Our Story
How Depwah began, and who builds it.
I am a creator of beauty.
It is what I have always done, in whatever form was in front of me. A room. A table. A morning. A home.
I feel beauty in waves, most often in the smallest details. The weight of a glass. The way light falls across a room in the late afternoon. The moment a piece of music changes a conversation. I feel it, I see what it could become, and I build it.
Depwah is the fullest expression of that.
I created it to hold people.
Beauty is at the center of everything I make. Colors, textures, presentation, architecture, flowers. I love all of it. But the deepest beauty is the why behind something's creation, and for Depwah, that why is love.
Love gives something depth. It nourishes, inspires, heals, and enchants. It turns something visually beautiful into something you can feel. And when you feel it, it stays with you.
Beauty is not the aesthetic of Depwah. Beauty is the consequence of its why.
I come from a lineage where food is language, where the table is sacred, and meals carry what cannot always be spoken aloud. My grandmother, born in Vietnam, loved that way. She taught me that a meal could comfort you, heal something, say what words could not. I have carried that into everything I have made since.
I don't believe extraordinary flavor has to come at the expense of beautiful presentation, or that luxury has to compromise sustainability, or that thoughtful sourcing has to diminish pleasure. There is room for all of it.
Depwah is Vietnamese soul and French romance, born from intuition and built with intention. I don't think of it as a restaurant. I think of it as a world, and it is still expanding.
Heather Restrepo
Founder and Creative Director
Provisions is here now. Fridays and Saturdays.
French born and Michelin trained, Remy Lefebvre earned his first Michelin star at twenty five, in Barcelona. The years that followed took him through Qatar, Lebanon, India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Grand Cayman and Florida before Arizona. More than eighteen restaurants opened along the way, one of them named by CNN Travel among the best new restaurants in the world.
A career spent that far from home teaches a cook to enter a cuisine rather than adjust it to himself. It is the reason French technique and Vietnamese cooking meet in his hands without either giving way.
"Good cooking is a series of small decisions few people notice. The temperature of the butter, the land where the fruit was harvested, the hand that crafts the dish. French technique taught me the rules, Vietnamese cooking taught me the culture. Everything we make at Depwah sits harmoniously between the two."
At Depwah he leads the culinary direction across every part of the house. The menus taking shape for Old Town Scottsdale will be seasonal and ingredient led, rooted in Heather Restrepo's Vietnamese heritage and shaped by French technique. He describes the cooking as honest, cultural, respectful, and above all, tasty.
Remy Lefebvre
Head of Culinary
Who builds it
Maurice Murillo
Café Beverage Director
Twenty years in hospitality and a former partner in craft coffee and cocktail rooms across Scottsdale and Phoenix. He is building the café around Vietnamese coffee and ceremonial matcha.
John Sofio
Built, Inc. · Interior Design
Architect and designer. Through Built, Inc. in Los Angeles he shaped Delilah, The Nice Guy, Keys and Petite Taqueria, carrying each from concept through construction.
With Gratitude
Kathleen O'Mara, who built the operational foundation of Depwah.
