What was Mary Elaine’s?
For twenty years, if you asked where Arizona’s single grandest restaurant was, there was only one honest answer: up the hill, at the top of The Phoenician.
Mary Elaine’s opened with the resort in 1988, named for the wife of Charles Keating — the financier who built The Phoenician as a monument to opulence shortly before becoming the face of the savings-and-loan scandal. The restaurant outlived his disgrace and became something he never was: unimpeachable. This was modern French cooking at full formality — tasting menus, tableside caviar, a captain-and-sommelier service brigade, purse stools for handbags, jackets suggested and meant — in a rooftop room where the entire Valley glittered below the windows.
The kitchen was Arizona’s finishing school. Alex Stratta won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Southwest in 1998 at its stoves; Bradford Thompson won the same award in 2006; James Boyce held the room to Five Diamond standard between them. The cellar earned Wine Spectator’s Grand Award, the AAA gave it Five Diamonds, Mobil gave it four stars, and no other dining room in the state could match the full row of trophies.
It served its last supper on April 5, 2008, retired during a $70 million renovation that deliberately dressed the resort down. Arizona has produced better-known restaurants since. It has never again produced a more formal one — and likely never will.
What formality bought you
It’s easy, at this distance, to remember Mary Elaine’s as a museum of stuffiness. The people who actually ate there remember precision.
Dinner was a tasting-menu production in the French grand manner: courses composed like arguments, caviar service rolled to the table, sauces finished in view, cheese from a cart that deserved its own valet. Stratta’s era leaned classical Mediterranean-French; Boyce and Thompson each modernized in turn, but the through-line was rigor — the kind of cooking where nothing lands on the plate without a reason and nothing leaves the kitchen twelve seconds late.
The cellar was the co-star. A Wine Spectator Grand Award — the magazine’s highest honor, held by only a handful of restaurants nationally — meant verticals of Burgundy and Bordeaux that simply didn’t exist elsewhere in Arizona, and sommeliers who treated a mid-priced bottle request with the same courtesy as a trophy order. Regulars learned to name a budget and surrender.
And the room itself did resort theater at the highest level: windows running the rooftop’s length, Camelback Mountain behind you, the Valley’s grid of lights spreading to the horizon. Sunset reservations were the currency. Service details became local legend — the purse stools, the crumbing between courses, staff who addressed returning guests by name off a system that predated CRM software by decades.
This wasn’t a restaurant you dropped into. You booked it for the anniversary, the closed deal, the once-a-year blowout — and for two decades of special occasions, it delivered with a consistency that made the prices feel almost reasonable. Almost.
The rise and fall of Arizona formal
Mary Elaine’s was the flagship of a fleet. The late-1980s resort boom armed every luxury property with a formal dining room — the Golden Swan at Gainey Ranch, Marquesa at the Scottsdale Princess, the Chaparral Room at Camelback Inn — but The Phoenician built the tallest peak in the range. Keating spared no expense on the resort ($300 million in 1988 dollars, famously) and the restaurant inherited that mandate. When the S&L scandal took Keating down and the resort passed to new owners, Mary Elaine’s sailed on unbothered; the name stayed, and so did the standard.
Its deepest legacy is people. The kitchen and dining room functioned as Arizona’s ambassador to the national fine-dining establishment — the place Beard committees and food press could point to as proof the desert was serious. Stratta left for Las Vegas stardom; Thompson’s 2006 Beard win made him one of the era’s most-watched young chefs; alumni scattered into kitchens across the Valley and the country. For a state still building culinary credibility, two Beard medals from one room was an enormous down payment.
The end, when it came, was cultural rather than financial. By the mid-2000s the national tide had turned hard against jackets, carts, and four-hour dinners; even The Phoenician’s guests wanted steakhouses and small plates. The resort’s $70 million renovation made it official — Mary Elaine’s poured its last glass on April 5, 2008, and J&G Steakhouse took the rooftop. The Golden Swan fell in the same wave a year later. An entire genre of Arizona dining went extinct inside twenty-four months.
What replaced it — the chef-driven, come-as-you-are Scottsdale of FnB and its heirs — is livelier and more democratic, and no one seriously argues for the purse stools’ return. But something was lost that hasn’t been rebuilt: a room whose entire premise was that dinner could be the most important thing happening in Arizona that night. For twenty years, at the top of the hill, it occasionally was.