Best New Restaurant 2002 | Atlas Bistro | Food & Drink | Phoenix
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Best New Restaurant

Atlas Bistro

Jackie Mercandetti Photo
The past 12 months have seen the introduction of not just one incredible destination, but several. What happened? Did serious chefs finally wake up and realize how many Valley folks have lots of cash to spend on their evenings out (not us, but we've heard of such people)? For once, it was hard to choose the best new restaurant.

Yet there's something just a bit extra special about Atlas Bistro, a tiny cafe with a big-city mood. It's BYOB, always a nice touch to lower the dinner tab, but it's connected to the terrific AZ Wine Co., meaning it's almost as good as having a personal sommelier (just let the proprietors know what you're thinking of eating for dinner, and they'll help you choose the perfect wine. Plus, if you buy your grapes from AZ Wine, there's no corkage fee).

We love the sleek, elegant ambiance of white cloth capped with white butcher paper. But we love the menu even more, celebrating seasonal selections in simple but sophisticated dishes. The bruschetta are brilliant, six dainty crostini individually capped with things like chopped tomato and olive oil, white beans with hummus, and briny mushrooms over goat cheese and mascarpone. A quesadilla is special, a sun-dried tomato tortilla encasing white cheese and nubs of smoked salmon atop a peanuty-charactered bay scallop and crayfish sauce studded with corn and pearl onions. And it's hard to improve on an enormous Niman Ranch pork chop, exquisitely thick and moist, sided with an earthy wet heap of roasted corn, plump barley and black beans. What a beauty of a bistro.

Best New American Restaurant

House of Tricks

What do we love best about House of Tricks? It must be the setting, a small 1920s cottage with just 12 tables and an old river rock fireplace. Or maybe it's the patio, feeling like someone's front porch under a canopy of grapevines. Even as the restaurant has grown -- the property now includes a 1903 brick and adobe house next door -- the place has never lost its charm.

We think it's the wine list we love the most, selected from a temperature-and-humidity-controlled cellar holding more than 2,500 bottles. Surely, though, it's the food, a compelling blend of seasonal American accented with touches of Asia, Europe and the Southwest. Our favorite dish is lavender-and-herb-crusted ahi tuna seared rare with red curry sauce, risotto cake and sautéed greens. No, wait, we really adore the tenderloin au poivre, with sautéed potatoes and shiitakes in an herb butter sauce.

Okay, so it's simple. We love absolutely everything about this place. Nothing too tricky about that.

Best Mediterranean Restaurant

Marquesa

We're not the only ones enchanted with this amazing experience -- the resort's signature restaurant is rated AAA Five Diamond and Mobil Four Star. The decor alone is mouth-watering, rich in the colors of the Mediterranean region with polished marble, soft leather and 16th- and 17th-century Spanish Colonial antiques and paintings. A garden patio with a fireplace overlooking the McDowell Mountains invites us for luxurious alfresco dining. But we can't eat awards or ambiance.

Fortunately, the menu is as impressive as the setting -- exquisite seafood, meat, poultry and produce radiantly seasoned with provincial herbs, garlic and other flavors indigenous to the European region. We've been wowed by such temptations as cheese-filled pansotti with truffle oil scented sbira; buttered scalded chanterelles and truffles with sweet beet emulsion; and roasted veal loin pistou with crispy sweetbreads, cannellini beans and white almond pistou.

But what's most Mediterranean? Perhaps paella, and here it's pure luxury, stocked with lots of lobster, chicken, pork, frogs' legs, chistora, mussels, escargot, cockles and shrimp.

Vive la Riviera.

Best Middle Eastern Restaurant

Sabuddy Israeli Restaurant

Sabuddy is well-versed in the art of Middle Eastern cooking. There's a little bit of everything European on this lengthy menu -- baba ghanouj, chicken liver pâté, Russian potato salad, matbuha (North African tomato salad), shish kebabs, schnitzel and goulash.

