Beef Eaters Restaurant in Uptown Phoenix
Photos by Dan Semenchuk
Story by Alison King
in 1961, Jay Newton built the Beef Eaters restaurant to "house everything I ever dreamt of in a great restaurant". Yet after decades of serving Valley residents, the Beef Eaters restaurant on West Camelback Road now stands vacant. The current owners sought Modern Phoenix's help this spring to bring this unique property's presence to light. Since then, several groups have visited the space and even set up a charette to determine future uses that would benefit the community. This property is currently on the market, and the current owners seek a buyer with vision to transform this unique property into a venue the community can appreciate. A Facebook group helps connect those concerned with its future.
While it is not within the genre of midcentury modernism that Modern Phoenix typically reports on, Beef Eaters is a locally unique postmodern simulacrum of what an old English mansion in the desert might look like, and is in perfect alignment with creating the experimental dining fantasies like its peers such as Green Gables (no longer with us). One could even see Beef Eaters as an early precursor to such classic 1970s chains as TGI Friday's and the Lunt Avenue Marble Club (no longer with us) where the veneer of authenticity has been entirely fabricated. The primary difference might be that the English memorabilia was collected by the owners through visits to Great Britain.
Parties interested in the Beef Eaters property are encouraged to contact SaveBeefEaters@gmail.com
