What was Wildfish Seafood Grille?
The corner of Camelback and Scottsdale Roads is now the most expensive dinner in Old Town. For over a decade before that, it was the busiest bar.
Wildfish Seafood Grille was the creation of Larry Foles and Guy Villavaso, the Austin restaurateurs who had launched Eddie V’s in 2000 as a glamorous seafood answer to the steakhouse boom. Wildfish was the sibling — a touch more casual, a touch less expensive, built around the same idea that a seafood restaurant should feel like a party. The Scottsdale location opened in the mid-2000s at the new Scottsdale Waterfront, the canal-side development that was then trying to prove it could be a dining address rather than a shopping-center margin. Wildfish proved it on opening week: ninety-minute waits, a circular bar packed three deep.
The menu was upscale-casual seafood done with a chain’s consistency and a good chef’s palate — oysters with horseradish and mignonette, crispy salt-and-pepper shrimp with ginger and scallions, a truffled mac and cheese gratinata, the iceberg wedge, a Godiva hot chocolate cake. But the bar was the identity. The nightly 4-to-7 happy hour filled the room before the dining room opened, and the room stayed full after it closed.
In 2011, Darden — the Olive Garden and Red Lobster company — bought Eddie V’s and Wildfish for $59 million. In March 2018, it retired the Wildfish name, converting the other two locations to Eddie V’s and simply closing Scottsdale, because a Scottsdale Quarter Eddie V’s already existed a few miles north. Maple & Ash took the corner in 2019. The honest verdict: Wildfish was a very good corporate seafood room with a great bar, and its closure had nothing to do with the food.
Dinner at the circular bar
The smart money never sat in the dining room. Wildfish’s circular bar was enormous, served the full menu and was staffed by bartenders who ran it like a second restaurant — remembering names and making a solo diner feel like a regular.
Happy hour was the engine. From 4 to 7 nightly, the bar filled with the Waterfront’s office crowd, Fashion Square shoppers coming across Camelback and the hotel guests who had been told this was where Scottsdale drank. Discounted oysters and small plates made the crispy salt-and-pepper shrimp — light, gingery, gone in four bites — the default order, and the wine list ran deep.
The menu was built for the format. Oysters on ice with the three classic accompaniments; the wedge salad with blue cheese and marinated tomatoes; the truffled mac and cheese that half the room ordered as a side and the other half as dinner; fresh fish grilled simply, with the sauces on the side; and a Godiva hot chocolate cake with vanilla bean ice cream that closed the meal for anyone still upright.
The scene defined the Waterfront’s early years. The development had opened with condo towers, offices and a canal walk, and Wildfish — along with Olive & Ivy down the block and the P.F. Chang’s flagship across the way — gave it a nightlife pulse. On a Friday the bar spilled toward the canal and the wait for a table crossed ninety minutes without anyone seeming to mind.
How a chain killed its own restaurant
Wildfish belongs to a specific chapter of Scottsdale dining: the 2000s seafood-and-steak glamour wave, when the city’s money moved from resort dining rooms into freestanding, high-energy restaurants where the bar was as important as the kitchen. Mastro’s Ocean Club opened at Kierland in the same era; Eddie V’s would follow at Scottsdale Quarter. Wildfish was the Waterfront’s entry in that race, and for its first decade it was arguably the most consistently packed room of the bunch.
The Foles-Villavaso formula deserves credit. The pair understood something the old-school seafood houses like the Chart House had not: that a seafood restaurant could be a lounge first, that a circular bar and a live-music energy could carry a menu of straightforward fish and steaks to numbers a chef-driven room could never touch. Eddie V’s was the luxury version; Wildfish was the version for a Tuesday, and both made Darden — a company looking for growth outside casual dining — reach for its checkbook in 2011.
That purchase sealed Wildfish’s fate. Darden owned two overlapping seafood brands, and in Scottsdale it owned them a few miles apart: Wildfish at the Waterfront, Eddie V’s at Scottsdale Quarter. The company’s spokesman was blunt in March 2018 — the Wildfish closure was “due to the close proximity to our already existing Eddie V’s restaurant.” The other two Wildfish units, in San Antonio and Newport Beach, got new signs and became Eddie V’s. Scottsdale, the only market with both, got the lights turned off. The restaurant did not fail; its parent simply stopped wanting two of the same thing.
What followed tells the rest of the story. Maple & Ash arrived in August 2019 with Chicago money, a Michelin-pedigreed chef and prices that made Wildfish’s look quaint, and the Waterfront completed its 2010s transformation into a marquee dining address.
Honest assessment: Wildfish was corporate, formulaic and unashamed of it,. But it gave the Waterfront its first real crowd, and the circular bar at happy hour was, for over a decade, one of the most reliably good times in Scottsdale. The corner has never been that fun since.