What was Preston’s Steakhouse?
The building came first. The Citadel, the Pueblo-style complex on the northwest corner of Pinnacle Peak and Pima roads, has been a dining address since it opened in 1985, when 8700 at the Citadel gave far north Scottsdale its first serious restaurant. Michael’s at the Citadel followed from 1998 to 2008. And the building’s last fine-dining tenant, through the late 2010s and into the 2020s, was Preston’s Steakhouse.
Preston’s was a different animal from its predecessors. Where 8700 and Michael’s were chef-driven rooms, Preston’s was a white-tablecloth prime steakhouse — the format the Pinnacle Peak corridor had been buying since Mastro’s opened a few blocks east in 1999. The bet was that Troon, Desert Highlands, and DC Ranch could support two steakhouses a mile apart, and that the Citadel’s courtyards, sunset views, and history would give the newer one an identity Mastro’s could not match.
For a while it worked well enough to earn hardware. In 2019, Wine Spectator gave Preston’s an Award of Excellence, the magazine’s recognition for a thoughtfully built list of at least 90 selections, placing it among ten Scottsdale restaurants honored at that level that year — company that included Mastro’s itself, Roka Akor, and both Fleming’s locations. It ran $44 Scottsdale Restaurant Week menus in 2019 and 2020, and the neighborhood treated it as the special-occasion option for people who wanted the Citadel’s atmosphere with a bone-in ribeye.
In 2025, Preston’s closed. The Progress filed it in its year-end roundup of what Scottsdale lost, one line among many. For the Citadel, it was the end of a steakhouse era in a building that has been feeding far north Scottsdale since 1985.
Steak, sunset, and the courtyard
The room did half the work. The Citadel is a genuinely beautiful building — thick adobe-style walls, courtyards, terraces facing west toward the McDowell foothills — and Preston’s inherited all of it. A table on the sunset side before the light went was the reservation regulars fought for, and the walk through the courtyard afterward was part of the evening.
The menu was classic prime. An 8-ounce USDA Prime Delmonico and a petite bacon-wrapped bistro filet anchored the Restaurant Week menus, clam chowder and a hickory-wrapped Atlantic salmon filled them out, and the wine list was built to a Wine Spectator standard — 90-plus selections chosen with care rather than a 400-bottle cellar. Prices sat at level four, in line with the corridor’s other prime rooms, which meant Preston’s had to justify itself against Mastro’s on every visit. On its best nights, with the courtyard and the list, it did.
The bar was the neighborhood’s. Like every steakhouse in the far north, Preston’s ran a bar trade that had little to do with the dining room — Troon and Pinnacle Peak residents who wanted a cocktail and a smaller plate without the full production. That crowd was loyal, and it is the crowd that noticed first when the room was gone.
Getting there was a commitment. Pinnacle Peak and Pima is a long way from anywhere else in the city — twenty-five minutes from Old Town, and the Citadel’s parking and courtyard layout meant a walk in from the lot. For the neighborhoods around it, that isolation was the appeal. For everyone else, it was the reason Mastro’s, better known, kept winning the drive-up decision.
Forty years of dinner at the Citadel
The Citadel’s dining history is a compact version of far north Scottsdale’s. When 8700 at the Citadel opened in the late 1980s, Pinnacle Peak Road was the frontier, and a fine-dining room out there was a statement that the golf communities rising around Troon would want more than Pinnacle Peak Patio and Reata Pass. Michael’s at the Citadel carried the idea through the 2000s, alongside Sassi on Pinnacle Peak Parkway and Talavera at the Four Seasons.
Preston’s arrived in a corridor that no longer needed convincing — it needed differentiating. The steakhouse format was the safe read of what the neighborhood spent money on, and the Citadel’s setting was the differentiator. The 2019 Wine Spectator award was proof that the room was taken seriously, and for a few years Preston’s gave Pinnacle Peak a historic building’s worth of atmosphere with a menu anyone could understand.
The 2020s were unkind to that position. The pandemic hit the far-north special-occasion trade hard, and when it recovered, the money consolidated around the corridor’s strongest brands. Mastro’s, the DC Ranch Fleming’s, and the resort rooms absorbed the anniversary dinners; the newer energy in north Scottsdale dining moved to Market Street at DC Ranch and the Kierland district. A freestanding steakhouse in an isolated historic complex, competing on setting against a legend a mile away, was the kind of restaurant the decade closed. The Progress’s 2025 roundup recorded it without comment.
Honest assessment: Preston’s was a good steakhouse in a great building, which is a fine thing to be and a hard thing to sustain against Mastro’s. It will be remembered less for its own cooking than for what it was the last of — the Citadel’s run as a place to eat, which stretched from the late 1980s to 2025 and covered nearly the whole story of far north Scottsdale’s rise. If a new tenant takes the courtyard, the neighborhood will show up. It has been showing up at that corner for forty years.