What was Posh?
Every restaurant asks what you’d like to eat. Posh asked one question nobody else did: what do you hate? Then it cooked you everything else.
Chef Josh Hebert opened his sleek dining room near Optima Camelview in 2009, into the teeth of a recession, with a concept that read like a dare. There was no menu. Diners received a card listing ingredients; they crossed off their aversions and allergies, picked a course count, and surrendered. The kitchen then improvised a tasting menu on the spot — not a set menu with substitutions, but genuine composition in real time, different for every table, unrepeatable by design. The restaurant’s full name was the mission statement: Posh Improvisational Cuisine.
For eight years, that high-wire act made Posh the Valley’s most adventurous table. The cooking pulled from everywhere — French technique, Japanese ingredients, modernist tricks — because it had to; an improvising kitchen needs the whole vocabulary. Regulars learned that the experience scaled with trust: veto little, receive wonders.
Eating there felt like sitting in on a jazz set. Courses arrived with a narration of what the kitchen had just decided, some experiments soared, the occasional one wobbled, and the wobble was proof it was live. In a Scottsdale increasingly optimized for the reliable and the photogenic, Posh sold the opposite: risk, nightly, at a fine-dining price.
It closed in 2017, with Hebert decamping toward ramen and his Frites Street fry obsession. Nothing in Scottsdale has replaced it, because nothing has tried.
How the improvisation actually worked
The aversion card was the whole interface. Sit down, receive the checklist, mark what you couldn’t or wouldn’t eat, choose how many courses you were in for. That was the last decision you made all night. From there the kitchen built each course against your constraints, table by table — a logistical feat worth pausing on, since a full dining room meant dozens of simultaneous bespoke menus in flight.
Game theory favored the brave. The open secret among regulars: your card was a negotiation with the chef, and every veto shrank his canvas. Hand in a nearly clean card and the kitchen rewarded you with its furthest-out ideas — obscure fish, offal done gorgeously, sauces invented that hour. Fill the card with fears and you got competent, constrained cooking that missed the point. Posh was the rare restaurant where picky eaters measurably subsidized adventurous ones.
The pairings doubled the act. Wine (and sake, and the odd beer) was improvised alongside the food, pulled to match courses that hadn’t existed twenty minutes earlier. Taking the pairing option turned dinner into a duet — and gave you the fun of watching the sommelier side of the operation think on its feet too.
Practical memories, for the record: the room was modern and intimate, the counter seats were the connoisseur’s perch for watching composition happen, and course counts ran from a restrained few to a blowout. Budget-wise it sat firmly in special-occasion territory — price level four — but against the tasting menus at the resort palaces of the era it was arguably the better value, because you weren’t buying a rehearsed performance. You were buying the only seat in the Valley where dinner was being written as you ate it.
Scottsdale’s avant-garde moment
Posh opened at a strange, fertile hinge in Valley dining. The 2008 crash had gutted the expense-account fine dining of the previous era — the grand rooms like Mary Elaine’s were closing — and what grew back was scrappier and more personal: chef-owned rooms with points of view, from FnB’s Arizona-locavore manifesto to Shinbay’s austere omakase brilliance. Hebert’s contribution to that generation was the most conceptually radical: he didn’t just write a new menu, he abolished the menu as an institution.
The idea had deep roots — omakase culture, the European chef’s-whim tradition — but Posh systematized it with the aversion card, which quietly solved fine dining’s oldest tension: the gap between the chef’s vision and the diner’s autonomy. You got total personalization and total surprise. Food-nerd pilgrims treated it as a Valley must-visit, and for much of its run Posh was the answer to “what’s the most interesting restaurant in Scottsdale?” — a title with surprisingly few claimants in any era.
Why didn’t it last forever? The model’s brilliance was also its burn rate. Improvisation at that level demands a kitchen of genuinely versatile cooks, nightly invention without the safety net of repetition, and a chef whose creativity has no off switch — eight years of that is a marathon sprinted. Meanwhile the dining public’s money drifted toward the comfortable and the shareable. Hebert’s post-Posh path — ramen, perfect french fries — reads less like retreat than release: a virtuoso choosing one song to play beautifully instead of improvising the whole set.
Honest assessment: Posh was occasionally uneven by design — live composition guarantees it — and it was never for diners who wanted control. But it remains the boldest sustained experiment in Scottsdale restaurant history, and its eight-year run in a comfort-seeking market is the real miracle. The Fifth Avenue district still hosts ambitious small rooms, and the city eats well. It just no longer has anywhere that asks the beautiful backwards question. What do you hate? Cross it off. Trust the band.