No matter what we order, we know it'll arrive fresh, homemade, hearty and impossibly cheap. Soups are particularly mesmerizing, the lentil thickened with potatoes; the white bean and tomato broth robust; the gazpacho brilliant and singing with tomato. We like to sample from each section -- a salad (the Greek eggplant is divine, grilled, chopped and blended with fried onion, garlic, parsley, olive oil and lemon juice to be spread on pita), any of the soups, and an entree (try the ground beef kebab, rich with Middle Eastern seasonings, skewered and grilled to a juicy finish).

When we're craving topnotch Middle Eastern food, we know exactly what to do. We rely on our Sabuddy system.

Best Seafood Restaurant

C-Fu Gourmet

In Manhattan's or San Francisco's Chinatown, our criterion for selecting a seafood restaurant is simple. It must have live fish, and lots of it, on display. While the Valley lacks a Chinatown, we've found the fresh fish alive and swimming at C-Fu. The choices change with the seasons, but we can usually count on shrimp, Dungeness crab, lobster, oyster, tilapia, flounder or sea bass. Portions are huge, almost two dozen shrimp per order, two-pound crabs, whole fish. Selections are huge, too, spanning almost 100 fishy dishes including jellyfish, abalone, scallops, clams, rock cod, catfish, conch, squid and mussels.

Here's our dream feast of the deep: appetizers of sugar cane shrimp and a walnut shrimp salad. A soup of crab meat and winter melon. Entrees of lobster with black bean sauce (spicy, with bell pepper, bamboo, carrot, onion, water chestnuts, mushrooms and baby corn), plus yu shang rock cod (pan fried in spicy vinaigrette with bell pepper, onion, scallion, bamboo and mushroom). And to round it out, we get salted fish and chicken fried rice or soft lo mein with shrimp and scallops. It's simply the best fish to be found anywhere in town, sea?

Best Old Valley Charm

El Chorro Lodge

In this town, "old" is anything predating the '80s. But when we say old, we mean ancient. Such as the heritage of El Chorro, a local landmark since 1937. Very little has changed over the years at this adobe building, formerly Judson School for Girls and later a restaurant frequented by such celebrities as Clark Gable and Milton Berle. Its current owner, Joe Miller, began as a bartender in 1952, then purchased the property in 1973, ensuring tradition would carry on.

We personally have consumed more than our fair share of El Chorro's signature items, giant sticky buns that are served free with every meal. And while we'll admit that when we were in high school, we scoffed over the "old people's" menu -- loaded with classics like chipped beef on English muffin, shrimp Louie salad, chicken liver with bacon, and shad roe on toast -- now we appreciate the nostalgia.

We really appreciate the refinement, too, with tableside presentation of châteaubriand with béarnaise sauce, and rack of lamb with minted jelly. Quality has survived the ages with grace -- USDA prime aged filet mignon, New York steak, lobster tail and lamb chops are prepared in 1600F mesquite broiler to lock in flavor and juices.

Some things just never go out of style. Thank goodness.

Best New Valley Charm

Paisley Violin

Molly Smith
It was just seven years ago that downtown Phoenix welcomed its first McDonald's. Given the frenzy stirred up by the media, we must have thought we'd finally joined the ranks of downtown Manhattan or Los Angeles. How embarrassing. Then, last year, there came Paisley Violin. And finally, we wiped the sleep from our ennuied eyes and thought, Yes! Phoenix truly is on its way to having an honest-to-goodness downtown we can be proud of.

The area is no stranger to eclectic art houses, coffee shops, performance theaters, music venues, funky little restaurants and hangout spots. The difference is, Paisley Violin is the first to package them all together, and to actually be successful doing it. It's refreshing to stop in the little spot and see it rocking as a center for poetry slams, live music, ambient art, open-mike slots, after-hours grooving, DJ spinning and even chess tournaments.

