What is Society Swan?
Society Swan is a martini bar that happens to serve dinner, inside a shopping mall that would rather you called it a dining destination. It opened on October 15, 2025 on the lower level of Scottsdale Fashion Square, at 7014 E Camelback Rd, Suite 559, in the space that was Kona Grill from 1998 until April 2024.
The owner is Sam Fox, through Fox Restaurant Concepts, the Phoenix company behind North Italia, Flower Child and Culinary Dropout, which The Cheesecake Factory bought in 2019. Fox calls this one a “refined American brasserie” that bridges East Coast poise with Parisian charm, and the inspiration, per the opening announcement, was the New York “Swans” of the 1960s and ’70s, the socialites who defined their era, along with Paris’s Swan Island. The room is two levels: a dining floor of banquettes below and a bar lounge upstairs where the happy hour lives. “Society Swan is all about bringing a little glamour to everyday dining,” Fox said at the opening.
The glamour is mostly in the glass. The martini list runs $17 for the Dirty, the Centerfold and the Espresso and $25 for a Decadent Dirty garnished with an oyster and kaluga caviar. The CIAO Brooklyn, straight rye with a trio of vermouths, toasted pecan and bitter cacao, is the house stirred drink, and the espresso martini, finished with salted cold foam and a touch of burnt banana, is the one Experience Scottsdale listed first among the city’s best cocktails. The kitchen does wagyu steak frites, lobster carbonara and a raw bar. Champagne at noon is official policy: the restaurant says it makes “no distinction between lunch and happy hour.”
Our verdict: the best cocktail bar in a mall in Arizona, which is a smaller category than it used to be, and a genuinely good upstairs room. Our list of every bar and club in Scottsdale puts it among the Fashion Square wing’s new rooms, and the Fox restaurants list explains where it sits in the empire.
Upstairs at 3, dinner at 7
Use the lounge. Society Swan serves from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and to 11 on Friday and Saturday, and the lounge opens daily at 3 with the bar “open late.” The High Society Happy Hour runs Monday through Friday, 3 to 6, upstairs: classic cocktails, boutique wines and draught beers with shareable plates and raw-bar favorites from $6. Half a dozen oysters go from $23 to $17, and the martini menu has been pitched at $10 to $11. Our happy hour guide ranks it with the rest of Old Town.
Order the stirred drinks. The espresso martini is the famous one and earns it, but the CIAO Brooklyn is the bartender’s drink, and the Decadent Dirty is the one you order when someone else is buying. The wine list leans boutique; the group also hosts ticketed wine dinners in the private upstairs room, like the five-course evening with Kerr Cellars founder and golfer Cristie Kerr on October 26.
Eat the frites. The menu’s frites section is the signature: Steak Frites with wagyu skirt steak, arugula and black truffle maître d’ butter at $43, and a coastal fish and chips. The Lobster Carbonara with bacon lardons, charred corn and roasted tomato is $39. Stone crab claws come off the raw bar in season, and the Golden Orchard salad of crispy squash, Brussels sprouts, quinoa, apple and goat cheese is $18. Dinner for two with two martinis each lands in the low $200s.
Book the room you want. The dining room takes OpenTable; the three private spaces are the Tiger Room, the Upstairs Bar Lounge and the Main Dining Banquettes, booked through Fox’s group-dining desk. Fridays and the holiday season fill a week out.
Know the wing. Society Swan sits in the south wing Macerich rebuilt around Nordstrom between 2023 and 2025, beside Catch, which added a Friday-and-Saturday Emerald Lounge in March 2026, and Élephante, with its speakeasy Bar Bambino tucked behind it. Nobu is in the exterior building, and Caesars Republic connects by a second-floor walkway, so a whole night can happen without going outside. Park in the Nordstrom-wing garage and use the lower-level entrance.
From Kona Grill to the Swans
The space has a history in Scottsdale restaurant business. Kona Grill opened here on September 18, 1998, and from this room built a national chain on macadamia nut chicken and mall sushi before quietly closing the original in April 2024. Its departure was part of a larger plan: Macerich, which owns Fashion Square, was rebuilding the south wing around Nordstrom into a row of destination restaurants. Élephante, from Nick Mathers’ Wish You Were Here Group, opened on December 4, 2024; Catch, the seafood-and-steak house, opened in fall 2025 as Arizona’s only Catch; and Society Swan took the Kona Grill space that October.
For Fox it was a return to the neighborhood. His first Valley restaurant opened at Gainey Village in 2001, and Scottsdale has been his test kitchen ever since; Olive & Ivy, on the Waterfront since 2007, and Culinary Dropout next to it are both a short walk from this door. Society Swan is the most explicitly bar-forward room he has opened in the city, a brasserie whose menu starts with martinis.
The timing fits the 2020s in Old Town, where the money has moved from the Stetson Drive clubs toward polished rooms with dress codes and reservations: Sexy Roman at the W, Wolf by Vanderpump above the mall, Kauboi at The REMI. A mall restaurant row is an unlikely member of that set, but Macerich’s leasing chief, Cameron Done, put it plainly in October 2026: “The restaurant collection is now a destination in its own right, not just an amenity for shoppers.” Fashion Square reportedly sells more than $1,800 per square foot against about $400 for an ordinary mall, which explains why Caesars built a hotel on it and why Fox wanted the corner.
Honest assessment: Society Swan is a very good bar with a competent brasserie attached, and the upstairs lounge at happy hour is the best way to use it. The dining room is handsome and the prices are mall-luxury, which is to say Fashion Square prices. Come for the martinis and the oysters, stay for one plate of frites, and treat the rest of the wing as the second half of the night.