What was Roy’s Scottsdale?
Roy’s Scottsdale was the first Arizona restaurant from Roy Yamaguchi, the Hawaii chef who had helped invent what Los Angeles called Euro-Asian cooking in the early 1980s and then built a chain of Pacific Rim rooms from Honolulu to Tokyo and Guam. It opened in January 1998 at Scottsdale Seville, 7001 N Scottsdale Road, the Spanish-revival center at Indian Bend Road on the McCormick Ranch side of the resort corridor, in a space that had been a branch of the Mexican chain Marilyn’s.
It was not Yamaguchi’s own money on the line. The Scottsdale room was a joint venture with Randy Schoch, whose Desert Island Restaurants held the franchise and went on to open Roy’s in Newport Beach and Phoenix. New Times counted Scottsdale as the chain’s 13th location. Yamaguchi trained the kitchen and lent the name and the menu; his surrogates ran the stoves.
The menu was the Roy’s formula of the time: fish flown in and cooked with Asian and tropical flavors, a wood-fired pizza, a short list of meat, and four desserts. Critic Howard Seftel reviewed it in April 1998 and found it uneven in the way chains are, brilliant with ahi and mahimahi and disappointing with lamb, but he read its arrival as proof that the Valley had joined the urban big leagues, next to Wolfgang Puck’s ObaChine and Scottsdale’s own Restaurant Hapa.
It lasted more than a decade. Outback Steakhouse Inc. bought it in December 2002, Yamaguchi came back to cook its tenth-anniversary dinner in February 2008, and by November 2010 its space at Scottsdale Seville was a Mexican restaurant called Taberna Mexicana. Our verdict: Roy’s was the restaurant that taught Scottsdale what Pacific Rim meant, and then stayed long enough to become simply the place on Indian Bend with the good tuna.
What the menu and the room were
Order the fish. Every account agreed that seafood was what Roy’s did best. The blackened ahi ($19.50 in 1998) came rare in the center under a hot soy mustard butter, and New Times said no one in town did tuna better. The mahimahi ($18.25) was crusted with nori and served on purple mashed potatoes with a shiitake sauce; ono got a ginger-scallion seasoning and raspberry mango sauce with sticky rice and wok vegetables; Alaskan halibut came dusted with porcini powder, with rock shrimp. A shrimp risotto with lobster essence was the non-fish fish dish.
Start small, or start with pizza. Appetizers were small and pricey. Lobster pot stickers were five bites in sesame ginger miso sauce for $10, two dollars a bite; chicken spring rolls were $7.50 for four. The better value was the wood-fired pizza, nothing Pacific about it, which one night came topped with smoked salmon, capers and lemony creme fraiche. Critics told readers to skip the spinach salad, the Szechuan ribs and the lemongrass tempura chicken, and to be wary of the steak and lamb.
Save room. The four desserts were the least creative and most praised part of the menu: a chocolate souffle with a molten center ($6.50), a mango cheesecake, a creme brulee and a white chocolate mousse cake.
The room was loud and quick. Light wood tables without tablecloths, a metal bird-of-paradise sculpture at the door, subdued lighting, an open kitchen and walls hung with art for sale. Diners came in suits and in shorts. The complaint in 1998 was pace: appetizers in two minutes, entrees thirty seconds after the plates cleared, a busser who never left. Lunch ran Monday through Saturday; dinner ran nightly to 10 p.m., 11 on weekends.
Regulars came for the events. In the summer of 1999 the restaurant ran Taste of Hawaii Tuesdays, four shared courses with wine demonstrations for $25. In 2008 the anniversary dinner, at $90, put Yamaguchi on the line with chefs from Fleming’s, Aaron May’s Sol y Sombra and Roy’s Desert Ridge, with chef Erin Goldman of Roy’s Scottsdale closing the meal with a trio of chocolate desserts.
The franchise that outlived its franchisee
Roy’s came to Scottsdale on the crest of the late-1990s chef-chain wave. Yamaguchi had opened the first Roy’s in Honolulu in 1988, won a James Beard Award, and by 1997 had an empire across the Pacific Rim. The desert expansion ran through a partner: Randy Schoch’s Desert Island Restaurants, which according to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin opened Roy’s in Scottsdale in 1998, Newport Beach in 1999 and Phoenix in 2000. New Times announced the Scottsdale room in November 1997 in a roundup that also previewed ObaChine, the Valley’s other celebrity-chef Asian import of that season.
The partnership ended in 2002. Desert Island sold the Scottsdale and Newport Beach restaurants to Outback Steakhouse Inc. on December 11, keeping the Phoenix location, which it closed for a remodel into an Italian cafe; Schoch told the paper the split was not acrimonious. Outback had been Yamaguchi’s corporate partner since 1999, and under its company, later OSI Restaurant Partners, Roy’s became a mainland chain of more than twenty rooms, including one at the JW Marriott Desert Ridge.
Scottsdale’s Roy’s ran quietly through the 2000s. When it turned ten in February 2008, New Times called it a local institution and noted that Pacific Rim food, rare in 1998, was now everywhere. The end is the part the record leaves blank. We found no report of the closing, no date and no reason. What is documented is the space’s next life: Taberna Mexicana opened in “the former Roy’s location” in November 2010, from the Houston group behind Glendale’s Ninfa’s, with chef Alex Padilla; it closed in July 2011, blaming the economy. Nimbus American Bistro & Brewery followed in March 2012 and closed that November. OSI’s annual report for 2010 counts two Roy’s closings that year without naming them, and says the company planned to exit the brand.
Honest assessment: Roy’s Scottsdale was a good chain restaurant with one great idea, cooking fish properly in the desert, at a time when that was still news. It never had the chef-owner glamour of Rancho Pinot or Hapa down the road, and by its second decade it had been overtaken by the trend it started. But it held a corner of the Seville for the better part of twelve years, and the two restaurants that followed it in the space lasted eight months each.