Restaurant legend Sam Fox is back with his first original, stand-alone Valley restaurant in six years.
In this exclusive sneak peek, PHOENIX gets a behind-the-scenes glimpse – and taste – of Society Swan.
By Craig Outhier | Original Photography by Mirelle Inglefield
The boss likes the crispy zucchini just fine, but the precariousness of the dish is giving him pause.
“It’s tall,” restaurateur Sam Fox says, skeptically eying the tower of fried squash cutlets, piled impressively high on the plate by his test-kitchen chefs. “It’s gonna be a nightmare getting that up the stairs.”
“Not for any of us cooks,” his culinary aide-de-camp, Clint Woods, shoots back playfully. But a mental note is collectively shared by the five R&D chefs contributing to this mid-week tasting session: Less height on the zucchini, more server-friendly.
A similar Socratic back-and-forth attends each of the dozen or so dishes we subsequently sample here in the Fox Restaurant Concepts development kitchen in Phoenix, where all the food in FRC’s 60-plus restaurants nationwide is mercilessly workshopped before joining a given menu.
Far from focusing solely on taste – and, yes, these crispy medallions of zucchini, served with a ranch-like dill labneh for dipping, are quite tasty – Fox is weighing the full implications of each dish: food cost, price point, repeatability, menu gestalt, all of it.
“There’s a thought process with all of that,” explains the 50-ish but still-youthful restaurateur, whose bookish mien and clear, firm communication style suggest a middle-school history teacher in another life. “We’re a high-feedback org, and these guys have great temperament [to take the criticism]. I have ideas, Clint has ideas, they have ideas, and we just work through the ideas together.”
Fox’s fastidious instincts are inflamed for good reason. The dishes we’re sampling today will soon appear at FRC’s latest restaurant, Society Swan – or maybe they won’t, pending his critique. The restaurant opens in two months, mid-October, and this will be one of the last tastings before the final menus go to the printer.
Set in the former Kona Grill spot at Scottsdale Fashion Square, Society Swan is envisioned by Fox as an upscale “American brasserie” with gastropub-style dining on the bottom floor and a swank, high-energy lounge on the street-level mezzanine. It’s also FRC’s first original full-service restaurant since Fox famously sold his majority stake to The Cheesecake Factory for $353 million in 2019. Thus, it represents something of a milestone for both the company and its founder, who helped energize Arizona’s modern culinary landscape with restaurants like Zinburger, The Henry, True Food Kitchen, Flower Child, Olive & Ivy and The Greene House.
Besides giving the FRC team a new toy to play with (“The old stuff pays for the new stuff, and the new stuff gives back to the old stuff,” he says), the restaurant offers an intriguing self-challenge: Does Fox still have the old magic?
It may surprise some casual industry watchers that Fox still has his hands on the levers at FRC – because his hands have famously been busy doing other things. After the Cheesecake Factory buyout, he partnered with Justin Timberlake to open The Twelve Thirty Club, a lavish, music-driven supper club in Nashville. After that, he dived into his biggest venture to date: building a luxury hotel from the ground up with The Global Ambassador in East Phoenix.
“Yeah, that’s my side hustle,” he laughs.
And then there was the extraordinary sum of his buyout, which – to us outsiders – seemed to put a final, chapter-closing exclamation point on his FRC story. Not so. Per the terms of his Cheesecake Factory deal, the Tucson native remains CEO of the company and continues to guide its long-term strategy.
For much of the last six years, that meant opening more locations of The Henry – like, a slew of them. In addition to the original location on Camelback Road and 44th Street, which also houses FRC’s corporate offices and test kitchen, the company has 11 locations of the all-day, Gatsby-toned restaurant in six states, either up and running or in advanced development. The Henry on Coronado Island in San Diego, where Fox and his family bought a summer home five years ago, is now “pound for pound, the most profitable restaurant” in the FRC portfolio, he says with a touch of pride.
Scaling out The Henry was not the original intention, Fox says. “I would say the public gets to decide if we get to do another [location], right? Not me, because if we open one up and it’s a flop, we’re not gonna do another one. But if the community says, ‘Well, we love you, we’re supporting you,’ then [we] say, ‘OK, let’s try and do another one.’
“And, you know, just because you do two doesn’t mean three is going to work, either.
Sometimes [a restaurant] is successful for maybe reasons that you can’t duplicate.”
Fueled by its furiously reproducing Henrys, FRC was expanding at an adequate pace and didn’t particularly need new concepts. But that mindset shifted when Fox’s contacts with the Fashion Square leasing team reached out to him last year. “I knew they were doing a giant remodel and adding on all the restaurants there in the porte-cochère,” he says, referring to the covered valet area on the mall’s south end, where Kona Grill, Z’Tejas and Yard House joined to form a formidable nightlife nexus in the early 2000s. “They came to me and said, ‘Hey, we have a void.’”
The revitalized porte-cochère already had Élephante, the scene-y Modern Mediterranean restaurant from California-based Wish You Were Here Group, in the fold. Another Los Angeles restaurant, seafood-steakhouse hybrid Catch, soon signed on, as did mega-popular Taiwanese dim sum chain Din Tai Fung, due to open in early 2026. For the old Z’Tejas spot next door to Kona Grill, the mall was about to sign yet another Los Angeles import, tapas sensation Telefèric Barcelona.
So, what void needed filling for Fox’s mall friends? “They [wanted] an everyday American grill, Henry-like restaurant that can get used by everybody every single day. The [other] restaurants they have going in there are great, but maybe more special-occasion.”
Not keen on doing a Henry clone, Fox artfully twisted the concept.
