What was Marco Polo Supper Club?
Marco Polo Supper Club was a dinner house built on one joke that turned out to be a good idea: if Marco Polo brought noodles home from China, why not cook Italian pasta in a wok? The Scottsdale room opened in spring 1995 at 8608 E Shea Blvd, in the Pima Crossing shopping center at Shea and Pima on the Shea Corridor, and for eight years it was one of the north side’s dependable nights out.
It started smaller. Around 1990, Jim and Irma Valli opened Marco Polo Cafe at 7027 E Camelback Road, in a former pizzeria by the mall on Goldwater Boulevard: lace tablecloths, heavy wood tables, no liquor license, and a menu that New Times’ first critic found slow but promising. By 1994 the cafe had doubled in size and Howard Seftel was praising its lobster pasta and its filet mignon in hoisin oyster sauce. When Nordstrom took the Camelback site, the restaurant moved north and grew up.
The Shea room had the look of a big-city supper club: dark wood paneling, dark wood floors, gilded mirrors, tiled ceilings and etched-glass globe lamps, with hundreds of family photos of the restaurant’s nine partners on the walls and Sinatra on the sound system. Seftel wrote in July 1995 that it outdid the original in every respect and was clearly one of the town’s better restaurants.
The people behind it became better known for something else. By 1999, New Times was describing the operators of Marco Polo as the group opening Mastro’s Steakhouse at Pinnacle Peak, and by 2002 it called them the Mastro Group, which also ran Cocomo Joe’s and Maloney’s Tavern. The Shea Marco Polo closed in April 2003 and reopened in 2004 as a revival of the Mastro family’s first steakhouse, What’s Your Beef. Our verdict: Marco Polo was the Mastros’ rehearsal for the steakhouse era, and the most fun menu the family ever put its name near.
What the menu was
Go straight to the house specialties. Of about two dozen entrees in 1995, nine were marked “Original Marco Polo house specialties,” and they were the point. The lobster and shrimp pasta, a special at the old cafe, sauteed the shellfish in olive oil and garlic, then wok-fried it with soft lo mein noodles, cabbage and bok choy in a mildly spicy tomato sauce. Hong Kong chicken rolled breast meat around mozzarella, calamari, sprouts and spinach and served it with linguini in a sharp orange sauce and a side of skin-on eggplant parmigiana. Penne alla Szechuan duck ($12.95) was stir-fried with mushrooms, cabbage and a lot of crisp boneless duck. The filet mignon broccoli steak in hoisin oyster sauce was Seftel’s top pick.
The menu kept wandering. By 1997 it offered won tons filled with pork and vegetables in a curry-Alfredo sauce, sea bass sauteed in Chinese rice wine with pesto-Alfredo linguini, a sweet-and-spicy eggplant pizza and duck breast with almonds over linguini in oyster black bean sauce. In 2002 New Times still called it a dependable Italian-Asian menu. Most entrees sat between $15 and $20, which Seftel said almost no other restaurant in town matched for quality at that price.
Fill up on bread, not starters. Appetizers, such as kung pao prawns with pineapple and cashews or deep-fried potstickers, were the weak part. The bread, from the nearby Arizona Bread Company, came with olive oil and Parmesan. Desserts were three: a light cheesecake, tiramisu and a chocolate tartufo with pears in raspberry sauce. Espresso dropped from $3.50 at the cafe to $2.25 on Shea.
Expect a crowd and a quick turn. Dinner ran nightly from 5 p.m. to 10, 11 on weekends. Even in summer the room filled on weekends, and the kitchen ran fast: entrees before appetizers were cleared, the check before anyone asked. The one thing critics disliked about the room was a television in the bar, visible from the dining room.
It was a supper club in the full sense. The Phoenix branch on Camelback, open by 1999, added live bands and dancing after dinner, and the Shea room was the kind of quiet, dressed-up place a source might choose for a newspaper interview, as one did in 2001.
From a bring-your-own-wine cafe to a steakhouse dynasty
The Marco Polo story starts with a couple and ends with a family name. New Times’ reviews of the original Marco Polo Cafe credit Jim and Irma Valli, who opened it in the former Vince’s pizzeria on Goldwater Boulevard with an East-meets-West concept the paper said began in St. Louis. The record we found does not say how the restaurant came to the larger partnership that ran the Shea Boulevard room, whose nine partners’ families lined its walls in 1995. By the late 1990s, though, Marco Polo belonged to the circle around Dennis Mastro, whose family, according to a 2019 Scottsdale Progress profile, followed its first steakhouse, What’s Your Beef, with Barnacle Bill’s and then Marco Polo.
What came next is the reason anyone remembers the name. By 1999 the group had a second Marco Polo Supper Club upstairs at 2621 E Camelback in Phoenix, and that year, New Times reported, the people behind Marco Polo set up Mastro’s Steakhouse at Pima and Pinnacle Peak. The prime-steak formula worked so well that the family’s steakhouses went national, and Marco Polo became the side business. In December 2002 New Times critic Carey Sweet listed it alongside Cocomo Joe’s and Maloney’s as part of the Mastro Group’s range, in a column that joked about suing the group for her waistline.
The Shea room closed in April 2003, according to an October 2003 East Valley Tribune report, which said the space would reopen in mid-January as a more upscale reincarnation of What’s Your Beef, the Mastros’ 1970s and 1980s hot spot. New Times’ club directory confirmed the change by February 2004: What’s Your Beef at 8608 E Shea, same phone number, formerly Marco Polo Supper Club. By 2006 the address was Maloney’s Tavern, the family’s pub. Scottsdale Beer Company brewed there from about 2014 until 2020, and Macayo’s opened in June 2021.
Honest assessment: Marco Polo’s fusion was more comfort food than cuisine, pasta in hoisin sauce for people who wanted dinner and a little theater, and the press treated it as dependable rather than important. It still deserves its place in the 1990s record. It was where the Mastro group learned to run a big, clubby, dressed-up room on the north side, the exact skill it sold the country in steakhouse form a few years later.