What was Nellie Cashman’s Monday Club Cafe?
Every big resort has a room that does the unglamorous work — breakfast for the conference, lunch for the foursome, dinner for the family that isn’t dressing up — and rarely does that room get a name worth remembering. The Westin Kierland’s did.
Nellie Cashman’s Monday Club Cafe opened with the Westin Kierland Resort in 2002, when the property arrived on Greenway Parkway with a bagpiper at sunset and an Arizona-history theme threaded through every corridor. The restaurant’s name came from Nellie Cashman, the Irish-born woman who reached Tombstone in 1880, opened a restaurant, and spent the next forty years feeding and nursing miners from the San Pedro Valley to the Yukon — the “Angel of the Mining Camp” — and from the Monday Club, which the resort billed as Arizona’s oldest women’s club. It was a mouthful, and locals shortened it to Nellie’s within a season.
What Nellie’s served was Southwest-inspired American cooking from an open-style kitchen, three meals a day. Its more famous sibling, Deseo, handled the destination dinners with ceviche and a mojito cart; Nellie’s handled everything else, and in its later years under executive chef Jason Christie it built a genuine identity around Arizona Prime — USDA Prime beef from Arizona ranches, cut into tenderloin, strip, ribeye, and flat iron — and a bar mixing cocktails from recipes dated to the late 1800s.
It closed as 2023 turned into 2024, when the Westin rebuilt the room as Faro & Brag. Twenty-two years is a long life for a hotel café. Nellie’s earned it by being the room a resort could not run without.
What a meal at Nellie’s was like
Morning was its best hour. The open kitchen, the natural light off the lawns, and a breakfast menu that ran from proper Southwest chilaquiles to the hotel-standard omelet made Nellie’s the Kierland’s morning room by default. Dinner was a quieter proposition than Deseo, and often the better value. The Arizona Prime program was the hook: Christie’s kitchen sourced USDA Prime cuts from select Arizona ranches, which in a state that raises plenty of cattle but exports most of the good beef was a rarer flex than it sounds. A flat iron or a strip steak, a side or two, and one of the pre-1900 cocktails — the bar’s conceit was that everything on the list had a recipe older than the state — made a complete evening for a fraction of what the resort’s fine-dining room charged.
The theme was the service. The Westin Kierland’s whole personality is cheerful Arizona-history pastiche — a kilted bagpiper plays the sun down every evening — and Nellie’s leaned in with cocktail lore and a menu that kept a Southwestern accent without becoming a chile-relleno museum. Staff would tell you who Nellie Cashman was if you asked, and plenty of guests asked.
Regulars knew the geography. Nellie’s sat at the resort’s heart, minutes on foot from Kierland Commons; the veteran pattern was breakfast or lunch at Nellie’s and dinner across the street at the Commons, or the reverse on nights when the Arizona Prime special was worth staying for. Prices ran a solid level three — resort-inflated but not punitive — and reservations were rarely a struggle outside the WM Phoenix Open week, when the whole Kierland corridor sold out.
The room that outlasted the showpiece
Nellie Cashman’s is a case study in how resort dining actually works, as opposed to how it gets written about. When the Kierland opened in 2002, the press went to Deseo — Douglas Rodriguez’s Nuevo Latino pedigree, the ceviche bar, the sense that north Scottsdale was finally getting a serious restaurant inside a hotel. Nellie’s got a paragraph. Two decades later, Deseo was gone by the early 2020s, and Nellie’s was still serving eggs at 6:30 a.m. The unglamorous room won on stamina, which is the only contest that matters in a hotel.
It also tracked the shift in what resorts wanted from their signature restaurants. In its first decade Nellie’s was a café in the classic three-meal mold; by the 2010s it had absorbed the steakhouse function that resorts across the Valley were adding — the Camelback Inn had BLT, the Phoenician had J&G — but did it in a lower key, with the Arizona Prime program standing in for a celebrity-chef marquee. That was a very Kierland choice: local sourcing as identity rather than a name on the door.
The end came the way these things do now. Marriott’s stewardship of the Westin brought a wave of renovations, and by late 2023 the resort was announcing a rebuilt restaurant collection: the Rim and the Scotch Library refreshed, a new bar called Antidote, and in the Nellie’s space, Faro & Brag — named for the saloon card games faro and brag, opened in February 2024 under chef Chris Masco with dishes like Desert Springs barramundi and tamarind-braised pork shank. The Old West theme survived the rebrand; the Cashman name did not.
Honest assessment: Nellie’s was never a great restaurant, and it never tried to be. It was a reliable one with a real identity, which in the Kierland corridor — where the Commons across the street offers thirty better dinners — is exactly what a resort café needs to be. It gets a page here because twenty-two years of steady service and a name worth explaining are worth remembering, especially now that the reservation links still say Nellie Cashman’s and the sign does not.