What was Searsucker?
Celebrity-chef restaurants arrive in Scottsdale the way monsoon storms do: loudly, with a lot of advance warning, and often gone by morning. Searsucker was one of the fast ones.
It opened in October 2012 at 6900 E Camelback Rd, the corner of Camelback and Goldwater at the western edge of Old Town, a block from Scottsdale Fashion Square. The name came from San Diego, where chef Brian Malarkey, a finalist on Bravo’s Top Chef in 2007, and nightlife entrepreneur James Brennan had opened the original in the Gaslamp Quarter in 2010 and packed it nightly. Their Enlightened Hospitality Group built fabric-named siblings across Southern California, and Scottsdale was the first outpost in Arizona: 9,500 square feet of “gastrolounge,” cozy dining vignettes around a big bar and a lounge, dressed in leather, cowhide and hardwood under exposed ductwork that kept the acoustics civil.
The food was small-plate theater. Cheddar puffers for two dollars, duck fat fries with tomato jam, bone marrow, meatballs, chicken and waffles, then showpieces like a “drunken” shark with boozy cherries and a $75 Tomahawk rib-eye for tables that wanted to be seen ordering it. Phoenix Magazine’s Carey Sweet, reviewing it in May 2013, called the place “a lovely breath of fresh air” for Valley diners hungry for something new, while dinging the cryptic menu descriptions and prices that did not always track the plate.
Just over a year in, the group pulled the plug. Enlightened Hospitality closed Searsucker Scottsdale in late 2013, citing a desire to stay focused on its core portfolio, and by early 2014 the partners had sold a majority stake to Hakkasan Group. Honest verdict: a genuinely fun room with some genuinely good snacks, run by people whose attention was already elsewhere.
Dinner at a nightclub that cooked
The clock decided everything. Searsucker’s design brief was restaurant-that-becomes-lounge, and the two halves did not always agree. Early evening, the vignettes felt like a good, slightly showy dinner spot; by ten on a weekend the bar took over and the plates became accessories to the drinks. Regulars who came for the food learned to book the first seating.
Happy hour was the value play. Weekdays from 5 to 6:30, cocktails and appetizers dropped in price, and that window was where the kitchen’s real strengths lived. The cheddar puffers, warm cheese-laced dough at two dollars a pop, and the duck fat fries with their sweet-savory tomato jam were the dishes everyone ordered and the ones that survived in local memory. Bone marrow and the meatballs rounded out a snack order that could feed two for the price of one entree elsewhere on Camelback.
The big plates were the gamble. The Tomahawk rib-eye at $75 was priced for the room’s nightlife aspirations more than its kitchen, and the “drunken” shark, at $29, was the kind of dish that read better than it ate. Chicken and waffles at $14 was the safe large plate.
The room was the best part. Leather booths, cowhide accents and hardwood under exposed ducts gave Scottsdale a look it had not seen much of in 2012, when new restaurants defaulted to resort-polished or tequila-bar rustic. It drank well and filled fast on weekends with the crowd that would soon be dancing on tables at El Hefe a few blocks east.
A one-year case study in imported ambition
Searsucker’s short run was not an accident of bad cooking; it was a mismatch of timing and attention. In 2012 Scottsdale was still absorbing the lessons of the recession, and the celebrity-chef gambits of the previous cycle had gone badly. Sam Fox’s Modern Steak at Fashion Square, a pink-leather steakhouse experiment, had closed the same year Searsucker opened. The neighborhood’s most durable dining successes were homegrown and specific, from Cowboy Ciao on Stetson Drive to Matt Carter’s The Mission beside the old adobe chapel. An out-of-town brand with a television-famous chef and a nightlife-first partner was betting that Scottsdale wanted San Diego’s Gaslamp energy; the answer was yes, briefly, and mostly at the bar.
The deeper problem was corporate. Enlightened Hospitality was expanding fast across California, Brennan was a nightlife operator by trade, and within months of the Scottsdale closing the partners sold a majority stake to the Abu Dhabi-based Hakkasan Group. The Scottsdale room, the group’s most distant outpost, was the easiest piece to shed ahead of the sale. Malarkey later left to build new concepts in San Diego, and the Gaslamp original closed in 2020 after a decade; Scottsdale was a footnote the group’s farewell framed as focus rather than failure.
What it foreshadowed matters more than what it was. Searsucker’s restaurant-into-lounge structure, its cowhide-and-Edison-bulb look and its small-plates-and-showpiece-steak menu all became Old Town defaults over the following decade, as the 2010s turned the district into a national party destination and every new opening hedged between dinner and dance floor. The idea was right for Scottsdale; the operators were a year early and a thousand miles away.
Honest assessment: Searsucker Scottsdale was a good time and a mediocre investment, remembered by locals mostly for the cheddar puffers, the duck fat fries and the speed of its exit. It belongs on this list less as a lost treasure than as a warning label, the kind of restaurant Old Town keeps getting and keeps losing, usually before the second spring-training season.