What is Lure Fish House?
Lure Fish House is a California coast seafood restaurant that drove its fish 500 miles inland and made it work. It occupies Suite 402 at 8877 N Scottsdale Road, a 6,336-square-foot room at the Scottsdale Road entrance to The Shops at Gainey Village, at the southeast corner of Doubletree Ranch Road, and it opened on Friday, November 6, 2020, as the chain’s first restaurant outside California.
The chain belongs to David and Patricia Cortina, who opened the first Lure in Camarillo in 2010 and keep a family home in Chandler; their vice president of development, Matt Rek, told the Scottsdale Progress in 2019 that the “whole family really adores Scottsdale’s food scene.” Lure now has seven restaurants: San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura, Camarillo, Westlake Village, Porter Ranch and this one. What makes the Arizona store possible is a seafood cutting and distribution facility in Ventura County that the company opened in 2019; fish is cut there and trucked to Scottsdale daily, about 15 hours from order to kitchen by OpenTable’s account, and the menu is printed each morning from what arrived.
The cooking is simple on purpose: the daily catch grilled over mesquite with two sides, a raw bar of oysters and ceviches, Sally’s Sand Dabs (a family recipe, herb-crusted, with lemon and capers), cioppino, chowders, fish tacos, a lobster roll and a spicy salmon burger. The company sources from MSC- and ASC-certified fisheries, is a certified Ocean Friendly Restaurant, cooks 100 percent seed-oil free and sweetens its cocktails with organic coconut sugar. The room is nautical without a net in sight: whites and blues, large gothic mirrors, industrial lights, wood, an open oyster bar where you watch the shucking, and two patios.
Who it is for: Gainey Ranch and McCormick Ranch at dinner, the Doubletree Ranch Road offices at happy hour, resort guests from across the road, and Californians who know the Ventura original. Our verdict: the best fish house in central Scottsdale, more honest than the steakhouse seafood rooms on Kierland’s end of the road, and a happy hour that is the real reason to learn the address.
How to eat at Lure Fish House
Start at the oyster bar. The raw bar seats you in front of the shuckers, and the oysters are the value: $3 each at happy hour, about $3.40 otherwise, $19 a half dozen and $38 a dozen at brunch, with an Anacapa seafood tower at $29. The ceviches change with the fish; the opening-week version was wild Gulf shrimp and Pacific rockfish.
Then the daily catch. It is grilled over mesquite, the Arizona touch, with two sides: sesame-seared ahi and Faroe Islands salmon at $34, Pacific swordfish at $31, branzino at $38, Alaskan halibut at $44, and a Coastal Grill Platter at $44. When Sally’s Sand Dabs are on the sheet, order them; the May 2021 reviewers who tried them with sautéed spinach and fries called the herb crust and lemon-caper sauce the best thing on the table. The cioppino is the other signature. For a smaller plate, the crispy calamari with jalapeños and two sauces ($13), mussels Basquaise ($13), pan-roasted basil clams ($13), the house chowders ($5), pop rock shrimp ($10) or a grass-fed slider and fries ($10). The spicy salmon burger (Faroe salmon, grilled jalapeño slaw, avocado, orange aioli) was $16.95 at opening and remains the lunch order.
Happy hour is the play. Monday through Friday 3 to 6 p.m. and on Saturday and Sunday until 5 p.m. (the restaurant’s site says from 10, the AAA listing from 11): $5 tacos, $7 drafts, wines by the glass from $8, cocktails around $10, and the oysters. It is not available for takeout, and the restaurant suspends it on Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. For context see the Scottsdale happy hour guide.
Brunch and timing. Saturday and Sunday 11 to 2: einkorn pancakes ($15), smoked salmon avocado toast ($18), a breakfast burrito or the Lure breakfast sandwich ($19), hanger steak and eggs ($26), $12 fresh-squeezed mimosas or a $60 tabletop mimosa bar, and a $15 Bloody Mary. Lunch starts at 11:30 on weekdays and 11 on weekends; dinner runs to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Reservations are on OpenTable and suggested from Thursday to Saturday; about half the room is kept for walk-ins.
Getting there and what to skip. The restaurant is the first building at the center’s Scottsdale Road entrance, with the shared lot behind it; at noon and Sunday morning the lot is the problem, at 3 p.m. and dinner it is not. Skip the New York strip, which is on the menu for the one person at the table who will not eat fish, and the fried platters unless there is a child along. The kitchen’s argument is the grill and the raw bar; stay with them.
The fish house that waited out a pandemic
Lure’s Scottsdale story is a lease that took two years to become a restaurant. The company signed on a 6,336-square-foot suite at the front of Gainey Village in 2018, a room that had already been Bloom, Cask 63 and Naya, three restaurants whose turnover is the center’s recurring theme, and sent crews in late that year to gut the dining room, bar and kitchen. In December 2019 the Scottsdale Progress reported an opening for spring 2020, with a general manager coming from one of the California stores and a nautical interior of gothic mirrors and industrial fixtures. The Cortinas had prepared for the distance: the Ventura County cutting facility that opened earlier in 2019 existed so the company could, in Rek’s words, self-deliver the freshest seafood to Scottsdale daily. Velocity Retail Group’s Darren Pitts, who brokered the deal, called seafood “somewhat underserved here in the desert” and said Lure was looking at more Valley sites.
Then spring 2020 did not happen. The restaurant opened instead on November 6, 2020, in the thick of the 2020s’ worst restaurant year, with dinner only, Monday through Saturday, and lunch and Sunday promised within weeks. Phoenix New Times put it in its month’s openings on December 1, noting the Veracruz fish chowder, tequila lime shrimp pasta, Idaho trout and a Cermaq sustainable salmon bowl; Mouth by Southwest recorded the first hours; Phoenix magazine ran a First Dish review in January 2021; and by May 2021 a local reviewer found the full day running, with the two patios and the open raw bar as the room’s best features. It was, counted the chain’s way, the fifth Lure, and it remains the only one east of the Colorado River; Porter Ranch and San Luis Obispo came later, both in California, and the additional Valley locations Pitts floated have not appeared.
The restaurant arrived at a particular moment for the corner. Gainey Village’s restaurant row had been built around Village Tavern and Hash Kitchen, with Pomo and Soi 4 in the north building; Lure gave it the one thing it did not have, a seafood house with a bar, in the suite that had defeated three operators. What the record does not say is how many seats the room holds, who the executive chef is, or whether the Cortinas’ Arizona expansion plans survived the pandemic; the company’s press since 2021 has been about menus and sustainability certifications, not real estate.
Honest assessment: Lure is a chain, and a careful one, and its Scottsdale room shows the limits of that. The dinner menu is a little expensive for grilled fish and two sides, the brunch is pleasant rather than necessary, and the room’s nautical polish is the same in Camarillo. But the fish is genuinely fresh in a city where “fresh seafood” is usually a steakhouse’s afterthought, the seed-oil and sourcing claims are specific and verifiable, and the oyster bar at 4 p.m. on a Saturday, with $3 oysters and the patio doors open, is as good as central Scottsdale gets in the cool season. It belongs near the top of any list of where to eat fish on Scottsdale Road.