What was Voltaire?
Restaurants usually die of neglect. Voltaire died of loyalty — to a cuisine, a clientele, and a way of doing dinner that the world outside its doors had stopped requesting.
Opened in the late 1970s at McDonald Drive and Granite Reef, on the unglamorous edge of McCormick Ranch, Voltaire was a classic French dining room of the old school: escargots bubbling in garlic butter, Dover sole boned with surgical calm, steak Diane, vichyssoise, and soufflés you ordered before your appetizer because excellence takes forty minutes. The service matched — formal, unhurried, personal in the way only decades of the same faces on both sides of the table can produce.
What made Voltaire remarkable wasn’t the food, which many cities had in 1980. It was the refusal. For more than thirty years, while Scottsdale burned through Southwestern fever, fusion, tapas, and gastropubs, Voltaire changed essentially nothing. The dishes your parents ordered in 1985 were on the menu, prepared the same way, in 2012. For its devoted, mostly older clientele — heavily seasonal, fiercely attached — that constancy was the entire point.
It was also the fatal flaw. In July 2013, chef-owner David Antonelli finally conceded, closing Voltaire with a line that doubles as its epitaph: the restaurant couldn’t survive on three months of activity a year. One month later, on August 14, 2013, the same room reopened as the casual Brooklyn Cafe — the whole forty-year arc of Scottsdale dining compressed into a single summer’s renovation.
The mechanics of a time capsule
Dinner at Voltaire ran on rituals that had vanished nearly everywhere else, and regulars treated them as liturgy.
The soufflé order came first. Grand Marnier or chocolate, committed to before the escargots arrived, because a proper soufflé is built to order and the kitchen refused shortcuts. Watching first-timers learn this rule from a patient captain was a small recurring theater of the dining room.
The classics were the menu, not a section of it. Escargots, onion soup, pâté; then Dover sole — flown in, sautéed, and deboned with the flourish of a kitchen that had done it nightly for decades — or steak Diane, rack of lamb, duck à l’orange. Sauces were mounted with real butter and zero apology. Portions and plating belonged to the era of the cuisine, which is to say generous and unironic.
The room ran on relationships. Much of the staff measured tenure in decades, knew the regulars’ tables and anniversaries, and delivered the kind of formal-but-familial service no training manual produces. Snowbirds structured their winters around it; some flew in from the Midwest and had their first Voltaire reservation booked before their golf.
And the seasonality was extreme. January through March, the room hummed at capacity with its silver-haired faithful. Come summer, it emptied to a whisper — the pattern Antonelli ultimately named as the killer. The economics of a 30-item classical menu, skilled old-guard labor, and ninety good days a year stopped penciling long before the owner admitted it.
If you caught it in season, in its element, you weren’t eating a museum piece. You were eating dinner at the last working outpost of a whole civilization of restaurants.
The long goodbye of French Scottsdale
Voltaire’s story is really the story of a genre. In the resort-boom years of the 1970s — the era our 1970s history page chronicles — French was the unquestioned summit of American fine dining, and Scottsdale built accordingly: La Chaumiere, Chez Louis, the tableside grandeur of Palm Court at McCormick Ranch, and Voltaire among them, with resort rooms like Mary Elaine’s later carrying the French flag at its most luxurious. To eat seriously in 1980s Scottsdale was, to a large degree, to eat French.
Then the tide went out — slowly, and then all at once. Nouvelle cuisine discredited the heavy classics; Southwestern cooking gave the region a native prestige cuisine; dress codes died; and each subsequent Scottsdale generation arrived with less nostalgia for sauce work. One by one the French rooms closed or converted, until by the 2000s Voltaire stood nearly alone — no longer one option among many, but a destination for a specific act of remembering. Its clientele aged in place with it, which gave the dining room its extraordinary warmth and its actuarial doom in equal measure.
That’s why the ending, when it came, felt so precisely symbolic. Antonelli didn’t sell to a developer or lose a lease; he performed the conversion himself, closing Voltaire in July 2013 and opening The Brooklyn Cafe in the same walls that August — trading Dover sole for a casual, year-round neighborhood formula in thirty days flat. It was the rational move, cleanly executed, and it marked the moment old-line French dining ceased to exist as a Scottsdale category. Palm Court, the last tableside holdout, followed within a few years.
Honest assessment: Voltaire outlived its era by two full decades on stubbornness and butter, and both were admirable. The city that replaced it eats more interestingly now. But nobody’s soufflé arrives with that much ceremony anymore, and something civilizational went out of the Valley when the last one fell.