There's a full menu offered with refreshingly well-executed appetizers, salads and sandwiches. Just as pleasing, the beer and wine policy is BYOB. And this is bargain culture: Cravings for art and appetite can be satisfied for $7.50 or less. Choose from light bites like imported olives, a plate of assorted cubed cheeses, fruit and baguette, hummus with grape leaves, panini or lox and capers with jalapeo cream cheese and greens on a sourdough baguette.

Welcome to the modern world, Phoenix. We're so glad to see you.

Best Fusion Restaurant

Eddie Matney's

Back in the '80s, fusion cuisine was the hottest thing around. Folks marveled over this mix-and-match approach to cooking. It was like a Reese's peanut butter cup commercial -- hey, your foie gras got in my kung pao!

Today, nobody keeps the fad as fresh as Eddie Matney's, with a menu that's all over the map with its touches of the Mediterranean, Asia, Mexico and down-home American classics.

How to define horseradish mashed potato-stuffed shrimp with cactus pear and five-peppercorn ranch sauce? Toasted seafood ravioli with apricot-Voodoo dip? A seafood pot pie with mussels, clams, shrimp, scallops and crab legs in savory tomato/fennel broth over penne pasta? Sometimes it sounds weird, but our advice is to live a little and give it a try. We're never disappointed, often amazed. Eddie's is keeping the fire in the fusion.

Best Southwestern Restaurant

Medizona

For a place that's about as Southwestern as they come, the Valley sure doesn't have a lot in the way of Southwestern cuisine. Yet when we've got Southwestern along the lines of Medizona, we don't really need any more restaurants than this one. Medizona is where we send every single visitor we know, so proud we are to show off how interesting our cuisine can be. It's not pure Southwestern, touched with Mediterranean influences, but still, it shows how much deeper our heritage is than just jalapeos, tomatillos, tacos and quesadillas.

This is desert with daring, flaunting appetizers like blackened shrimp with white bean hummus, mango-olive salsa and charbroiled tomatillo sauce, or eggplant tacos with lamb, arugula, kasseri cheese, cucumber-radish relish and roasted tomato-garlic sauce. Entrees are edgy, like charbroiled prime tenderloin of beef with potato-leek gratin plus butternut squash, spinach, smoked bacon and provolone-cheese-filled green chile in sun-dried cherry barbecue sauce. And we challenge any out-of-towners to find anything comparable in their burg to Medizona's to-die-for dessert of prickly pear tiramisu in Turkish coffee-pistachio sauce.

When we want to savor the Southwest, we find all the best of Arizona in our very own Medizona.

Best Restaurant To Impress A Client

The Latilla Room

Just tell that client -- the one who controls whether you make your mortgage -- that you're taking him or her to your favorite little hole in the wall.

Actually, it's more like a hole-in-the-rock, tucked into the Sonoran Desert foothills that make up the fabulous Boulders resort, surrounded by the 12-million-year-old granite boulder formations that dot the landscape. The restaurant's decor is the source of its name, with the main room's ceiling crafted from ocotillo branches (called "latilla," or "little sticks" in Spanish). Your client will be so breathless from the ambiance there'll be no air left to complain about your cost proposal.

And soon, your client's mouth will be too full of sumptuous American-Southwestern cuisine to quibble about anything. Who could argue over foie gras with creamy polenta, beet slices, fresh berries, and port reduction; grilled vegetable muffaleta strudel; seared Chilean sea bass with shrimp pot stickers and crisp chicken in a spicy crayfish broth; an Italian cowboy veal chop with Sicilian green olives, peppercorns, artichoke hearts and pancetta-mashed potatoes; or hazelnut praline ice cream layer cake?

If there's any doubt, after dinner, take your client to the desert-landscaped patio, boasting a fireplace and a huge boulder waterfall. Just remember, once the account is firmly landed, to bill the evening back on your expense account.

Best Of Phoenix®

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