What were Oaxaca and Vincent’s?
In 1980 the corner of Pinnacle Peak and Pima roads was the edge of nothing: the Nelson family’s General Store and a small plaza, a long way north of anything else in Scottsdale. That’s where a restaurant called Oaxaca set out to do something odd: serve French food and Mexican food from the same kitchen, with mariachis.
Its French chef was Vincent Guerithault, a young cook from Le Français, Jean Banchet’s celebrated restaurant outside Chicago. The double act failed within months. The Mexican restaurant moved upstairs, and Guerithault took the ground floor as Vincent’s French Cuisine. In 1981 Craig Claiborne of the New York Times found him and wrote a favorable review, and a French restaurant in the far-north desert became, in Phoenix New Times’s words, “the first independent restaurant in the Phoenix area to achieve national culinary celebrity.”
Guerithault left in 1986 to open Vincent on Camelback in Phoenix, still one of the Valley’s best-known restaurants. Le Relais, with chef Christopher Gross, took his old room. Upstairs, Oaxaca carried on into the 1990s as the Vistas at Oaxaca.
The two kitchens
The plan. Guerithault tells it this way: he arrived in November 1979, after three and a half years as a sous-chef under Banchet in Wheeling, Illinois, because friends had told him about some men in the Phoenix area who wanted French and Mexican restaurants run from one kitchen. The menu put French dishes on one side and Mexican on the other. Terry Goddard, later Phoenix’s mayor, wrote it up for the Phoenix Business Journal. It still “flopped,” as New Times put it in 2013.
The split. After two or three months, by Guerithault’s account, the owner divided it. The Mexican restaurant went upstairs as Oaxaca; Guerithault had the ground floor for Vincent’s French Cuisine. Claiborne’s review followed in 1981, and the young chef became the first famous one the Valley had. A banker named Bob Keys, who was planning a showpiece restaurant across the road, the future 8700, tried for months to bring him in as a partner. They couldn’t agree, and Guerithault stayed, until January 1986, when he moved to Camelback Road and began adding Southwestern flavors to his French cooking.
After him. New Times’s 1989 survey of the decade says Le Relais took over the site and that its chef, Christopher Gross, became “the Valley’s second gratine idol.” Upstairs, the Mexican restaurant drifted to American food. When Howard Seftel reviewed it for New Times in August 1992, it was the Vistas at Oaxaca, a “decade-old place” renamed to stop confusing people: prime rib, clam chowder and fried zucchini under a pitched wood-beam ceiling, with patio and window views of the desert.
The sources, and what they leave open
Main sources: Phoenix New Times’s December 1989 survey of the decade’s restaurants, Howard Seftel’s August 1992 review of the Vistas at Oaxaca, and Nikki Buchanan’s 2013 interview with Guerithault; Guerithault’s own account to A Taste of AZ; and Joan Fudala’s 2025 column on the Pinnacle Peak and Pima corner, which lists Vincent’s, Oaxaca, Drinkwater’s, Vic’s and The Peaks among the plaza’s restaurants.
What’s unsettled:
- The opening date. Guerithault arrived in November 1979; the restaurant probably opened in 1980.
- The owners. Neither New Times nor Guerithault names them. A 2026 Phoenix Magazine piece says the plaza’s developer, Jerry Nelson, recruited the chef; we’ve read it only in an excerpt.
- Which building. The plaza shares the 8711 E. Pinnacle Peak Rd. address with the General Store, and we haven’t worked out which of its buildings held the two restaurants.
- The closings. When Le Relais and the Vistas at Oaxaca closed isn’t in anything we’ve found.
- The plaza’s start. Fudala dates the General Store to 1975; our General Store page uses the store’s own date of 1977.
Where the answers are. Claiborne’s 1981 review in the New York Times archive; the Scottsdale Progress and Arizona Republic restaurant listings for the 1980s and 1990s; and the Nelson family’s records of Pinnacle Peak Plaza’s tenants.
Why it matters
Guerithault showed that a chef-owned restaurant here could be taken seriously nationally, and he did it at the far northern edge of the city, years before the Citadel, Troon North or the Four Seasons. Christopher Gross followed in the same room. It started as a French and Mexican restaurant that didn’t work, and the cooking Guerithault became known for on Camelback was French with a Southwestern accent.