“I presented this American brasserie idea to them,” he says, using the French word for a restaurant serving simple but well-crafted food alongside expansive drink options. “It would be a little fancier than just a typical grill, just a little more polished and with more flair to it. And that’s how we came up with Society Swan.”
The name was the invention of the FRC creative team, who accepted their CEO’s directive to find a name that was “70 percent American and had a 30 percent European-French influence, which is how the menu is going to read.”
Following the most French thing in America – the Statue of Liberty – down a rabbit hole, the team stumbled upon the existence of a small island on the river Seine that has its own, 37-foot replica of Lady Liberty. The name of the island: Île aux Cygnes, or “Island of the Swans.”
Voilà. FRC added “society” to give the name some Gilded Age élan, recalling an era “in New York when an empowered group of women ruled society there.” It also plays against the ’60s-era “swans” admired by writer Truman Capote – wealthy, whippet-thin New York socialites leading secret lives of scandal and debauchery.
The design and look of Society Swan will similarly harken to a different era. Entering from inside the mall, visitors will pass under a vintage 17th-century swan chandelier into a 253-seat bistro-style dining room done in Art Deco floral booths and ceiling coffers, with a traditional bar on the side and a display kitchen in back. Two sets of stairs lead up to the mezzanine lounge – one for the day, the other for after-dinner hours – and here’s where design firm Smith Hanes will really cook.
“As you elevate and go up the stairs, you walk into this really moody, over-the-top design, with [a] lot of different material changes,” Fox says. “I’m typically sort of conservative in that way, but we let everyone go a little bit wild.”
Gone is the legendary Kona Grill patio. “Too much car exhaust,” Fox explains reasonably.
In its place: an enclosed lounge with a sightline-friendly center bar and marble floors, with just a bit of carpet “because we have this incredible sound system in there.”
Borrowing a page from The Henry, there will be copious banquettes, and barside finishes done in gold to complete the period effect.
“Over each table, we’ll have a light with a mirror picture frame in tile, and then nice tile details with brass dividers in between,” says FRC senior creative director Richard Cassey during a hard-hat tour of the property, driving home the baroqueness.
But Society Swan will not be priced lavishly in kind, Fox promises. Inside the lounge, he envisions a play-all-day ethos where lunch and happy hour are basically indistinguishable, and cocktails are priced like it’s 2010. “We’re leaning really, really heavy into cocktails,” he says. “It used to be weird to go somewhere [and] pay more than $10 for a cocktail. That was only 15 years ago. So, we’re gonna lean in with an amazing happy hour, and cocktails will be 10 and 12 dollars.”
The idea is to recapture some of the youthful energy – and youthful disposable income – of the Kona Grill years. Except, instead of dollar-watching Gen Xers, they’re dollar-watching Gen Zers.
“It’s gonna be pretty incredible,” Fox says of Fashion Square’s emerging porte-cochère hospitality hub. “Din Tai Fung just opened a store in New York and is absolutely killing it. Telefèric Barcelona has a beautiful restaurant up in San Francisco, and I think they’ll be a great complement to us as well. Élephante is always busy. It’s amazing, the culinary transformation that’s happened at the mall.”
Fox knows that if Society Swan is going to be a meaningful fixture in that transformation, the food will have to be dialed in.
Per Fox’s vision, the near-completed prototype menu presented at the test-kitchen tasting casts a wide Modern American net – gastropub-style hors d’oeuvres, a tidy raw bar and sushi selection, showpiece salads and sandwiches, and an efficient artillery of protein-driven entrées. All in all, it seems like the kind of menu from which an exhausted shopper – or a spouse, preferring to sit out the afternoon’s retail odyssey – might gladly order. “Maybe that person wants a burger, so we want to have [the area’s] best burger,” Fox says.
But there are also intriguing, impressionistic flairs of French cuisine on the prototype menu, including a starter calling for “burnt mornay” and another with “roasted garlic custard.” After the crispy zucchini comes another hors d’oeuvre: tuna poke ferried on little, bize-size rafts of crispy rice, drizzled with yuzu honey and sprinkled with sesame seeds. More chewy than crispy, the rice adds texture and toastiness to the ubiquitous raw tuna dish, and it’s splendid – a lit-up mission control board of urgently pleasing flavors.
Next come star-shaped duck rangoon wontons, a play on the classic tiki nibbles that are just as tasty as they sound, though Fox wants the final restaurant versions to include cream cheese. And then: Society Swan’s lobster roll – a perfect, plump portion of broiled lobster tail, seasoned with Old Bay and set on a buttered brioche roll with pickled onions and a flash of celery leaf. Everyone loves it, but Fox is not super-stoked with the preliminary $31 price tag.
“Did we price it out?” he asks.
Woods assures him he did. A 20-year fixture at FRC – beginning with Zin Café, the precursor to Zinburger – Woods is clearly granted indulgences the average executive chef might not get, serving as the company’s chief culinary officer. He pushes back on some things, accepts others, all with the steely, upbeat confidence of a battlefield colonel.
“Clint and I are brothers and good friends and co-workers, but we fight a lot,” Fox says happily.
After a handful of other savory dishes – including fillet of sole, draped in tomato-shrimp butter and poached rosette-style to resemble a pinwheel, so delicate and rustic – the meal ends with a Moelleux au Chocolat cake that Fox and his team worry might be too gooey, but which makes me want to buy a wedding ring.
The meal concludes. Feedback is processed, pans and plates are sent to the back, Fox gets ready to hop over to The Global Ambassador to handle other business.
Now that the hotel is underway, Fox is concepting again. And one senses it’s his natural state.
“As we grow our brands around the country, when we do new stuff, I always take it as an opportunity to learn,” he says. “I love learning new things… learning new design and new cocktails and new uniforms and new music.
“To stay relevant, you need to stay creative.”
