What was Medizona?
Medizona was the restaurant a resort chef opened to stop being told what to cook. It sat in a small building at 7217 E 4th Avenue, at Winfield Scott Plaza a few steps off Scottsdale Road in Old Town, and it opened in December 1999 under chef-owner Lenard Rubin.
Rubin had the résumé of a hotel executive chef. He had cooked at the Boulders and the Phoenician, and at the Scottsdale Princess he ran Marquesa until, in New Times’ account, management traded his Catalan menu for a more approachable Mediterranean one. Before that he had introduced Southwestern food to Russia at Moscow’s Santa Fe cafe and written Southwestern menus for hotels in Malaysia, Singapore, Massachusetts and Alaska. Medizona was the first kitchen where nobody could clip his wings.
The name described the food: Mediterranean flavors on Arizona staples. Eggplant tacos with lamb and Kasseri cheese. A baklava stuffed with rabbit, fig, quail egg and pine nuts. Salmon rubbed with achiote and sauced with morels and baby clams. Green chile stuffed with butternut squash and bacon beside a beef tenderloin. It was ambitious cooking in a very small room: 13 tables on saltillo tile, goldenrod plaster walls with Picasso prints, denim-clad servers, and Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here playing every night.
The city noticed fast. Critic Carey Sweet called it her new favorite restaurant in Old Town in March 2000, and Rubin said business nearly doubled after the reviews. Esquire put it on its list of the country’s best new restaurants that December, and New Times gave it Best New Restaurant for 2000. By around 2002 a new chef-owner, Konstantin Mescheryakov, was running it, and it kept going until about 2009. Our verdict: for its first two years Medizona was the most personal chef’s restaurant in Old Town, and the proof that Scottsdale’s resort cooks could cook better on their own.
What the menu was
It was an appetizer restaurant. Rubin’s small plates were the reason to go, and in 2000 they were cheap for what they were: three eggplant tacos with lamb, arugula, cucumber-radish relish and roasted tomato-garlic sauce for $7; the rabbit baklava with fig, quail egg, pine nuts and chive sauce, also $7; a portobello enriched with duck and jack cheese in chipotle sauce for $8; curry-rubbed squab on a peppery potato pancake and blackened shrimp on white bean hummus with mango-olive salsa, $9 each. The one dish that divided the table was the lobster and veal cheek minaret at $11.
The entrees came with sides worth ordering for themselves. The achiote salmon ($24) arrived with crayfish-corn risotto; the swordfish ($23) with a chorizo and potato cake; the beef tenderloin ($26) with a sun-dried cherry barbecue sauce, potato-leek gratin and that stuffed green chile. A roasted lamb loin came with a moussaka tart, a Moroccan-spiced chicken with saffron couscous. Breads were baked in-house and came in a painted wooden box with chipotle hummus and balsamic eggplant relish.
Desserts were the strangest part. All were $6: a halvah creme brulee, a prickly pear tiramisu soaked in Turkish coffee, and a flourless chocolate cake with peanuts and marshmallow foam. The prickly pear tiramisu and the halvah brulee outlived Rubin; Gayot’s later review of the restaurant still lists both.
The practical part. Medizona served dinner only, Tuesday through Saturday from 6 to 10 p.m. at the start, and with 13 tables it was reservations or nothing once the reviews hit. The wine list was mostly Californian, with a few French, Spanish, Italian and Arizona bottles. There was a little patio, but regulars preferred the dining room, close enough to hear the kitchen.
Later it had a second act after dark. By 2008 the room was part of the Old Town nightlife circuit too: the Ultra Lounge DJs played electronica and downtempo on Friday nights from 10 p.m., with no cover, a year or so before the restaurant closed.
The chef who left the resorts, and the house he left behind
Rubin’s story is a turn-of-the-century Scottsdale story. Many of the best cooks in town worked in resort kitchens, where corporate food-and-beverage departments set the limits, and as the 1990s ended Rubin was one who went independent, in the smallest room he could find. New Times framed Medizona as a culinary martyr’s revenge on resort management, and when a big October 2000 charity gala named its Top Five Favorite Restaurants, Medizona was on the list with RoxSand, Restaurant Hapa, Gregory’s Grill and Rancho Pinot.
The record does not say when or why Rubin left. By the account of his successor, Konstantin Mescheryakov, who listed himself as owner, general manager and executive chef, the change came in 2002, the same year a later profile says Zagat ranked Medizona among the top ten restaurants in Phoenix and Scottsdale. Gayot’s review of the Mescheryakov years kept the house signatures in place and scored it 11 out of 20. Rubin went on to run kitchens at the Wigwam and the Ritz-Carlton, became chef and partner at The Vig and The Vig Uptown around 2010, joined the Country Club at DC Ranch in 2013, won the American Culinary Federation’s Western Region Chef of the Year in 2016, and has been inducted into the Arizona Culinary Hall of Fame.
Medizona’s own end went unrecorded. It was still in New Times’ restaurant directory in November 2008 with its own website, and a 2025 Mouth by Southwest history of the building puts its last year at 2009, matching Mescheryakov’s profile. The house had other restaurant tenants after it, according to directory listings at the address, before Liquor Pig opened there in March 2025. That gastropub won best-new-restaurant honors and then lost both founders; the owners reopened the house as Wayward in June 2026. Our Liquor Pig guide still describes the building the way locals do: the house that had been Lenny Rubin’s Medizona.
Honest assessment: Medizona’s great period was short, roughly from the December 1999 opening to Rubin’s departure two or three years later, and its second chef-owner kept it alive rather than famous. But the first version mattered. It was proof that a 13-table room on a side street could win a national list, and it set the template, chef-owned, small, odd, personal, that Old Town’s best restaurants of the 2000s followed.