Honest assessment: La Champagne was probably not, dish for dish, the best French restaurant in 1980s Scottsdale — Voltaire and La Chaumière have longer, better-documented claims. But it was the room where Arizona’s most important chef found out he could draw a crowd from New York, and for a city that spent the next four decades trying to prove it belonged on the national table, that first proof is worth a page. The Registry is condos. The chef is still cooking.