What was The Other Place?
Most restaurants agonize over naming. The Other Place let its customers handle it.
In 1969, restaurateur Dale Anderson opened his second restaurant in a building at the Smoke Tree Resort on Lincoln Drive, right where Scottsdale shades into Paradise Valley. Before he’d settled on a name, the regulars from his first restaurant had already solved the problem — “meet you at the other place” — and Anderson, a man who evidently understood his clientele better than most marketers do, made the shorthand official. Few restaurant names have ever been more honest about what a restaurant actually is: the place your people go when they’re not at the first one.
What it served was equally honest: prime rib and dependable American fare in a resort-casual room — comfortable, unhurried, priced for a weekly habit rather than an annual splurge. The Lincoln Drive corridor of that era was a particular ecosystem: small resorts like the Smoke Tree, Paradise Valley estates filling in behind them, and a clientele that valued knowing exactly what dinner would be. The Other Place was engineered for them, and they repaid it with roughly three decades of loyalty.
It faded out in the 1990s — no scandal, no fire, just the quiet sunset that claims neighborhood institutions — and Anderson, who also built The Quilted Bear and a small Arizona-California restaurant group, died in 2009. The name outlives the room as a small monument to letting customers tell you what your restaurant is.
The dependable-dinner formula
The Other Place ran on consistency the way other restaurants run on novelty. The menu was the American canon of its era — prime rib as the flagship, steaks and seafood and proper salads in support — and the point was that it didn’t change. Regulars ordered from memory. The kitchen’s job was to make Tuesday taste exactly like the Tuesday before, and it took that job seriously for thirty years.
The room matched the mission. Resort-casual meant real comfort without ceremony: booths you could settle into, service that remembered your drink, lighting flattering enough for Paradise Valley’s dinner-jacket-optional crowd. Attached to the Smoke Tree Resort, it pulled a steady mix of hotel guests and neighbors — the guests discovering it, the neighbors treating it as an extension of their kitchens.
Location was destiny. Lincoln Drive in the 1970s and 80s was one of the Valley’s quietly excellent restaurant corridors — a string of resort dining rooms and institutions serving the mountainside neighborhoods, with El Chorro glowing a bit further west and Lon’s at the Hermosa carrying the hacienda tradition nearby. The Other Place was the corridor’s everyday option: less romantic than its famous neighbors, more often visited. Ask anyone who grew up along Lincoln in that era where their family ate on ordinary nights and this name comes up with a warmth the landmark rooms don’t always get.
The economics were the old kind. Moderate prices, high frequency, multi-decade relationships — a formula that built Anderson’s little restaurant group and that modern Scottsdale, with its churn of concepts chasing peak-season tourists, has largely abandoned. The Other Place never needed you to be impressed. It needed you back Thursday, and you came.
Dale Anderson and the quiet school of Scottsdale hospitality
The Other Place belongs to a lineage that Scottsdale’s restaurant histories chronically undercount: the unfamous institutions. The city’s dining mythology celebrates its spectacles — the necktie-snipping steakhouses, the celebrity rooms, the see-and-be-seen bars like Lulu Belle. But the actual fabric of mid-century Scottsdale dining was woven by operators like Dale Anderson: professionals who opened comfortable rooms, fed the same families for decades, and never once issued a press release.
Anderson’s small empire proved the model scaled. The Quilted Bear brought the same comfort-first philosophy to a beloved Scottsdale gift-shop-and-restaurant hybrid, and his group stretched into California on identical principles. The through-line was a specific idea of hospitality — that a restaurant’s highest achievement is becoming a habit, woven into how a neighborhood lives. The accidental name was the philosophy in miniature: the customers had already absorbed the restaurant into their language before it officially existed.
The 1990s ending was ecosystem-wide, not particular. That decade began the great turnover of the Lincoln Drive and resort-adjacent old guard, as founding operators aged out, small resorts like the Smoke Tree cycled through redevelopment pressures, and Scottsdale’s dining energy shifted toward the chef-driven and the branded. The corridor’s institutions fell one by one, most as quietly as they had operated. By the time anyone thought to write their histories, even their closing years had gone soft at the edges — which is why The Other Place’s final chapter is dated only to the decade.
Honest assessment: nothing about The Other Place was remarkable except everything in aggregate — thirty years of showing up, a name donated by its own regulars, and a place in thousands of family routines along one of the Valley’s loveliest roads. Scottsdale builds few restaurants like it anymore, because the business model rewards spectacle over habit. But every neighborhood still knows exactly what “the other place” means. That’s the legacy: a common phrase, permanently warmed.