What was The Estate House?
The Estate House was the grandest of the restaurants developer Fred Unger built into SouthBridge, his canal-bank block of shops, condos and dining rooms on Stetson Drive in Old Town. It stood at 7134 E Stetson Drive, facing the Scottsdale Waterfront across the Arizona Canal, and it was scheduled to open on February 8, 2008, as Unger’s third SouthBridge restaurant, after Foodbar and Canal.
Unger was a developer with a reputation for taste. He was the man behind Lon’s at the Hermosa, having restored the Hermosa Inn, and he had renovated the Royal Palms, home of T. Cook’s. The Estate House was his statement piece: a building meant to evoke a grand mansion, with multiple dining rooms and terraces on different levels, white linen tablecloths, an upstairs lounge and a champagne bar pouring alongside caviar and oysters on the half shell. John Mariani, writing in 2009, called it a splendidly handsome, three-level restaurant, with a broad bar, polished floors, a chandelier hanging from a beamed ceiling and, for reasons nobody explained, a unicycle on one wall.
The kitchen opened under Ron Dimas, who described his cooking as French-inspired wine country cuisine, and passed in August 2008 to Gio Osso, a chef who would later build his own following at Virtù Honest Craft. It served the most ambitious food on the block at the worst possible moment. Four months after Osso arrived, a New Times columnist counted about ten people in the building, staff included, on a holiday-season evening.
It closed in 2010, according to Phoenix New Times, and The Herb Box opened upstairs in the renovated space in January 2011. Our verdict: The Estate House was the most beautiful restaurant SouthBridge ever had and the one that most clearly belonged to the year before the crash.
What the menu and the mansion were
The opening menu was French wine country. Phoenix New Times previewed Dimas’s draft menu a week before opening: seared ahi with pickled beech mushrooms, white asparagus, radishes and almond oil; a Belgian endive salad with crème fraîche dressing, foie gras toasts and quince jelly; truffled linguine carbonara with guanciale, duck egg and Parmigiano Reggiano; La Belle magret duck breast with leg sausage, pear, chanterelles and salsify purée; and braised pork osso buco with fig and onion polenta, Brussels sprouts and chestnuts.
Go upstairs for the lounge. The upstairs lounge ran its own list of artisan cheeses, including burrata with cold-pressed olive oil and green olive tapenade, and small plates such as seared Nantucket Bay scallops and spiced chicken confit. Its dessert, seckel pear and mascarpone cheesecake with spiced tawny port sauce, was the dish the critic said she wanted a bite of right that second. Caviar and oysters were the champagne bar’s business, not the lounge’s.
Osso’s menu was the high point. By May 2009 Mariani was calling Osso one of the finest interpreters of modern American cuisine and listing the dishes: grilled baby lamb with thyme-roasted figs and a pinot noir and hazelnut reduction; date-stuffed elk loin with toasted cumin tabbouleh, Moroccan-spiced eggplant caviar and minted yogurt; hamachi with yuzu, aïoli and sweet-sour daikon served on a slab of Himalayan salt that seasoned the fish; and a maple pot de crème with cream-filled doughnuts. Appetizers ran $7 to $15 and main courses $22 to $42, with dinner nightly and, per Gayot’s listing, lunch Monday through Saturday. Osso’s own favorite, he told Arizona Foothills, was sea bass with chorizo, potatoes and saffron broth.
Then it got cheaper. As the recession deepened, the restaurant was re-concepted, in New Times’ word, because the luxury mansion theme suddenly seemed gauche. Gayot’s review of the revamped room found it more casual and said it looked a lot fancier than its menu or prices, with achiote-rubbed pork belly with pickled onions, fettuccine with wild mushrooms and a prime rib-eye. Gayot’s listing noted a parking garage, a casual dressy dress code and reservations suggested, though by then they were rarely needed.
Finding the door was the hard part. Michele Laudig, who loved the interior, wrote later that the place always seemed fortress-like, grand and intimidating and hard to figure out, and that she was sad every time she walked past the big canal patio full of empty tables and flickering candles.
The mansion that opened into the recession
In April 2007 New Times announced that SouthBridge would hold seven upscale restaurants. Unger opened three of his own in under a year: the sandwich-and-salad Foodbar that spring, the fashion-runway restaurant Canal in October 2007, and The Estate House in February 2008, within the same few weeks as Talavera at the Four Seasons and Bourbon Steak at the Princess. Laudig’s preview called it the great 2008 boom. Canal, she wrote, was pretty glam, but The Estate House sounded downright swanky.
The boom did not survive the year. Dimas left in August after six months, and Osso, who had cooked at Luc’s, Spiga and Sugo, took the kitchen. In December 2008 New Times’ anonymous waiter-columnist walked SouthBridge at seven on a holiday evening and found Canal in virtual dry dock and The Estate House nearly vacant, its staff greeting him with the desperate enthusiasm of realtors. Unger converted Foodbar into Metro Brasserie that fall and kept The Estate House going with a more casual menu, and it outlasted Canal, which closed in 2009, by about a year. Osso, by the account of his later biography, spent about two years revamping the program before leaving in 2010 to run concessions for HMS Host at Sky Harbor.
The building did not stay dark long. The Herb Box opened its SouthBridge location the weekend before January 3, 2011, with the restaurant upstairs in the former Estate House space, which New Times said had been completely renovated, and a market downstairs at the corner of Stetson Drive and the bridge. Arizona Foothills put the new restaurant at 7,200 square feet. Laudig’s review that March argued the new entrances solved the old problem: people could finally find their way in.
What the record does not say is the month The Estate House closed, why Unger ended it, or how many seats the three levels held. The press we found dates the closing only to 2010.
Honest assessment: The Estate House was a serious restaurant, with a chef whose cooking the national press noticed, inside a building designed for an economy that ended the year it opened. Its legacy is Osso’s, who went on to open Virtù, his own small room on Marshall Way, in the 2010s, and the lesson SouthBridge took from it: on Stetson Drive, the door matters as much as the chandelier.