What was Relish Burger Bistro?
Relish Burger Bistro was the burger restaurant The Phoenician opened in the spring of 2010 on the second floor of its Golf Clubhouse at 6000 E Camelback Road, the casual room the resort built so its guests would stop driving down Camelback for lunch. It lasted eight years and closed for a renovation in June 2018 that it never came back from; The Phoenician Tavern has held the room since March 2019.
The idea came from the top. Executive chef Paul Carter was serving a griddled Kobe burger at the Devoured festival on March 13, 2010, while Relish was in soft opening, and he told the food writer Food GPS that the owners had noticed guests leaving the property for a casual meal and wanted to keep them on it. The restaurant planned to close briefly and reopen at full strength on May 1, 2010; by June, Meetings Today was listing it as the clubhouse restaurant with a dozen signature burgers.
The formula was the one every resort tried around 2010: eight-ounce natural Kobe patties on housemade brioche, served with tater tots, with build-your-own toppings, a few specialty burgers, house-made sodas in ginger, orange and prickly pear, draft root beer for floats, and “adult” milkshakes spiked with flavored vodka and chocolate liqueur. The bar claimed one of North America’s largest tequila selections and 70 premium beers. In 2014 every burger was $16; by 2015 the Cowboy was $18 and the salmon burger $19, and New Times’ headline summed up the problem in six words: above-average burgers at a high price point.
The room was the asset. It sat upstairs over the course by the Canyon Suites, with window tables looking across the fairways toward Camelback Mountain, four big screens in one dining room for games, and the conference-room decor that reviewers kept mentioning. Golfers off the Phoenician Golf Club used it as the nineteenth hole; hotel families used it as the place that was not Il Terrazzo. Our verdict, looking back: Relish was a competent resort burger room whose real legacy is the room itself, which the Tavern uses better.
What the menu and the room were
The burgers. In Business magazine’s Mike Hunter laid out the 2014 menu in his Power Lunch column: all burgers $16, all with tots. The True Blue was grilled Kobe beef with cave-aged blue cheese and caramelized onions. The Turkey Apple was house-ground turkey and apple with blue cheese, field greens, maple pecans and shaved Willcox apples. The Cowboy stacked fried onions, bacon, jalapeños, sharp cheddar and steak sauce. The Atlantic Salmon was house-ground salmon with avocado, red onion, Arizona tomato, arugula and horseradish tartar sauce on a wheat bun with wasabi mayo. A classic burger on simple egg bread took whatever toppings you built.
What the critics thought. Robrt L. Pela’s New Times review of February 11, 2015 is the fullest record. He found the Kobe pucks “weak in the beefy-steak-flavor department” but cooked to order, the classic “juicy but not greasy,” the maple bacon tots ($8) crisp and hot with the maple barely there, and the salmon burger the most satisfying thing on the menu. Nachos were $15. The ambiance, he wrote, “screams ‘hotel restaurant!’,” and he told readers to ask for a window seat. His closing line conceded a burger he would, dare he say it, relish. Hunter’s 2014 piece was warmer about the view and the house sodas and called the draft root beer ground zero for a float.
The drinks. The tequila list was the thing Relish talked about most, and for a burger room it was an odd flex that made sense at a resort where the lobby bar did not yet specialize in agave. Seventy beers rounded it out. The adult shakes were the dessert.
Hours and logistics. New Times listed hours of 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Sunday through Wednesday and 11 to 9:30 Thursday through Saturday, with the phone at (480) 423-2530. The clubhouse had its own lot off Camelback Road, so locals never went through the valet, which is the same advantage the Tavern trades on today. The crowd was golfers at lunch, hotel families at dinner and neighbors from Arcadia and the Camelback Corridor who wanted the resort’s view for the price of a sandwich. What to skip, by the record: the Kobe upcharge on a plain burger, which the reviewers agreed did not taste like $18.
The burger room between two renovations
Relish belongs to the Starwood years of the Phoenician, the stretch between the fall of Charles Keating and the arrival of Host Hotels & Resorts, when the resort was managed as a Luxury Collection property and its restaurants were being quietly modernized. Mary Elaine’s had closed in 2008 and become J&G Steakhouse in 2009; Windows on the Green had gone. A burger bistro at the golf clubhouse in 2010 was the next logical step, the same move the Fairmont, the Hyatt and the Four Seasons were making with their own casual rooms through the 2010s. The resort’s Phoenix Chamber listing called it “a fun twist on the American classic,” which is the language of a hotel trying to sound like a neighborhood.
It never quite became one. The reviews were polite, the prices were resort prices, and the room’s best feature, the course view, belonged to the building rather than the kitchen. Relish ran for eight seasons without, as far as the record shows, a chef change that anyone reported or a menu overhaul that anyone noticed.
The end came with the money. Host Hotels & Resorts paid roughly $400 million for the Phoenician in 2015 and spent the next three years and about $118 million remaking it: the pools, the spa, the rooms, Il Terrazzo into Mowry & Cotton in 2017, and the golf course from 27 holes to 18 under architect Phil Smith. On June 1, 2018, AZCentral’s Dominic Armato reported the last two restaurant closures, J&G and Relish; J&G would reopen in September, and the burger restaurant, the report said, would return in 2019. A Tripadvisor diner on July 20, 2018 found it closed for renovations. What returned was not Relish. In January 2019 the resort told Phoenix New Times that a tavern would take the clubhouse, “even more inviting and not so formal,” with 170 seats, Arizona craft beer and a chef de cuisine, Michael Press, writing about 30 pub dishes. The Phoenician Tavern opened on March 9, 2019.
The record is thin in places. No press we found gave Relish’s exact last day of service, named a chef after Carter, or explained why the resort chose to retire the name rather than refresh it; the Tavern’s beer-first concept and its explicit pitch to locals suggest the burger bistro had never drawn enough of them.
Honest assessment: Relish Burger Bistro was a good idea executed at a hotel’s pace, a $16 Kobe burger with a $40 view, and the critics were right that the burger was not the point. It mattered mostly as the room’s first act. The Tavern that replaced it kept the view, the free parking and the TVs, swapped tequila for twelve Arizona taps and added the one thing Relish never had, a reason for people who are not golfers or guests to climb the stairs. It belongs in the lost column beside Windows on the Green and Mary Elaine’s, but as a footnote, not a casualty.