What was Nourish?
Nourish was a restaurant built around the question most kitchens in 2010 did not want to hear: what is in this?
It opened on Wednesday, May 5, 2010, on the ground floor of Optima Camelview Village, the eye-catching condominium complex off Highland Avenue just north of Scottsdale Fashion Square, in the same development as Josh Hebert’s tasting-menu restaurant Posh. The owner was Kirstin Carey, a professional speaker and certified holistic nutritionist whose own wheat allergy and lactose intolerance had made eating out an ordeal. She wanted a place for people who felt, as she put it to New Times, like “a freak at the table.”
So the whole menu was gluten-free, soy-free and peanut-free, and most of it was dairy-free, with vegan, vegetarian, egg-free, Paleo and raw options. Every item was color-coded by what it left out. The Optima sandwich was at once lactose-free, corn-free, egg-free, nut-free, soy-free, vegetarian and vegan, and gluten-free on request. The kitchen had no open flames or cooktops: hot food came out of a panini press, low-temperature Alto-Shaam ovens and air-fryers, and the back of the menu invited diners to ask for a kitchen tour to see how cross-contamination was prevented.
The website called the food comfort food with a healthy twist. In practice that meant American and Mediterranean plates: lemon-garlic roasted chicken with black bean couscous, baked eggplant and spinach parmesan, vegan burgers on gluten-free baguettes, quinoa-crust pizzas and quiche, and desserts like chai cheesecake in a gingerbread crust. It served lunch and dinner and grew into catering, meal plans, an online cooking channel and, by 2013, cooking classes under the name Nourish 123.
It closed quietly over a weekend in May 2014, when the landlord decided to do something different with the space. Our verdict: Nourish was early to a cause the whole restaurant business later adopted, and it was better at the cause than at the cooking.
What the menu and the room were
The critics were not kind. Phoenix New Times reviewed Nourish in August 2011 under the headline “Nourish May Be Good for You, But It Also Tastes Like It.” The critic found the Optima sandwich taste-free, a $15 Tuscan chicken pizza with a quinoa-flour and chia crust brittle and burnt, a cheeseburger pizza soggy, the healthy mac and cheese studded with uncooked macaroni, and the asparagus beside a well-cooked wild salmon practically raw. The verdict was respect for the mission and a long way to go on the food.
Order what worked. The same review named the winners. The veggie quiche in a quinoa crust, with caramelized onions, was the best thing on the menu, especially with the air-fried sweet potato fries and orange chipotle dipping sauce. The sweet potato and avocado salad in an Asian dressing was the best starter, the seared ahi tuna salad was good on top, and the roasted chunk chicken salad sandwich, with grapes, candied walnuts and bacon, was a better bet than anything labeled with every color on the menu.
Drink the cocktails. The organic cocktails were the category that did not disappoint: a ginger and spice with house-made spiced rum, and an açaí berry martini with a single raspberry at the bottom of the glass. For dessert, the critic recommended the gluten-free baked goods brought in from Julia’s GF Bakery, like a red velvet cupcake.
The room. Open and bright, with green accent paint and two glass walls looking onto a patio full of plants, inside the jungle of the Optima Camelview landscaping. Service was friendly and fast. On the critic’s weeknight dinner in 2011, the room was practically empty.
Classes. By 2013, the Nourish 123 brand ran gluten-free, vegan, Paleo and raw cooking classes; the Intro to Gluten Free class cost $40 and covered an appetizer, a main course and a dessert.
Early to the gluten-free table
Nourish arrived at the start of the wave. In 2010, the year True Food Kitchen brought Andrew Weil’s anti-inflammatory menu to the Scottsdale Quarter, Nourish went a step further: a restaurant where nothing on the menu had gluten, soy or peanuts in it, so the diner never had to explain. New Times’ first notice of the opening was mostly about the phone being hung up three times; the paper’s 2011 review was about the food. Neither said much about the diners Carey built it for, whose reason to come was not having to ask.
The setting mattered. Optima Camelview Village sits at the north edge of downtown Scottsdale, and its ground floor held restaurants as well as residents. Posh, the improvisational tasting-menu room, was the famous one. Nourish was the neighborhood one, a quiet cafe inside a residential complex that diners had to know to find.
Carey kept expanding the business around the cafe. A Gilbert Nourish opened in April 2014 at 1495 S Higley Road, open from 7 a.m. daily. A month later the Scottsdale restaurant closed over a weekend, with a sign on the door. Carey told New Times on May 23, 2014, that the landlord at Optima had “decided to do something different” with the space, and that Nourish would relocate to Tempe in the fall, at an address she could not yet name. The record we found does not show what took the Optima space, or whether the Tempe restaurant opened.
Honest assessment: Nourish was an earnest, well-intentioned restaurant whose cooking, by the only full review we found, did not match its ambitions. It still deserves a place in the history of the 2010s in Scottsdale, because it treated allergen-free eating as a whole restaurant rather than a footnote, at a time when that was rare, and its color-coded menu anticipated the allergen labels that many restaurants print today.