What was Remington’s?
There used to be a kind of room every good hotel kept: dark wood, deep booths, prime rib on a cart’s worth of menu, and a band in the corner playing standards for people who knew the words. The Valley had a whole constellation of them once. Remington’s, at the Scottsdale Plaza Resort on the Paradise Valley border, was one of the last still burning.
It opened in 1987, when the Plaza was young and the resort-signature-restaurant was mandatory equipment, and it ran for roughly thirty years without ever chasing a trend. The dining room did the American classics — rack of lamb and prime rib above all — with the kind of unhurried service that assumed you’d come to stay a while. The lounge did the rest: live jazz five nights a week, Tuesday through Saturday, a piano working through the songbook while a happy-hour crowd of regulars ordered another round and stopped pretending they were leaving.
For a generation of Scottsdale and Paradise Valley families, Remington’s was where the calendar happened — Easter brunch, Mother’s Day, Thanksgiving buffets, proms, anniversaries, the dinner after the funeral. It wasn’t fashionable, which was precisely its value: it was reliable, in the deep sense, the restaurant equivalent of a standing appointment.
The music stopped in May 2017. The room survives as private-event space, which is a polite way of saying it survives as a memory.
Why the formula worked for thirty years
Remington’s understood something the churn of modern restaurants forgets: a certain kind of diner doesn’t want news. The menu barely moved for decades — the lamb, the prime rib, steaks and seafood in the classic register, proper cocktails — and that constancy was the product. You could book a table in 1992 and again in 2012 and order dinner from memory. In a city that reinvents its restaurant row every few years, that made Remington’s less a restaurant than an institution with a kitchen.
The lounge was the engine. Jazz Tuesday through Saturday gave the place a nightly pulse most hotel dining rooms never had. The happy-hour crowd was its own society — Paradise Valley retirees, Plaza guests who wandered in once and became annuals, local players sitting in. Plenty of nights, the bar out-drew the dining room, and the smart regulars treated the whole operation as one continuous evening: drinks and the first set in the lounge, dinner when hunger won, back for the late set with dessert.
The holidays were the franchise. The Thanksgiving, Easter, and Mother’s Day buffets were booked by families on a standing basis, some of them across all three decades — kids who fidgeted through Easter brunch in the ’80s eventually brought their own fidgeting kids. That generational loop is the rarest asset in the restaurant business, and Remington’s had it in quantity.
And the location did quiet work. Perched at 7200 N Scottsdale Rd on the Paradise Valley line, it caught the old-money neighborhoods that wanted white-tablecloth comfort without a drive into Old Town’s noise — the same catchment that kept the Valley’s other classic rooms alive longest.
The last of the hotel supper rooms
To understand what closed in May 2017, zoom out. Scottsdale’s resort boom of the 1980s built dining rooms as flagships: the Marquesa at the Princess doing Five Diamond Catalan, Mary Elaine’s crowning the Phoenician, the Chaparral Room at Camelback Inn defining continental elegance for an earlier generation. Remington’s belonged to that family — less rarefied than the trophy rooms, and precisely because of that, longer-lived. It aimed for the local celebrating a birthday, not the critic awarding stars.
One by one, the genre died. The trophy rooms went first in the 2000s, too expensive to run once resort guests started wanting casual, chef-branded concepts instead of jackets and captains. The supper clubs held out longer because their business wasn’t tourists — it was habit, and habit is durable. Remington’s, with its jazz-five-nights heartbeat and its holiday-buffet annuities, outlasted nearly all of them, running its unfashionable playbook straight through the farm-to-table years and into the Instagram era.
But habit ages with its holders. By the 2010s the happy-hour regulars were thinning, resort economics favored ballrooms over dining rooms, and a thirty-year-old restaurant occupying prime event space became a spreadsheet question. The Plaza answered it in May 2017: final services, then conversion to private events. No scandal, no fire — the same quiet arithmetic that closed the genre everywhere.
What was lost is specific: a room where live jazz was furniture, not programming; where a family could run a forty-year streak of Easters; where the Valley’s older idea of a nice night out — the one it shared with clubby stalwarts like Don and Charlie’s — got to finish its long last set. Scottsdale has better restaurants now. It does not have another room like that one.