What is Maple & Ash?
Every steakhouse claims fire. Maple & Ash actually builds the whole restaurant around one — a roaring hearth that cooks nearly everything on the menu — and then wraps it in the most flamboyant dining room in Scottsdale.
The original opened in Chicago’s Gold Coast in 2015 and became a phenomenon: a steakhouse with two-Michelin-star cooking from chef Danny Grant that behaved like a party you were lucky to be invited to. In August 2019, the second location landed at the Scottsdale Waterfront, taking over the old Wildfish space at the corner of Camelback and Scottsdale Roads, and the city met its match. Scottsdale had steakhouses. Scottsdale had scenes. It hadn’t had both executed at this level in one room.
What eating here feels like: velvet and firelight, a soundtrack that climbs as the night does, tables of birthdays and closers and anniversaries, and food that keeps surprising you for a place this loud. The fire-roasted seafood tower arrives hot instead of iced, smoke curling off it. Steaks come from the hearth with real char and real precision underneath the theater.
The famous order is the “I Don’t Give a F@k”* menu — you surrender, the kitchen improvises, and dinner becomes a procession. It’s a gimmick the way the necktie scissors at Pinnacle Peak Patio were a gimmick: it works because the substance behind it holds up.
This is Scottsdale’s dressed-up dinner at full volume, and it earned the volume.
How to do dinner here right
Book early and decide what night you want. The same room is two restaurants: at 5:30 it’s a serious hearth-cooking showcase where you can hear your table; by 9 on a Saturday it’s a party with exceptional steak service. Neither is wrong. Choose on purpose, especially between January and April when spring training and event crowds compress every reservation book in town.
First-timers should surrender to the surprise menu. The “I Don’t Give a F*@k” tasting takes budget and allergies and returns the kitchen’s greatest hits — typically some run of the seafood tower, hearth vegetables, pasta, and a parade of beef. It’s genuinely the best-value way to see what Danny Grant’s team can do, because the kitchen shows off for these orders.
Ordering a la carte, build around the fire. The seafood tower is the signature for a reason — roasting shellfish over wood instead of burying it in ice changes the whole category. Steaks are dry-aged, hearth-fired, and priced like the address suggests; the supporting cast (think fire-kissed sides and starters that would headline elsewhere) deserves real estate on the table.
Logistics: you’re at the Waterfront, so valet or the garage, and the canal is right there — a pre-dinner walk along the water is the civilized warm-up, especially when Canal Convergence has the banks lit up in November. Dress up; you’ll be underdressed in a polo. And pace yourself on the cocktail list, which is engineered for exactly the kind of night this room wants you to have.
The Waterfront gets its anchor
Maple & Ash arrived at a hinge moment in Scottsdale dining. Through the 2010s, the blocks around Fashion Square and the Waterfront were quietly assembling into the state’s luxury restaurant district — Nobu and Ocean 44 in the mall’s glossy new wing, Toca Madera turning Mexican dinner into theater, Olive & Ivy holding down the canal bank. What the district lacked was a steakhouse that matched its ambition — Scottsdale’s classic beef palaces were excellent but formal, built on an older idea of what a big night out sounded like.
Maple & Ash imported a newer idea from Chicago: that a top-tier steakhouse could run at nightclub energy without cutting corners on the plate. The pedigree mattered. Danny Grant had cooked at the two-Michelin-star level, and the menu’s discipline — real hearth technique, serious sourcing, a seafood program treated as more than an obligation — is what separates the room from the merely loud. Scottsdale has never lacked for expensive restaurants with DJs. It had lacked one where the food could survive the volume.
The bet paid off immediately. The 2019 opening slotted straight into the city’s event calendar — this is a room built for Phoenix Open week, for Barrett-Jackson buyers celebrating a gavel, for the whole January-to-April stretch when Scottsdale runs at maximum wattage. In a real sense it completed the Waterfront’s transformation from a shopping-center margin into the city’s marquee dining address.
The honest assessment: this is not the room for everyone, and it doesn’t pretend to be. If your ideal steakhouse is hushed leather and tableside quiet, Scottsdale still has those. But as a statement of where the city’s high-end dining energy lives now — confident, expensive, unembarrassed, and better-executed than it strictly needs to be — Maple & Ash is the room the 2020s built. Bring people you like. Order the surprise. Let it happen.