What was Taggia?
Taggia was the Italian restaurant of the resort at 4925 N Scottsdale Road during its Kimpton years, the stretch from 2007 to 2016 when the old Executive House Arizonian traded as the FireSky Resort & Spa. The property sits on Scottsdale Road just north of Fashion Square, at the top edge of Old Town, and the room that was Taggia is now The Canal Club at The Scott Resort & Spa.
It opened on March 12, 2007, when the resort was still called the Caleo, with a chef who was the whole story. Claudio Urciuoli, an Italian native who had cooked at Osteria del Circo at the Bellagio, the Four Seasons in Newport Beach and La Brea Bakery in Los Angeles, promised coastal Italian food: local organic produce, house pastas, wood-fired pizzas and seafood flown in from Italy, served at breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. The opening preview in Phoenix New Times listed a Dungeness crab salad with red grapefruit, rigatoni with Genovese-style veal ragu and a braised lamb shank with Sardinian fregola. Two weeks after opening, Taggia was handing out house-made cheese drizzled in olive oil at the West of Western festival.
The chef did not last the year. By August 2007 Urciuoli was overseeing the menu rather than cooking it, splitting time between Scottsdale and a Kimpton restaurant he was developing in Washington, D.C., and on December 10, 2007, New Times ran a piece titled “Claudio, we hardly knew ya” that opened with word that Taggia “is no more.” The resort kept the name and rebooted: Andrea Volpi in 2008, James Siao by 2011, Massimo De Francesca from September 2012. For most of its life Taggia was a competent resort Italian with a dining room of chandeliers, dim light and round booths, a pair of patios facing the pools, and, from 2014, the best-priced aperitivo hour in the city.
It ended with the resort. Classic Hotels & Resorts bought FireSky from Kimpton in April 2016, announced The Scott in January 2017 and rebuilt the restaurant as The Canal Club. Our verdict: Taggia was a restaurant that began as a chef’s statement and settled into being the resort’s kitchen, and its real legacy is the lesson Kimpton learned, that on this stretch of Scottsdale Road a hotel dining room survives on its bar.
What the menu was, chef by chef
The Urciuoli menu, 2007. The opening list was Ligurian in spirit, with the crab salad, the veal ragu and the fregola, plus wood-fired pizzas and a burrata with roasted tomatoes that New Times’ critic called the best thing she ate there. She also wrote that the preview menu had been “watered down” before opening and that the promised ever-changing menu never materialized. No prices from that year survive in the press we found.
Round two, 2008. Volpi, a Milan-born chef who made his Valley name at La Locanda in 1994, started in March 2008 with a draft menu of risotto ai gamberi (Carnaroli rice, rock shrimp, roasted red peppers, Hawaiian blue prawns and pesto), paccheri al ragu di maiale with shaved ricotta salata, and chicken breast rolled with mascarpone, caramelized onion and apple in a Madeira reduction. He stayed until about October 2010, when he left to open Local Bistro.
The farm years, 2011. Under James Siao the kitchen leaned local. The EarthCare Week dinner of April 18 to 25, 2011 was four courses for $45: a salad of Drake Farms goat cheese and Windmill Farms tomatoes, house gnocchi with Schreiner’s sweet sausage and ramps, wild Alaskan halibut with Controne beans and saffron, and a dark chocolate torte with local honey.
De Francesca, 2012 to 2015. The Toronto-born De Francesca had been with Kimpton since 2008, trained under Michelin-starred Vincenzo Camerucci in Italy and staged at Clio in Boston. His January 2013 menu, served by general manager Brian Blanke’s staff, ran prawn escabeche with lobster oil, veal tonnato with pickled egg and gherkin pesto, smoked duck carpaccio with blueberries and smoked goat cheese, potato gnocchi with chorizo, crab, English peas and soy brown butter, and a coulotte steak with smoked bone marrow he called “steak butter.” Dessert was a tiramisu in a dark chocolate shell that cracked under hot chocolate sauce.
The aperitivo hour, 2014 to 2015. This was the deal. From 5 to 7 p.m. daily through Labor Day 2014, every appetizer was $5 (ahi crudo with black olive gremolata, bruschetta, formaggi and salumi plates, salt cod fritters, beef sliders, pretzel bites with fontina fondue) and so was every drink: red, white, Prosecco, draft beer, well cocktails and a lineup of amaros poured neat or as a spritz. A weekday version returned on October 5, 2015, with $13 cocktails by mixologist Stephanie Teslar; spring-training specials that March included $15 chilaquiles with pork belly and a $16 Niman Ranch burger. See our happy hour guide for what the Scott does now.
The chef who left and the resort that kept trying
Taggia belongs to the moment when Scottsdale’s mid-size resorts decided they needed chefs. In the mid-2000s the big properties were importing names, Jean-Georges at the Phoenician, Laurent Tourondel at the Camelback Inn, and Kimpton, the San Francisco company that invented the American boutique chain, wanted the same effect on a smaller budget at the resort it had taken over on Scottsdale Road. Urciuoli was the answer: a real Italian cook with Bellagio and Four Seasons credentials, hired to make a 1961 convention hotel feel like a destination. The resort was renamed FireSky the same season.
The problem was the gap between a chef’s menu and a hotel’s. Kimpton needed breakfast, lunch, room service and banquet food out of the same kitchen, and within three months Urciuoli was gone to a Kimpton project in Washington, then Different Pointe of View, Prado, Noca and eventually his own Pa’La, where New Times named him Best Chef in 2024. Taggia, meanwhile, became what the hotel needed: a dependable Italian room with a succession of good, unflashy chefs, a wine dinner series (Arizona Stronghold on January 23, 2013) and a bar that did more business than the dining room.
That bar is the thing to remember. Kimpton properties were known for a nightly lobby wine hour, and FireSky’s lobby lounge was, according to New Times’ hotel listing, one of Old Town’s better people-watching rooms. The 2014 aperitivo hour turned the restaurant into an extension of it. In a city where happy hour is a civic institution, a $5 Montenegro spritz with $5 salt cod fritters was an unusual offer, and it is the part of Taggia locals still bring up.
The end was a real estate transaction. Classic Hotels & Resorts, a Phoenix company, bought FireSky in April 2016 and in January 2017 announced a $15 million plan to turn a 55-year-old hotel into The Scott: a Spanish Revival-meets-Bauhaus concept by AvroKO with a Havana-style lobby porch, the restaurant work running from May to September 2017. When critic Patricia Escárcega reviewed The Canal Club that November, she noted the makeover had removed Taggia’s open kitchen and sleek dining room, and described the new room’s round leather booths, rattan and mint walls. Taggia’s last service is not dated in anything we found; the resort guide of the 2010s simply has it in one year and gone the next.
Honest assessment: Taggia was never the restaurant its opening press promised, and for nine years it was a better-than-average resort Italian that locals used as a bar. That is not nothing. The gnocchi years under De Francesca were good cooking, the aperitivo hour was the best value on Scottsdale Road, and the room, with its chandeliers and pool patios, was a pleasant place to be. It earned the footnote it has in the story of The Scott, and not much more.