What was Rattlers?
Rattlers was the restaurant WestWorld built when it decided to become a destination, and it was enormous.
It stood inside WestWorld of Scottsdale, the city’s equestrian park at 16601 N Pima Rd, in a freestanding building beside the polo grounds. The city’s own chronology dates its grand opening to December 1990, the year HorseWorld was renamed WestWorld; Phoenix New Times, reviewing it in March 1991, called it brand new. It covered 10,000 square feet, had three wraparound patios with a 270-degree view toward the McDowell Mountains, and, as the paper put it, room for you and 1,199 of your closest friends. The private operator that ran the park for the city had just landed the Barrett-Jackson auction and the Arabian Horse Show, and New Times judged the hall clearly designed for big crowds, perfect for company dinners and events.
The format was what New Times called a new strain of cowboy steakhouse: no sawdust, no necktie scissors, no tin plates, but country music, Western uniforms, a flag-draped bandstand, a parquet dance floor and a menu of steaks with cowboy names, from Festus’s Favorite beef ribs to the two-pound Hang ‘Em High porterhouse. The paper’s word for it was “yupboy”: a cowboy steakhouse revamped the way country music had been, slick but still country.
It did not hold that form for long. By December 1994 the restaurant had been refurbished and renamed Diamondback Steakhouse, its single vast hall split into three themed rooms. Chef Norman Fierros consulted there in 1996, and by March 2001 New Times was calling it now defunct.
Our verdict: Rattlers was a big, well-meant room with a good smoked prime rib and a better view, built for event crowds that came only a few weeks a year, and nothing like it has opened on the grounds of the Princess and WestWorld district’s horse park since, as far as the record shows.
What the menu and the room were
Order the prime rib. New Times’ December 1991 dinner review found the best plate was Clint’s Favorite, a pink slab of smoked prime rib cooked to mouth-watering perfection, with the smoke adding a new dimension to the familiar cut. The High Plains Drifter, a one-pound T-bone, was flavorful and tender. Dinners came with soup or salad; the ham-flecked corn chowder beat the tired salad. Sides were cowboy beans, homemade corn bread and corn on the cob, and dessert was Rattlers’ Famous Mud Pie, coffee ice cream on a chocolate cookie crust with crushed peanuts.
Share the onion rings. The appetizer called Horse Hay was a gigantic plate of thin, separately fried onion rings that the critic said could feed a family of five and was too addictive to finish without help.
Brunch was the polo day. Weekend brunch ran from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., ordered off a menu at $6.95 to $10.95, with kids under ten eating free. The draw was the 1 p.m. polo match on the field below on Saturdays and Sundays, weather permitting; the critic’s visit came on a Sunday when rain had cancelled play. The plates were huge: a six-egg wimpy amigo omelette with Monterey Jack and green chile, Belgian waffle stompers with cinnamon-apple topping, and cowboy taters with red and green peppers.
The hall was the problem and the point. It was handsomely done, with a Mexican brick patio, copper horse lanterns, cowhide love seats and hand-carved doors, and saddles, lariats and hay bales on a shelf around the dining room. But on an ordinary weeknight in 1991 it was about 90 percent empty until the house band took the stage. The 1991 hours were 4 to 10 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday, closed Monday.
Diamondback changed the shape. The 1994 remodel steered diners into a saloon in gaudy red wallpaper, a blacksmith shop full of tools, or a frontier hotel dining room with striped wallpaper and lace curtains. The beef was choice, not prime: a 16-ounce T-bone, a bone-in Kansas City strip, prime rib, chicken and baby back ribs, yams with maple cinnamon butter, and homemade pecan and sweet potato pies. The $10 fried rattlesnake, New Times advised, was best avoided. Dinner ran Tuesday through Saturday with a Sunday brunch.
The cowboy steakhouse, remodeled for the yupboy
WestWorld began as Horseman’s Park, which the city opened in 1982 north of the Central Arizona Project canal. A private operator built the covered Equidome in 1987, renamed the park HorseWorld in 1988 and WestWorld in 1990, and brought in Barrett-Jackson and the Arabian Horse Show in 1989. A restaurant to feed those crowds was the obvious next step, and Rattlers’ December 1990 grand opening is one of the entries in the city’s own history of the park.
New Times read it as a sign of where the genre was going. The cowboy steakhouse of the north desert had been sawdust, mesquite smoke and a cut necktie at Pinnacle Peak Patio. Rattlers, and Copper Creek Steakhouse and Grille in the same 1991 review, kept the beef and the band and dropped the theater: you listened to their music and ate their neotraditional cowboy food, the critic wrote, but nobody made you wear a bandanna or watch a gunfight. It was a 1990s format for a north Scottsdale filling with newcomers, and its dance floor, where the critic watched a country-swing couple glide through the first number, is a reminder that the city’s country dance nights were not always in Old Town.
The size was the trouble. A 1,200-seat hall that packed out for Barrett-Jackson week sat nearly empty on a weeknight in late November, and the 1994 conversion into Diamondback, three smaller rooms instead of one barn, reads as an answer to exactly that. The park’s management changed too: the managing partner sold his interest in 1993, and in 1997 the city took over WestWorld’s operation from its contractor. Diamondback was still cooking in 1996, when Norman Fierros, the chef behind Norman’s Arizona, spent a while there turning out chuck-box fare. By March 2001 New Times was calling it defunct. The press we found records neither name’s last night, nor why it closed.
The building’s fate is not certain either. The city says the restaurant and catering facility built in the private-operator years is now Monterra, WestWorld’s banquet hall. That is the most likely successor, but the city does not name Rattlers, and we have not found a source that says so.
Honest assessment: Rattlers was the right restaurant for about six weeks a year and the wrong one for the other forty-six. The food was better than a theme hall’s needed to be, and the patio view over the polo grounds was real. It belongs in the lost column as the moment WestWorld tried to be a dining destination, and as proof of how hard that is on grounds built for horses and cars.