What was Metro Brasserie & Bar?
Metro Brasserie & Bar was the French restaurant in SouthBridge, developer Fred Unger’s canal-bank complex on Stetson Drive in Old Town, at 7114 E Stetson Drive, Suite 105. It opened in October 2008 in a space that had already failed once, next door to Digestif, and it lasted until February 2011.
The room began as Foodbar (officially THE FOODBAR, in capitals), announced in April 2007 as the first of seven upscale restaurants SouthBridge would hold: a breakfast, lunch and dinner place for salads and sandwiches, eat in or take away, with Allan Schanbacher, the former executive chef and food stylist of Phoenix Home & Garden, in the kitchen. Phoenix New Times’ critic later called it a total dud, with an awkward atmosphere and unimpressive food. It closed for renovations in the summer of 2008 and reopened that October as a rustic French restaurant with a New Orleans spin.
Unger owned it, as he owned his other SouthBridge rooms, The Estate House and Canal, and he hired a chef to match: Matt Taylor, who had cooked at Mosaic and Mary Elaine’s in the Valley and in two of John Besh’s New Orleans kitchens, Restaurant August and Luke. The menu read like a Paris brasserie that had spent time in the French Quarter: oysters, onion soup and moules frites alongside shrimp and grits, braised rabbit and beignets.
The verdict at the time was mixed. New Times critic Michele Laudig wrote that Metro was a welcome change from Foodbar, that Unger should be able to create a great restaurant experience, and that Metro could do better all around. Our verdict: Metro was a good idea for a neighborhood brasserie that never escaped the room it inherited, and it closed in the same turnover that took most of SouthBridge’s first restaurants.
What the menu and the room were
The room was Foodbar with linens. Metro kept Foodbar’s exotic patterned tile floors, wood paneling and exposed-ductwork ceiling. It swapped the old seating for upholstered chairs around a long communal table, added French rattan bistro chairs, and covered the tables in white linens and brown butcher paper. What it did not add, the critic wrote, was the je ne sais quoi: a 1990s grunge soundtrack and men in T-shirts hooting at a basketball game on the bar television did not put her in a Left Bank mood. The patio, on the canal side of SouthBridge, was the pleasant place to eat.
Order the burger. The Brasserie burger was the dish New Times called truly memorable: cooked to a juicy medium rare on a golden brioche bun with melted Gruyère and creamy sauce gribiche, dressed with smoked Vidalia onion, cured tomato and Bibb lettuce, with cornichons toothpicked to the bun and crisp pommes frites on the side. Raw oysters came from a daily selection, and the onion soup, under brioche toast and Gruyère, was a satisfying bowl.
Know what to skip. The Burgundy snails had crispy garlic but a bland potato-parsley purée; the beet salad with blue cheese burrata was meager; the moules frites were fresh Prince Edward Island mussels in a broth that was too weak; the slow-cooked rabbit, braised legs and bacon-wrapped loin with pistachio, orange and green olive, was dry; and the shrimp and grits drowned in a heavy andouille gravy. The tournedos of beef with tarragon sauce chasseur were hot and juicy, but the purée came out nearly cold.
The surprises were the pork and the beignets. Braised pork cheeks, fork-tender with a hint of maple syrup and a creamy parsnip purée, were the critic’s favorite. The frisée aux lardons with Creole mustard dressing and a poached egg beat the beet salad. And the beignets, fried deep gold and dusted with powdered sugar, came with Nutella sauce, raspberry coulis and vanilla cream for dipping; a lemon thyme tart with berries and chantilly cream was the other dessert worth ordering.
Service was the weak point. On one visit to a half-full room, New Times waited 45 minutes between appetizers and entrées and had the appetizers comped. The press we found does not record Metro’s hours, prices or reservation policy. Parking on this block means the garages on either side of the canal; Stetson Drive has almost none of its own.
The space that SouthBridge kept reinventing
Metro’s history is SouthBridge’s history in miniature. In April 2007 New Times announced that Unger’s complex, still under scaffolding, would open seven high-profile restaurants, beginning with Foodbar in mid-May. Unger, the developer behind Lon’s at the Hermosa and T. Cook’s at the Royal Palms, followed it with Canal in October 2007 and The Estate House in February 2008, and he had the block’s most ambitious independent neighbor next door, Peter Kasperski’s Digestif.
When Foodbar failed, Unger did not give up the room; he re-concepted it within months, and the reopening in October 2008 landed in the first weeks of the financial crisis. By December, New Times’ waiter-columnist found Canal and The Estate House nearly empty on a holiday evening. Metro kept going. In late 2009 Taylor left to work for Michael Mina in Las Vegas, and the restaurant named Christopher Mayo, a Boston native who had been a sous chef at J&G Steakhouse at the Phoenician and at T. Cook’s, and had cooked at Savoy in New York and interned at Daniel. Taylor, according to an Arizona Foothills profile, earned four stars from The Arizona Republic at Metro before he went.
Around Metro, the block changed hands. Canal closed in 2009, Digestif and its successor Tutto came and went, and on April 30, 2010, Marcellino Ristorante moved into the space next door, where it still makes pasta by hand. The Estate House closed in 2010, and The Herb Box opened in its space in January 2011. New Times’ list of the year’s closings put Metro Brasserie in February 2011. When the paper reviewed The Herb Box that March, it summed up the development’s first three years as FoodBar and its successor, Metro Brasserie; Canal and subsequent Aqua; Digestif; and The Estate House.
What the record does not say is why Metro closed, who if anyone took Suite 105 next, or how many people the room seated.
Honest assessment: Metro Brasserie was a respectable, uneven neighborhood French restaurant with one great burger, a chef with a real résumé, and the bad luck to open in the month the economy fell. It is remembered now mainly as the second act of a room that never found its third, and as a reminder that in the 2000s boom even Scottsdale’s most stylish developer could not make a restaurant work by changing the chairs.