What was Santé?
Santé was the most serious attempt Scottsdale has made at a restaurant where the farming was the point. It opened on December 14, 2021, at 15507 N Scottsdale Road, Suite 100, on the stretch of Scottsdale Road just north of Kierland Commons and the Quarter, in a 5,000-square-foot former Brunch Cafe, and it closed after dinner on June 4, 2023, nineteen months later.
The founders were Nick Neuman, who had owned EVO on Goldwater Boulevard in Old Town since 2013, and his friend Nico Doniele, a restaurant veteran who had earned a health-coaching certification and built the idea around his own dietary restrictions. Doniele’s motto, as he told AZ Big Media, was “let us live to eat and live longer to eat.” The general manager was Adam Formichella. The pitch was “beyond organic”: ingredients from regenerative, organic and biodynamic farms, Joyce Farms chief among them, composting in the kitchen, a list of nearly 50 biodynamic wines, and a menu written so that a vegan, a paleo eater and someone who wanted a bison filet could sit at one table.
The room matched the ambition. AZ Big Media described Hollywood Regency glamour with boho touches: living moss walls, neon, blush tones, brass and natural wood, a pink feather chandelier, a wraparound patio and a private dining room, with a grab-and-go cafe and supplement shelf at the front. It served breakfast, happy hour and dinner from the start, planned lunch for 2022, ran Sunday brunch, and within months was on Phoenix New Times’ Top 100 Restaurants in Phoenix.
It was aimed at the Kierland & Quarter crowd with money and food rules, and it found them; one regular told New Times it had been a weekly date night. Our verdict: a good restaurant with an expensive thesis, closed before the thesis could be tested through a second season.
What the menu and the room were
The food was built around sourcing. The signature plate was a bison filet with onion puree, roasted yellow tomatoes and a red wine and hemp reduction. Beside it sat a buttermilk-brined chicken with pickled spaghetti squash, brown rice chicharron and an olive-and-cherry gastrique, roasted carrots with lentil hummus, and the dish everyone remembered, a gluten-free shishito cornbread with maple butter and cheddar that New Times called a decadent favorite. The point, as Doniele put it, was that your vegan best friend could have a beautiful vegan dish while you had the bison. AZ Big Media also described a tableside espresso-martini cart. Published prices were not part of the opening coverage, and the restaurant’s menu pages are gone, so we will not guess at them; the room priced like a resort-adjacent dinner, which puts it in the $30 to $60 a head range.
The day ran long. Santé opened for breakfast, kept a happy hour, served dinner and Sunday brunch, and planned to add lunch in 2022. The front of the house doubled as a marketplace: a coffee and tea program, healthy grab-and-go meals and snacks, supplements and retail. That was the EVO lesson applied to wellness, keep the doors open across more hours than a dinner house can.
The room was the draw. Five thousand square feet with a wraparound patio is large for a restaurant with no hotel attached, and the design, moss walls and a pink feather chandelier, photographed well enough to carry the Instagram traffic that opening-year restaurants in this zip code need. The private dining space was marketed for events, and in February 2022 AZ Big Media recommended Santé to visitors in town for the Arabian Horse Show at WestWorld.
The crowd. North Scottsdale diners with money and dietary restrictions, the people Doniele said he had built it for. New Times’ obituary quoted the kind of customer the place existed for, a weekly date-night regular who did not understand the closing.
What regulars did. The record holds little beyond the cornbread and the date nights. The restaurant was a short drive from the Westin Kierland, but it was built for people who lived nearby and would come back, and nineteen months is not long enough for that model to pay.
The restaurant that became an EVO
Santé is the north-Scottsdale chapter of the Nick Neuman story. EVO had been the Old Town room that feeds people properly after midnight since 2013, and Neuman has said its north Scottsdale regulars spent years asking for something closer to home. Instead of an EVO, he and Doniele tried a concept with a much higher bar: regenerative sourcing in a market where “organic” was already a premium, in a 5,000-square-foot room that had already defeated a Brunch Cafe, opening in December 2021, the month the Omicron wave arrived.
The reviews were good. New Times put it in the Top 100, the design press covered the chandelier, and the inclusive-menu idea was genuinely new for the city; most Scottsdale restaurants that serve dietary restrictions treat them as a footnote, and Santé put them at the center. The business did not follow. On June 6, 2023, two days after a Sunday last service, the restaurant posted that it was closing its doors, thanked its guests for a year and a half, said the time it had to make a difference in their lives and to the planet had been special, and promised that future plans to create something new were soon to come. No reason was given, and none has been published since. The press we found does not record whether the Joyce Farms sourcing, the labor market or the lease was the problem; a 5,000-square-foot room running breakfast through dinner with farm pricing is an expensive thing to keep open, and that is the most anyone outside the company can say.
What came next was the obvious move. Neuman reopened the room as EVO North Scottsdale around the beginning of October 2023, telling the Scottsdale Progress that once they decided to close Santé, it made sense to put an EVO there; by November it had been open about a month. The new menu was the Old Town list plus branzino, lasagna and cioppino, with the EVO meatballs and focaccia rustica up front. The patio, the private room and the bones of the design carried over. Doniele’s name does not appear in the EVO coverage, and the “something new” the closing post promised has not surfaced under the Santé name.
The arc is a familiar one in the 2020s: an idealistic pandemic-era opening by a proven operator, strong press, a quiet closing inside two years, and a safer concept from the same owner in the same room. Kierland’s dining corridor has mostly been chains and hotel rooms; Santé was the independent that tried hardest, and EVO is the independent that stayed.
Honest assessment: Santé deserved more than nineteen months and probably could not have had them at that size and that price point. The cooking was real, the sourcing was more rigorous than anything the city had seen, and the inclusive-menu idea has not been picked up by anyone since. The lesson its successor teaches is blunt: north Scottsdale will pay for handmade pasta every night of the week before it pays for regenerative bison, and Neuman read that correctly the second time.