What is Lincoln Steakhouse & Bar?
The Camelback Inn has had exactly one flagship dining room since 1967 — the space has simply changed its name every time the Valley changed its mind about dinner. Today that room is Lincoln Steakhouse & Bar, and it is the best argument the resort has made for staying on property after dark in a long time.
Lincoln opened in October 2016 as Lincoln Restaurant & Bar 1936, a desert-to-table bistro under 29-year-old chef Chris Neff, cooking with Arizona suppliers like McClendon’s Select and Hayden Flour Mills and serving Arizona cheddar “Yorkies” and a Lincoln Burger. The name honored Lincoln Drive and John C. Lincoln, the electrical magnate who co-founded the Camelback Inn in 1936; the bar took the founding year. It was pleasant, and it lasted about a year.
In November 2017 Marriott rebuilt the concept as Lincoln, a JW Steakhouse — the first American version of the JW Steakhouse it had opened in London — and installed the piece of equipment that defines the room: a Josper charcoal oven running at 1,200 degrees, billed at launch as the only one in the Valley. Executive chef Paul Millist put hand-cut Prime and Wagyu through it, alongside Dover sole and Colorado rack of lamb, in a dining room with floor-to-ceiling glass on two sides, leather banquettes with hound’s-tooth trim, and Camelback Mountain filling the windows.
A pandemic closure ended with a March 2021 reopening under chef Paul Valenzuela. The honest verdict: this is a hotel steakhouse, priced like one, but the oven is real, the view is unbeatable, and it is the finest thing to happen to this room since the Chaparral Room’s tuxedos were retired.
How to eat at Lincoln
Start in Bar 1936, not at your table. Happy hour runs from 4 p.m. daily, the patio faces the mountain, and the cocktail program has leaned on Arizona distillers since the 2016 opening. Sunset on Camelback is the resort’s signature show; the bar is where you watch it for the price of a drink rather than a dinner.
Order for the oven. The Josper is a sealed charcoal grill-oven from Spain that runs hotter than any broiler on the Paradise Valley border. It does its best work on fat and bone — a Prime ribeye or a bone-in cut, not a lean filet. Past menus have sourced Cedar River Farms and Snake River beef; the char is smoky, the crust is deep, and the center stays rare if you let the kitchen cook it as ordered. Non-steak diners have been well served too: Valenzuela’s 2021 relaunch menu carried a lobster “escargot,” a sweet corn and bacon bisque, and an agave-whiskey-glazed salmon, and the JW cheesecake has survived every menu rewrite.
Know the calendar. Lincoln is dinner-only, Wednesday through Sunday. Monday and Tuesday it is dark, which strands more resort guests than you would think. In high season — roughly January through the WM Phoenix Open and on into April — book ahead.
Logistics. You are in Paradise Valley proper, five minutes from Scottsdale Road, with resort valet at the door. The room has private dining behind barn doors and fire pits outside; ask for a window or patio table on the mountain side. Expect level-four prices: this is a JW flagship, and the check reads like one.
If you want a second night. El Chorro is minutes west on Lincoln Drive and Lon’s at the Hermosa minutes south — the old-money hospitality belt Lincoln now anchors from the east.
Three restaurants, one room
The space Lincoln occupies is the most storied dining real estate in the Camelback Inn, and understanding its lineage explains what Lincoln is trying to be. From 1967 to 2008 it was the Chaparral Room, the resort’s continental showpiece — chateaubriand carved tableside, waiters in tuxedos, the kind of room that defined resort dining in the era chronicled on our 1970s page. When the Inn spent $50 million on a renovation in 2008, the Chaparral Room was retired and Laurent Tourondel’s BLT Steak moved in, part of the same celebrity-steakhouse wave that brought Bourbon Steak to the Princess and J&G Steakhouse to the Phoenician.
BLT lasted eight years, closing on September 9, 2016. What followed was a rare thing in resort dining: a reset done twice. Lincoln 1936 tried the farm-to-table idiom that FnB had made the Valley’s default, and it was fine — but a JW Marriott flagship needs a dinner that justifies a resort rate, and in 2017 Marriott chose Scottsdale to prototype its London steakhouse concept, oven and all. The Josper was the tell. Where BLT had been a New York brand transplanted whole, the JW Steakhouse was designed to be duplicated, and Camelback Inn got the first copy.
That is the tension in the room today. Lincoln is corporate in bones — a brand template, a signature cheesecake, a set of talking points about 1,200 degrees — and it is also, night to night, very good at what it does. The mountain does not care who owns the oven, and neither does a properly charred ribeye.
Honest assessment: Lincoln will not change how Scottsdale eats the way the Chaparral Room did in its day, and locals with a Mastro’s habit will find it a touch polite. But as a resort steakhouse it is complete — real fire, real view, a bar worth an extra hour — and it has already outlasted the bistro that preceded it. On the Paradise Valley border, that counts as stability.