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Dallas-based Western Addition Restaurant Group is opening its first restaurant outside of Texas next week with the March 30 opening of il Bracco in Scottsdale, Ariz.
This will be the third location of il Bracco, the group’s Italian-influenced restaurant that also has locations in Houston and Dallas. Western Addition also operates Balboa Surf Club, a seafood restaurant celebrating American coastal cuisine, in Houston, and Bobbie’s Airway Grill, a fairly upscale neighborhood grill in Dallas named for founder Robert Quick’s mother.
Quick said the Valley of the Sun, or metropolitan Phoenix, is an attractive market for expansion.
“The Valley has hit a critical mass in the last four or five years, where it’s just a big bustling economy now, which is really, really exciting,” he said.
Quick attended the Culinary Institute of America’s Greystone campus in St. Helena, Calif., and then worked for Thomas Keller’s restaurant group at Ad Hoc before joining the Hillstone restaurant group, where he furthered his education in operational excellence, which he said is a cornerstone of Western Addition.
He opened his first restaurant, the Dallas il Bracco, in 2019.
The Scottsdale restaurant is at a prime location on a 1.6-acre site on the corner of Scottsdale Road and Rose Lane near McDonald Drive.
“This is our first ground-up build, which we’re absolutely thrilled to be able to do,” Quick said, adding that the prime location was added incentive to expand to Scottsdale.
The 5,000-square-foot restaurant will seat 165 guests, including a 10-table patio. The interior features leather booths, wood paneling, and travertine, polished chrome, brick, and cork elements. A patterned terrazzo floor connecting the entry, bar, and patio is meant to evoke an elegant entryway in Milan while other parts of the floor are a checkerboard of marble and Travertine. It was designed by Western Addition’s vice president of architecture Kelly Wallace and vice president of design Mary Lucille Quick along with design firms MMaison Interiors and Brick & West Design.
The food is inspired by Italian and Italian-American cuisines, but with a Texas accent. Quick said top sellers in Dallas and Houston are the spicy gemelli pasta and chicken piccata, “but we actually sell quite a few USDA Prime steaks, which we’re cutting in-house every day,” along with cheeseburgers with aged provolone cheese, Calabrian chile, and arugula and fennel dressed in lemon and olive oil.
Other highlights include cacio e pepe and bolognese pastas as well as an eggplant parm and meatballs inspired by the Italian-American cuisine of the Northeast.
The beverage program includes Italian wines, most notably Barolo, Barbaresco, and Brunello di Montalcino by the glass, but also American wines that pair well with the food.
The signature cocktail, the Bracco, is a frozen drink with Aperol and grapefruit that’s a riff on the classic Greyhound.
Pastas are mostly priced in the $25-$30 range, and entrées, except for the $25 eggplant parm, range from $29 for roast chicken to $62 for a center-cut beef filet served with polenta and broccolini. Cocktails are around $17, and wines by the glass start at $13.
Quick said he chose il Bracco for the space because he thinks the Valley could use a restaurant like it. Phoenix and Scottsdale have “a lot of tremendous American dining, but we really felt like our vision of Italian-inspired cuisine was a new take in this area,” he said.
Contact Bret Thorn at bret.thorn@informa.com Follow him on TikTok and Instagram: @foodwriterdiary
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