What was The Upton?
The Upton was what happened to Petite Maison after the Porters sold it. In October 2014, chef James Porter and his wife Wendy announced the sale of their five-year-old French bistro on Shoeman Lane, saying it had just had its best year ever, and that the new owners would not keep the name or the concept. Petite Maison served its last dinner on November 8. On November 25, 2014, the little house at 7216 E Shoeman Lane in Old Town reopened as The Upton.
The kitchen stayed in the family, in a sense. The chef was Chris Schlattman, Porter’s sous chef for most of the previous three years, a self-taught cook who had worked for Aaron May and Lee Hillson in the Valley and, in Chicago, under Grant Achatz at Alinea. His partners were Sean Zimmerman, who ran the front of the house as general manager, Bran Oberg and Pouria Malihi. Zimmerman described the target as the gap between Old Town’s nightlife and its fine dining: the “urban foodie.”
The name had a local story behind it. Schlattman said it honored Louis C. Upton, founder of the Upton Machine Company, which became Whirlpool; Upton moved to Arizona and built a house, designed by architect Paul Schweikher, in what is now downtown Scottsdale. The restaurant’s own signage put the mission more simply: “A sanctuary for tastebuds.”
The menu was New American in the loosest sense: Chinese char siu ribs, bao buns, a Cuban sandwich, fried chicken with local honey, a pink beet risotto and a bone-marrow dish packed with foie gras. Opening prices ran from $5 for hand-cut fries to $17 for the bistro steak. The biggest physical change was a large back patio with lounge seating for about 40, which turned the cottage into an indoor-outdoor bar.
It closed on Sunday, July 3, 2016, after less than two years. Our verdict: a well-cooked, good-humored restaurant that inherited a beloved room and could not make the room its own.
Ordering at The Upton
Start with a drink. The cocktail list twisted the classics rather than reinventing them. The Tonic & Gin reversed the usual emphasis and was built on small-batch John’s Tonic; the Uptown Girl was muddled basil and blueberry with vodka, lighter-sounding than it drank, as New Times’ critic warned.
Order the bone marrow. The dish Schlattman called his favorite was Wagyu bone marrow ($13 in 2016): he pulled the marrow, made a pâté with foie gras, packed it back into the bone and brûléed the top. For five dollars more came a Scotch sidecar to pour down the hollowed bone. Beside it, New Times liked the char siu ribs ($11) with cilantro and smoked peanuts better than the crispy confit duck wings, which were rich but not very meaty, and found the bao (the pork-belly Momofuko and the Seoul Satisfaction with Asian pear kimchi) good but a little expensive for a couple of bites.
For dinner, the pink risotto. The most Upton dish on the menu was the Barbie doll risotto ($19), dyed fuchsia with pureed beets and served with seared sea scallops and roasted carrots. The Southern fried picnic chicken ($15), drizzled with local amber honey and served with a cornbread cookie, was the dish Schlattman said was becoming the signature in 2015. The Little Havana pressed Cuban sandwich, a salmon with lemon Greek yogurt, a bistro steak with chimichurri and pork pibil tacos filled out the list, and a miso vegan ramen was the dish Schlattman said he would never take off.
Timing. In 2016 it served dinner from 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, lunch on Thursday and Friday, and weekend brunch from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. On Friday and Saturday it stayed open until 2 a.m., one of the later kitchens in the district; see our guide to late-night food in Scottsdale. Brunch brought the donas, cinnamon-sugar doughnut holes that also turned up at dinner dessert.
Where to sit. Outside. The patio had a graffiti-style art wall and wooden booths with bright cushions, and the greenery around the lot muffled Scottsdale Road a short walk away. Inside was quieter and darker, a long wooden bar and a handful of tables.
Following a beloved bistro
The Upton had the hardest job in Old Town dining: following a restaurant people loved, in the same small house, with the same staff invited to stay. Petite Maison had been James Porter’s second act after he abruptly closed Tapino in 2009, and its onion soup and charcuterie had a following. Porter said he was done with restaurant ownership for now, and he handed the kitchen to his number two. Schlattman was clear that the new place was not Petite Maison, though he kept the foie gras and the Scotch, and the “Porter-isms” in the kitchen.
The early months were rocky in the ordinary way. In February 2015 Schlattman told New Times the three-month-old restaurant was still “finding itself,” and that after negative feedback he was going to scrap the happy hour and redo it. “I want to earn a buck the right way,” he said, “with a customer who’s excited to pay it.” By the time New Times critic Patricia Escárcega reviewed it in April 2016, Schlattman was gone and John Vasquez ran the kitchen, but many of Schlattman’s dishes had become standards. Her verdict was that the food was “whimsical, and nearly always very good,” and she called the room polished yet laid-back.
Three months later it was closed. Lauren Saria’s New Times report on July 6, 2016, said the restaurant’s knack for “playful and delicious” New American cooking “wasn’t enough,” but gave no reason, and New Times’ July roundup listed it beside the closing of ShinBay. We found no account of what opened in the building next. In the 2010s arc of Old Town dining, The Upton was an attempt to turn a chef’s cottage into something closer to a bar, with a patio and a 2 a.m. close, and the short run suggests that format was a hard fit for a building this small.
Honest assessment: The Upton was better than its run. It had a talented young chef, a smart patio, a real critic’s endorsement and prices that were fair for Old Town, and it still lasted nineteen months. Our best guess, and it is only a guess, is that it was caught between the two crowds it was designed for: too much of a restaurant for the bar crowd, too much of a bar for the people who had loved Petite Maison.