Phoenix's 1950 Steakhouse, Reborn Under New Ownership
Durant's opened in 1950 under Jack Durant and spent seven decades as one of Phoenix's most recognizable special-occasion rooms, famous for its back-door-through-the-kitchen entrance and its unapologetic old-school register. The Mastro brothers took over in late 2025 after a closure earlier that year, and the early record from the reopening suggests they read the assignment correctly: the bones of the original room are intact while the execution has been sharpened. This is Midtown Phoenix, not a resort corridor, and the room carries that civic weight.
The Prime New York Strip is the anchor, and it performs as the menu's load-bearing item should at a high-end steakhouse with this much history to answer to. The Lobster Mac and Cheese sits in the serious comfort-food register that steakhouses of this era have always done well, richness dialed up without apology. The Chocolate Soufflé closes the meal at the same formal pitch the rest of the room sets, the kind of dessert that requires patience and rewards it.
Service reads as polished and attentive across the record, and the room runs full on big Phoenix calendar nights, the PHX Open crowd testing the new operation and finding it holds. The Mastro ownership brings a track record in high-end steakhouse operations across the Valley, and the transition here reads less like a reinvention than a recalibration, the same formal occasion-dining contract honored with tighter execution.
At this price point, Durant's is competing against Steak 44 and the other Mastro properties for the same expense-account and milestone-celebration dollar. The differentiator is the building itself and seventy-five years of institutional weight in a city that loses landmarks faster than it builds them. The back-door entrance is still there.
