What is The House Brasserie?
Most Old Town restaurants are built to be found. The House Brasserie is built to be stumbled on: an old house behind a picket fence at the quiet west end of Main Street, white tents in the yard, the Hotel Valley Ho looming mid-century-modern next door.
The house came first. It was built in 1939 by the Mowry family, who had left Texas after the Dust Bowl, bought more than a hundred acres in what was then a farm town, and grew Pima cotton. They built the house on what is now one of Old Town’s most historic blocks, and the family stayed for six decades. Mrs. Mowry outlived her husband into the early 2000s and was famous in the neighborhood for her rose bushes; when she died, the staff of the Valley Ho transplanted her best one onto the hotel grounds, where it still grows. Apart from a kitchen addition finished in the spring of 2014, the exterior is the original construction.
Inside, the restaurant runs as a white-tablecloth dinner house: modern American cooking with French influence, a Victorian-inspired dining room, tableside service, and a patio under shade trees that is the best reason to book. The menu changes with the seasons, but the spine is steady: escargot in bone-marrow butter, crudo and shellfish to start, then 28-day dry-aged steaks, sea bass, short rib and king crab legs.
For a few years in the mid-2010s it was chef Matt Carter’s Old Town fine-dining room, the quieter sibling of The Mission across downtown. Today it simply carries on as one of the most romantic tables in Scottsdale, inside a farm family’s living room.
Booking, ordering and the walk afterward
Book the patio. The House is dinner only, Tuesday through Saturday from 5 p.m. for the fall 2026 to spring 2027 season, closed Sunday and Monday. The patio, with its picket fence, white tents and trees, is what regulars ask for from October through April; the Victorian-inspired dining room is the better seat on a cold night or in the summer heat. Reservations run through OpenTable, and prime weekend tables in season go early.
Order in three moves. Open with something from the sea or the butter dish: the escargot de Bourgogne with garlic bone-marrow butter and focaccia, the hamachi crudo, crab cakes or shrimp cocktail. Then pick a lane. The 28-day dry-aged filet mignon and the 20-ounce Delmonico ribeye are the house signatures, the second one big enough to share and slow enough that the menu warns you to allow extra time. Seafood people should look at the Chilean sea bass or the pound of king crab legs. On the side, the crab fried rice with house XO sauce and a quail egg is the dish people mention afterward.
Price it honestly. Main courses run from the mid-thirties to the eighties, which puts The House at the top of Main Street’s price range. Splitting a steak and adding sides is the sensible way to eat here.
Make an evening of the block. The House sits at the start of the Main Street arts district, so dinner pairs naturally with gallery hours; on ArtWalk Thursdays, walk the galleries from 7 and book a later table. For a drink before, Craft 64 is a few doors east and Pizzeria Virtù a few beyond. After dinner, walk next door to the Valley Ho and look for the Mowry rose.
A cotton farm house in a resort town
The Mowry house is a reminder that Old Town was a farm town before it was anything else. In the 1930s, Scottsdale was a small farm town, a general store and a schoolhouse surrounded by fields of cotton and citrus watered from the canals. Families like the Mowrys, who came west after the Dust Bowl, made a living from Pima cotton, the long-staple variety bred in Arizona, and built modest houses on the edge of what would become downtown. Most of those houses are gone, lost to the resort boom of the 1950s and the commercial building that followed. This one survived because a family kept living in it.
What grew up around it was the opposite of a cotton farm. In 1956 the Hotel Valley Ho opened next door and brought Hollywood to Main Street; galleries filled the blocks to the east from the 1960s on, and the ArtWalk began in 1975. Mrs. Mowry, tending her roses, became a neighborhood figure by staying put. The Valley Ho’s gesture after her death, moving her best rose bush onto its grounds, is one of the more graceful things a Scottsdale business has done.
The house’s second life began in the 2010s, when it became a restaurant and gained a kitchen addition. Under Matt Carter it was a chef’s room with ambitions, the place he ran weekly tasting menus and an Opus One release dinner in 2014, at a time when his group was defining modern Old Town dining. Critics were not always kind: a 2017 Phoenix New Times review of the new brunch found the dishes less inspired than the setting. But the setting has always been the point, and Phoenix New Times returned in 2022 to include The House among the Valley’s restaurants in historic homes, reporting that the Mowry children still come back to celebrate birthdays.
The honest assessment: this is an expensive dinner, and The House is a romantic setting first and a culinary destination second. But no restaurant in Old Town puts you this close to the town’s farm past, and on a spring night on the patio, with the tents lit and the Valley Ho glowing over the fence, it earns its prices on atmosphere alone.