What was Paul Shank’s Gracious Dining?
Paul Shank’s Gracious Dining was the gourmet room of the Safari Hotel, the modernist resort at 4611 N Scottsdale Road that Al Beadle designed for Ernie Uhlmann and Bill Ritter and that opened in November 1956 at the edge of what is now Old Town. The hotel arrived with a jungle-themed dining room, a Congo Room cocktail lounge and, by Phoenix New Times’ account, the northeast Valley’s first 24-hour coffee shop. Four years later a $3 million expansion added 80 rooms, a second pool and a 700-seat banquet hall, and with it came Paul Shank, a former Colorado restaurateur who took over everything the hotel cooked and poured.
Shank renamed the dining room after himself. An Arizona Republic column of December 6, 1960 called Gracious Dining his newest room at the Safari, and under the man the trade billed as the Architect of the Appetite it became, in Dewey Webb’s 1997 phrase, a high citadel of Chateaubriand, frogs’ legs, baked Alaska and cherries jubilee, virtually all of them engulfed in flames. The lounge became the French Quarter, and the coffee shop, open around the clock, became the place the rest of Scottsdale went after the French Quarter closed for the night.
The room ran for twenty years. Jeanie Louthan, the hotel’s personnel director for two decades, remembered waiting lines and waiting lines outside it, and a dining room where it was nothing to walk in and see Robert Taylor, Frank Sinatra Jr., Barry Goldwater, and Sonny and Cher. She dated its closing to 1980. The coffee shop outlived it by eighteen years, serving its chopped-liver Wayne King sandwich and Paul’s Million Dollar Pancakes until the Safari shut on September 4, 1998. The hotel was demolished in 1999.
Our verdict: Gracious Dining was Scottsdale’s first real gourmet room, a flambé theater in a town that was still selling hitching posts, and the coffee shop beside it was the city’s first all-night kitchen. Together they are the clearest record we have of how Scottsdale ate in the 1960s.
What the menu and the night were
The food came on fire. The surviving descriptions agree on the formula: continental gourmet dishes finished at the table by captains with carving carts and flaming swords. New Times listed Chateaubriand, frogs’ legs, baked Alaska and cherries jubilee, and named a house specialty called Gourmet’s Flaming Dream on a Spear. A December 1962 Republic advertisement sold a sirloin dinner in Gracious Dining with entertainment in the French Quarter; the price is unreadable in the clipping. In 1963 Paul Shank’s at the Safari advertised a Sunday brunch buffet at $1.95 a person. Shank was, by manager Russ Gribbon’s account, into microwave ovens real early, long before anyone else, which says something about how a flambé room kept pace with a banquet hall of 700.
The dove dinners. The best story in the record is seasonal. Bing Crosby and Fred MacMurray came every dove-hunting season, and hotel maids from the Salt River community cleaned and dressed the birds, which the dining room then served back to the hunters. John Forsythe, Lindsay Wagner, Jane Russell, Red Buttons and Burt Reynolds are the other names New Times collected; Jeanne Tovrea, later the Valley’s most famous murder victim, worked the cocktail tables in 1961.
The coffee shop was the second shift. It opened with the hotel in late 1956 and never closed. During spring training in the late 1950s the Red Sox and Orioles stayed at the Safari and fans could watch them eat breakfast; after midnight, in Webb’s words, bleary-eyed bar hoppers lined up for the Wayne King, a chopped chicken liver sandwich named for the bandleader. Saturday nights in the fall were busiest of all: Scottsdale restaurants ran buses to ASU games at Sun Devil Stadium, and when the buses came back the crowd drove to Shank’s coffee house and waited in line from 11:30 to 1 a.m. to argue about the game. Historian Joan Fudala records the room’s 1960s rebrand as the Safari Coffee House and its pancakes as Paul’s Million Dollar Pancakes.
What regulars did. Dinner early in Gracious Dining, the show late in the French Quarter, and the coffee shop for whatever came after. The 1972 flood that put Scottsdale Road under water did not stop it; waitress Maxine Brodt served in ankle-deep water until the health department shut the room, and when a toaster caught fire nobody left, because they wanted to watch. By the time the New Times retrospective ran in May 1997, the gourmet room had been a steakhouse with an all-you-can-eat salad bar for years, the lounge had a self-serve taco bar, and the coffee shop’s 16-year veteran Mira Bickle was telling the paper that this time the demolition talk sounded real.
Scottsdale’s first gourmet room, and the all-night kitchen beside it
The Safari was built to fix a problem Bill Ritter described plainly: in 1956 there was nowhere to stay in Scottsdale six months of the year, because the guest ranches had no air conditioning and closed for summer. What Ritter and Uhlmann built was, in his own words, a deluxe motor hotel that they called a resort, and its first food operation matched the theme: zebra-print waitress uniforms, a seven-foot greeter in jungle costume who stepped out of a planter with a spear, courtesy of food-and-beverage showman Max Penton. Shank’s arrival in the 1960 expansion replaced that with New York chic and cancan girls. Wikipedia puts his renovation spending at $400,000 and notes that the city had to repeal its ban on dancing for his nightclub to open at all.
It worked for most of two decades. By 1969, when the French Quarter got a $60,000 remodel, the Safari’s restaurants employed 250 people and claimed the highest food-sales volume of any operation in Arizona. Scottsdale’s chamber was flying in travel writers on the strength of the Safari, the Valley Ho and Mountain Shadows, and Good Housekeeping’s correspondent came home with the line that in a word, Scottsdale swings. Shank was ambitious enough to open a second room, Paul Shank’s Wining and Dining, at the Scottsdale Hilton after Bob Karatz opened it at Lincoln Drive in 1973.
The end came in pieces, and the sources do not fully agree on the order. Wikipedia dates the French Quarter’s closing to 1978, after a mid-1970s turn to dinner theater; Louthan dated the gourmet room’s close to 1980; the Brown Derby took a restaurant space from 1981 to 1996; and by 1997 the old dining room was a steakhouse and the lounge had a taco bar. Owner George Alexander of PALS Land Company announced in March 1997 that the eleven acres would be razed for a Marriott high-rise, the hotel closed on September 4, 1998, the bulldozers came in 1999, and the Marriott never happened. Beadle, asked about the loss of his first commercial building, told New Times the place had been remodeled to be mediocre and that he would not miss it. Condominiums on Safari Drive filled part of the ground by 2010, and the Caesars Republic tower now holds the corner.
What the record does not say is almost everything about Shank himself: where in Colorado he came from, when he left the Safari, when he died. We found no obituary, no first name beyond Paul, and no photograph of the dining room in the press. The matchbooks and ashtrays printed with Paul Shank’s Gracious Dining that turn up at auction are, at this point, the primary documents.
Honest assessment: Gracious Dining was a flambé room of its era, more theater than cuisine, and the coffee shop was a better restaurant in the way that matters, because it fed the city at the hours nobody else would. Both belong in our lost midcentury Scottsdale file next to the Sun Dial and the French Quarter. Nothing replaced them. The Safari corner went dark for a decade, and when hotel dining returned to it, it came with a celebrity chef’s name on the door rather than a restaurateur’s.