What was Market Street Kitchen?
For six years, the smell of mesquite and roasting prime rib drifting across Market Street at DC Ranch came from one building, and the building was Market Street Kitchen.
Market Street Kitchen opened on September 20, 2012, the work of Paul Keeler’s Keeler Hospitality Group, which pitched it as a “neighborhood social dining” room for the master-planned communities stacking up along Pima Road. The credentials were serious for a village-center restaurant: Robert McGrath, the James Beard winner who built Roaring Fork, signed on to shape the concept, and Matt Taylor, a Canadian-born cook with time in New Orleans kitchens, ran the line as executive chef.
The design told you what mattered. PHX Architecture gave the room a sandblasted timber ceiling, distressed wood on the walls, an open kitchen and, at the center of it all, a wood-fired rotisserie on full display, turning prime rib, pork loin, lamb and chicken while you watched from the bar. The patio faced the McDowells and the preserve. The menu ran rustic and urban at once — house-baked baguettes for the sandwiches, a charcuterie station, wood-grilled vegetables — with Taylor’s Southern accent showing in fried green tomatoes, cornmeal-dusted trout, sweet-tea chicken and a rice-grit risotto that people still describe unprompted.
It was, honestly, the right restaurant for the place: polished enough for a DC Ranch anniversary, loose enough for Thursday with the neighbors. In 2018 Keeler closed it and reopened the room as Liberty Station, a smokehouse-tavern spin on the same bones. That closed too. Since November 2025 the address has been Tomu-San Sushi. The rotisserie era is the one people miss.
Lobster Thursdays and the family supper
What made Market Street Kitchen work as a neighborhood room was the calendar. The menu was good; the schedule was the hook.
Thursday was Lobsterfest — a lobster special that drew a crowd from DC Ranch, Silverleaf and Grayhawk with a regularity the restaurant could set its staffing by. Sunday was the family supper, platters and sides down the middle of the table, priced so a household of five could do it weekly rather than annually. In between came the whole-beast dinners — rabbit one week, suckling pig the next — that gave the rotisserie a workout and gave regulars a reason to check the chalkboard.
On an ordinary night the play was simple. Sit at the bar, where the rotisserie was in view and the bartenders ran an award-winning cocktail list that would survive the restaurant. Ask what had come off the spit within the hour and order it — the prime rib was the safest bet, cut thick, and the rice-grit risotto beside it was the dish that converted skeptics of grits. Start with the charcuterie board or the fried green tomatoes; finish with something from the pastry side if you had room, which you would not.
Prices sat a tier below Fleming’s around the corner, which was the point. Market Street’s economics run on households that eat out three times a week, and Market Street Kitchen priced the middle night — not the anniversary, not the pizza run, but the Tuesday you didn’t want to cook. The patio in the cool months was the seat to hold out for; the bar was where the neighborhood actually gathered, and parking was the usual free Market Street shuffle shared with Jalapeño Inferno.
Three concepts, one building
Market Street opened in 2003 to give DC Ranch a heart, and for most of its first decade the storefronts turned over faster than the developer would have liked. The recession hollowed out the second wave of tenants, and by 2012 the center needed exactly what Keeler Hospitality brought: an operator with a national restaurateur’s playbook willing to bet on a suburban village center. Bringing in McGrath — the chef who taught Scottsdale that campfire cooking could hold a Beard medal — bought instant credibility for a room 20 miles from Old Town.
Market Street Kitchen belonged to a particular moment in north Scottsdale dining: the 2010s rotisserie-and-reclaimed-wood era, when open kitchens, live fire and Southern comfort dishes were the national template and every master-planned community wanted its own version. It ran alongside The Herb Box a few doors down, then the community’s brunch anchor, and Pescada across the street — a full village of restaurants for a neighborhood that a decade earlier had none.
Why it closed is less dramatic than most closings. Keeler didn’t leave; the company swapped concepts, opening Liberty Station American Tavern & Smokehouse in the same room in October 2018, keeping the beverage program, the interior and many of the regulars. That says something about the original: the bones were good enough to reuse, but the rotisserie-and-risotto identity had run its course as smokehouses took over the Valley’s casual-dining vocabulary. Liberty Station lasted several more years before closing, and in November 2025 Tom Kaufman — the DC Ranch resident who also runs The Living Room and Elvira’s on the same street — opened Tomu-San Sushi in the space.
Honest assessment: Market Street Kitchen was never a destination restaurant, and it never tried to be. It was the rare suburban room that felt designed by people who actually lived nearby, and its six-year run is the reason Market Street is a restaurant row today rather than a Safeway with a parking lot. The heirs to its Thursday crowd are still eating on the same block, in a building on its third name.