Drive east on Pinnacle Peak Road past The Citadel and the windows have been dark for the better part of a year. Preston's Steakhouse ran that space for more than a decade before it closed, citing the condition of the building and the repairs it would take to keep going. For anyone who has lived near that corner, the silence has been the strange part. A decade-old steakhouse with a loyal following doesn't usually just go quiet. Something has to replace it, and whatever moves in tells you something about what the neighborhood actually wants now, not what it wanted in 2015.
The answer arriving this fall is not a new steakhouse in the old sense. It's three businesses sharing one building, and the reasoning behind that split says more about how Pinnacle Peak residents actually eat than any single restaurant announcement would.
The problem wasn't the steak
Sheila Bryson, founder and CEO of Soul Hospitality Group, is moving her restaurant Alma out of Old Town Scottsdale and into the old Preston's address at 8700 E. Pinnacle Peak Road, with an opening targeted for October 1 and a fallback into early November if construction runs long. Bryson already runs four other concepts in the Valley, including Soul Café, Vic & Ola's, Pescada, and Little Snitch, so this isn't a first-time operator guessing at what a neighborhood wants. It's someone who has built a career reading exactly that.
What she's building at The Citadel is not a like-for-like replacement for Preston's. It's a Southwest-inspired steakhouse built around wood-fired cooking and flavors from Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Northern Mexico, paired with a rooftop lounge called Copper Club and a separate tequila and mezcal bar serving tastings alongside chef-made tacos and small plates. Guests can move between all three spaces off the same menu, whether they came for a full dinner, a rooftop cocktail, or nothing more than a taco and a pour of mezcal on a Tuesday.
That structure is the tell. Preston's asked for a two-hour commitment: you booked a table, you ordered a steak dinner, you left. Bryson has been direct about not wanting to rebuild that.
"It's going to be a steakhouse as they've never seen. You can just have a taco and tapas if you want. It'll be fun and laid back without feeling like a stuffy steakhouse."
Copper Club isn't even a new idea for the property. Bryson briefly opened it as an event space right before COVID hit and never got the chance to really use it. Bringing it back as a live music rooftop is her answer to something she says customers have been asking for directly, and it's also a signal that the old single-entrance model at that address had already stopped working before the pandemic ever forced the issue.
Three doors into one building
The practical shift for anyone who lives nearby is that the same address now has three different reasons to show up, not one:
- The steakhouse, for the occasion that still calls for a real dinner reservation and a wood-fired cut.
- Copper Club, the rooftop lounge, for a drink with a view and live music without committing to a full meal.
- The tequila and mezcal bar, for a taco and a flight on a random Wednesday, no reservation required.
None of those three requires the others. That's the entire point. Preston's had one door and one use case. The Citadel is being rebuilt to have three, which means the building can now absorb a Tuesday night regular and a Saturday anniversary dinner without either one feeling like the wrong kind of visit.
The same bet, a few miles down Bell Road
If Alma's redesign were an isolated move, it would just be one operator's opinion. It isn't isolated. A few miles away at McDowell Mountain Marketplace, near Bell Road and Thompson Peak Parkway, a restaurant called Heritage Kitchen + Cocktails opened in October 2025 in the space that used to hold Wandering Donkey Taqueria, and it was built by two people making a version of the same bet Bryson is making now.
Executive chef and co-owner Christopher Brugman trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Hollywood, worked alongside Gordon Ramsay and David LeFevre, and led kitchens at Mountain Shadows Resort and Castle Hot Springs before deciding to open something of his own. He's a Chopped finalist and has been featured in Food & Wine and James Beard's Taste America series, so the resume is not the question. His co-owner Eric Greenwald spent three decades in Valley restaurants, including leadership roles at Mastro's and Grimaldi's, and owns Lorenzo's Italian Kitchen in north Scottsdale along with several ProteinHouse locations. Both men live in north Scottsdale, and Brugman has said the goal from the start was building something for the neighborhood he already calls home rather than chasing visitors passing through.
The menu runs coastal Mediterranean, drawing on Brugman's own family roots in Asturias on Spain's northern coast, filtered through a modern American lens: fresh pastas, wood-fired pizzas, grilled octopus, a 350-bottle wine cellar built to stand up to that kind of food. None of that overlaps with what Alma is doing at Pinnacle Peak. What overlaps is the underlying assumption. Neither restaurant is betting on someone driving in from a resort for a once-a-quarter special occasion. Both are betting on a resident who will come back on a normal Tuesday, because the operators live in the same zip codes their customers do and built accordingly.
Two operators making the identical structural bet within a few miles of each other, in the same year, is not a coincidence. It's a read on how people who already live along this stretch of North Scottsdale actually eat now: more often, in smaller units, without needing every visit to be an event.
What this actually changes if you live out here
None of this requires a decision from you. It just changes what's available on an ordinary week. If Alma holds its October 1 target, or slips into early November as Bryson has said is possible depending on construction, that gives Pinnacle Peak a rooftop lounge with live music where there wasn't one before, plus a walk-in tequila bar that doesn't ask for a reservation. Heritage Kitchen has already been open for months at McDowell Mountain Marketplace if you haven't tried it yet, and the same low-commitment logic applies there: a patio seat and a plate of octopus doesn't require the full prix fixe experience some of us assumed North Scottsdale dining only came in one size.
The corridor along Pinnacle Peak and Scottsdale Road spent years being built around the assumption that people were driving in from somewhere else for a special night out. What's opening this fall is built around the opposite assumption: that the people eating here live here, and they'll be back next week whether or not it's anyone's anniversary.
If you're the kind of person who tracks what's actually changing in the neighborhood you live in, rather than what a listing photo makes it look like, that's the read worth carrying into fall. The building didn't need a new steakhouse. It needed a version of itself that matched how the people around it actually spend a Tuesday.
Hoyt Homes Group keeps this kind of local detail close because it's part of how we understand North Scottsdale beyond the median price. If you're curious what a changing corridor like this one means for what your home is worth right now, get your instant home valuation and we'll walk you through it.
