Tucson-born restauranteur Sam Fox leaves namesake company

Fox said Wednesday he is focusing his energy instead on the Phoenix-based Author & Edit Hospitality company that he launched four years ago to support his flagship hotel The Global Ambassador in east Phoenix.

“The majority of our business will hopefully be around the hotel business,” Fox said in a phone call from Nashville, Tennessee, where he was preparing to open … a new restaurant.

“I'm announcing that I'm leaving and getting out of the restaurant business, and here I am opening up a restaurant today in Nashville,” he said with a laugh. “It's kind of crazy.”

Restaurants actually play a role in his hotel ambitions.

The Global Ambassador, which he opened in late 2023, has four restaurants, including two upscale eateries: the French-inspired Le Âme Parisian Steakhouse and the Italian and Greek-leaning Théa Mediterranean Rooftop restaurant, which Condé Nast Traveler named to its 2024 list of "The Best New Hotel Restaurants in the World."

The restaurant business complements the hotel side of The Global Ambassador, where rooms can run more than $1,000 a night.

“I would say in Phoenix, the majority of our business comes from locals because we have four restaurants (and) the restaurants drive a lot of our traffic inside the hotel,” said Fox, whose hotel earned a Michelin Key — the hotel industry equivalent to the prestigious Michelin Star restaurant recognition — in 2024 and has retained it every year since.

Fox said he decided last year that he was leaving his company, which he sold to The Cheesecake Factory in 2019 for a reported $400 million, to “start all over again.”

“I get to sort of start from a very small place again, which I love,” he said. “As you grow and you get really, really big, you want to be like the little guy, and the little guy always wants to be like the big guy. And so I get to be the little guy again.”

Fox started his boutique restaurant company in Tucson when he opened Wildflower on Tucson’s northwest side in 1998. Within a decade, he had grown the company to a dozen restaurants, including North Italia, which opened in 2002, a year after he relocated his business to Phoenix.

Among the concepts that he ushered in were Sauce Pizza and Wine, which he sold in 2015 after growing it to nine locations; and True Food Kitchen, a collaboration with Dr. Andrew Weil that has a location in La Encantada mall.

“I feel very fortunate where I sit,” said Fox, whose family had been in the Tucson restaurant industry since the 1960s. “I never really had a plan. It sort of all happened organically. It was never like, ‘Hey, I'm going to go open 150 restaurants.’ … It just sort of evolved and took off, and one thing led to another and sort of blinking an eye, 28 years later, here I am.”

While Author & Edit’s primary focus is “to grow The Global Ambassador brand into a nationally recognized hotel company,” Fox said he also will “build a few restaurants along the way.”

Those include The Twelve|Thirty Club, a 30,000-square-foot three-story Nashville supper club that he opened in 2021 with pop star Justin Timberlake; and Au Cheval, the bar-diner collaboration with Chicago-based Hogsalt Hospitality that he opened Wednesday.

Fox is bringing The Twelve|Thirty Club to Austin, Texas, next September, months after Théa opens in Dallas early next year.