What was Tanzy?
Tanzy was the restaurant half of a dinner-and-a-movie idea that, for nine years, was one of the best-looking rooms at Scottsdale Quarter. It opened on New Year’s Day 2011 on the Quarter’s upper level, at 15257 N Scottsdale Road, Suite F220, directly beside the iPic Theaters luxury cinema that had opened a few weeks earlier, and it was run by the same company. Phoenix New Times welcomed it the first week of January as a modern Mediterranean restaurant “inspired by the Arizona landscape.”
The room was the draw. It covered 8,000 square feet, with walls of windows looking east to the McDowells, an open kitchen, and a high ceiling hung with undulating copper waves. New Times’ first look described it as one big great room in an ultra-contemporary house: a living room with a modern fireplace up front, the bar in the middle, booths at the back, and wood, glass, water and fire worked through it all.
The kitchen belonged to Geoff Baumberger, a 27-year-old from the Columbus, Ohio, area who had trained at the Culinary Institute of America and come over from Marcella’s Italian Kitchen at Fashion Square. He pulled mozzarella from curd in the kitchen, braised short ribs and lamb shanks, and put a cumin-battered tempura Brussels sprout on the menu that New Times suggested selling in popcorn boxes next door. The opening hours were 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily, late enough to eat before or after a film.
It was for the Quarter’s shoppers at lunch, the north Scottsdale and Kierland office crowd at happy hour, and the iPic’s members at night, who could walk from a booth to a reclining seat. It closed with the theater on January 30, 2020, after iPic’s bankruptcy. Our verdict: a handsome, competent room that outlasted neighbors like Parc Central, which closed in its first summer, and was undone not by its food but by the movie business it was attached to.
What the menu and the room were
The opening menu. The January 2011 card started with a pan-seared polenta cake with tarragon butter, smoked gouda, garlic spinach and roasted tomatoes; saffron wild mushroom arancini; and grilled calamari with artichokes, capers and roasted tomatoes. Entrées ran from tagliatelle Bolognese and shrimp puttanesca to Cabernet-braised lamb shank and black cod ratatouille, with what New Times called an extensive wine selection. At the first look, the paper’s critic singled out the deconstructed bruschetta with house mozzarella and pesto, a short rib over goat cheese gnocchi, cedar-plank salmon, and an Orange Creamsicle brûlée made with Grand Marnier and candied orange peel.
Lunch and happy hour. By spring 2011 Tanzy had split off a lunch menu, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily, with smaller portions and lower prices: filet sliders, a portobello and roasted red pepper panini with goat cheese, a turkey and brie panini, lemon sole over rock shrimp succotash, and the Bolognese and pineapple-glazed swordfish at about a third of their dinner prices. The weekday 3-to-6 happy hour came with a “Taste the Trends” table in the front lounge, where the chefs set out free samples. By 2015 a local writer found a $12 Lunch Club (with salad or fries), a seafood Cobb, and weekend brunch.
What regulars did. They treated the lounge as its own bar. The couches and fireplace at the front, and the big glass panels that opened when the weather cooled, made Tanzy one of the few places at the Quarter to sit with a view rather than a parking garage. Movie nights were the busy ones; weekday afternoons were quiet and the best value.
The later years. The menu kept moving. In September 2016, So Scottsdale listed new French onion soup, cast-iron polenta, crab cakes with shrimp and grits and a Mediterranean grilled skirt steak panzanella, along with a Marilyn Monroe four-course dinner paired with Piper-Heidsieck and a $33 three-course Arizona Restaurant Week menu. By then Tanzy was a small iPic brand, with versions at the company’s Westwood theater in Los Angeles and in Boca Raton. Compared with True Food Kitchen and Dominick’s Steakhouse down the row, it was the Quarter’s middle-price sit-down, and the one with the mountains in the window.
The dinner theater that a bankruptcy closed
Scottsdale Quarter opened in 2009 into the teeth of the recession, and the iPic was one of the bets meant to make it a night-time destination. iPic Entertainment, whose president and CEO was Hamid Hashemi, announced an eight-screen cinema for the 2010 holiday season with two tiers of plush seats in each auditorium, high-end food delivered to them, and an after-hours lounge called Salt. Tanzy was the full restaurant beside it, a way to sell dinner to people who did not want to eat it in the dark. In the 2010s that combination became a format, and dine-in theaters spread across the Valley.
The theater was renovated in 2018 with pod-style seating, pillows and blankets, lounge seats and butler service. ABC15’s account of that overhaul includes “the opening of Tanzy,” which is hard to square with a restaurant that had been serving since 2011; the most likely reading is that the dining room was reworked along with the auditoriums, but the record we found does not say what changed. What it does say is how it ended. iPic Entertainment filed for Chapter 11 in August 2019 and was sold in November. In January 2020 the company said the Scottsdale theater would close on January 30 as part of its restructuring, later citing economic reasons, and told members and gift card holders of both the theater and Tanzy to seek refunds before that date. No Arizona iPic remained.
Then the pandemic arrived, and the space sat dark for almost two years. Landmark Theatres signed a long-term lease in August 2021 and opened an eight-screen cinema on December 16, 2021, with a full-service bar and lounge but no restaurant on the scale of Tanzy. The rest of the Kierland and Quarter dining row kept turning over around it, which is the normal rhythm of The Quarter.
Honest assessment: Tanzy was never a destination on its own, and New Times’ early reports read like a good hotel restaurant: careful, pleasant, a little safe. But the room was genuinely beautiful, the house mozzarella and the Brussels sprouts were the real thing, and it kept a young chef’s menu changing for nearly a decade in a center where restaurants often lasted two years. It closed because its landlord was a movie chain that went bankrupt, which is about as blameless as a closing gets.