“It’s gonna be high-level fun.”
Maynard James Keenan is seated across from executive chef Brett Vibber under one of several sushi ninja prints that line the walls at Queen B Sushi in Cottonwood sharing his vision for a business set to open on Labor Day weekend.
It’s the legendary rocker’s latest dining venture in a Verde Valley city whose population in 2020 was 12,029.
The Arizona winemaker who lives a short distance away in Jerome when he isn’t off touring the country as the voice of Tool, A Perfect Circle and Puscifer, opened Merkin Vineyards Hilltop Winery & Trattoria to well-deserved fanfare in late 2023.
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A year later, the Grammy-winning singer and his wife, Jen Keenan, relocated Puscifer the Store, a business they’d been running in Jerome, to 102 E. Pima St. in Old Town Cottonwood as the rebranded Queen B Vinyl Café.
Now, he’s set to open Queen B Sushi at 816 N. Main St., a very short walk from the Vinyl Café, in a building he already owned that previously housed his Four Eight Wineworks.
“High-level fun” is the throughline that connects these ventures.
“If you’re gonna get the cacio e pepe at the Hilltop or the gnocchi, it’s gonna be some of the best you’ve ever had,” Keenan says.
“Are you gonna listen to Poison and Ratt or some B-52s while you’re having your pasta? Yeah. There’s fun, eccentric playlists everywhere. Jen has amazing bands coming through that cafe. It’s serious. A serious vinyl collection for your purchase, a serious menu. The ramen is incredible. The barber is one of the best barbers you’ll ever go to. But it’s fun. Trattoria, Queen B Vinyl, Queen B Sushi, all of it’s gonna be high-level fun.”
Queen B Sushi began as sushi pop-up nights at Queen B Vinyl Cafe
The Queen B Sushi concept began as a series of sushi pop-up nights at Queen B Vinyl Café.
“We kind of tested it over there,” Keenan says.
“Jen and I were trying to figure out what we could do special at the cafe. We wanted a nice special menu, and we always wanted to add ramen, but we had completely dismissed the idea of sushi because it’s like, ‘I don’t know a sushi chef, and I don’t know how we’re gonna get a sushi chef to come to Cottonwood. But, you know, ramen makes sense.’ We just needed to figure out ‘Who does ramen?’”
Keenan was surprised to learn that Vibber, the executive chef overseeing the menu at Hilltop Trattoria, Queen B Vinyl Café and Keenan’s food trucks, does ramen.
“And he does sushi,” Keenan says. “We didn’t know that. When we first put ramen on the menu over there, he goes, ‘Hear me out. Let’s do a Friday sushi menu to show you what I can do, to show you what’s possible.’ And it was great.”
Queen B Vinyl Café hosted its first sushi pop-up in October 2025.
“It was an extremely busy night of dinner service for me because I’m the only one that was in the company at that point doing it,” Vibber says. “We filled up the entire dining room and the entire patio about seven minutes after we opened.”
Worried that it may have been a fluke due to the scarcity of sushi in the area, they tried again.
“The same thing happened,” Vibber says. “That’s when we thought, ‘OK, now we can start being serious about this being something because that was the the locals you depend on, right? The tourists come and go. But the locals are really, in these small markets, what makes your restaurant not hurt in the seasons that the tourists aren’t here.”
The appeal of a quality sushi place in Cottonwood was obvious to Keenan, who lives nearby.
“They just don’t have this here,” he says. “You have to either drive to Village of Oak Creek or down to Phoenix to get decent sushi. I think there’s probably something in Flagstaff.”
Although the concept got its start at those pop-ups, the Vinyl Café wasn’t set up for sushi.
“That’s not the kitchen,” Keenan says. “But here, we could fix this place and make it so it’s perfect for that concept. My only instruction to him was ‘Find somebody better at it than you.’ He’s great at it, but ‘Find somebody who’s been doing it forever and that way, you can oversee them.’”
They found exactly what they need in executive chef Thomas Kato — whose 30 years of experience includes alongside culinary icons Nobu Matsuhisa, Masaharu Morimoto and Katsuya Uechi — and assistant chef Sheridan Chase.
Trattoria’s executive chef has a deep background in Japanese cuisine
The first year Vibber worked for Keenan, the Trattoria commanded their attention.
“We were so busy having opened the big restaurant that we probably didn’t talk about the fact that Italian is a big part of my past, but Japanese was just as big, if not bigger,” Vibber says.
“The task at hand when I first got here was to make sure the Italian restaurant was up and going. And as time went on, we started talking about sushi and Japanese cuisine, his love for it, my love for it, the fact that I’d been trained in it, and then finding the guy that can do it day in and day out at a very high level, which we did.”
Keenan loved the idea of trying again in the space that once housed Four Eight Wineworks.
“I mean, I had a choice,” he says. “I own the building. I could either sell it or do something fun in it. Let’s do something fun in it.”
The fact that Four Eight Wineworks had failed to find an audience in that space was of no concern to Keenan.
“You know, there’s a wine bar you’re competing with, the Trattoria, right up there,” he says.
“So you couldn’t really pull it off here. Everyone wants to go up there for the view. But like I said, I own the building. I tried some concepts here. But I feel like this is the one that fits. And I’m OK with failing. If I get it wrong, I’ll start over. So this is me starting over, having learned from my mistakes.”
Keenan and Vibber take great pride in their commitment to the culinary culture they’ve been nurturing at the Trattoria and Queen B Vinyl Café, which they have every reason to believe will carry over to their latest venture.
“We’ve been fortunate enough the last couple of years to build a really talented culinary program and team of culinarians that run the Hilltop,” Vibber says.
“We’ve just really worked diligently the last two-and-a-half, three years. My main thing is not who can make the fanciest looking food. It’s who has the heart of a teacher, because we have almost 100 cooks in this company, and we have to teach them.”
It’s been a true joy, Keenan says, to watch some of these young cooks grow into the role they now inhabit.
“As you know, this is a small area,” Keenan says.
“Imagine what it was like in Cave Creek before Binkley showed up. He was probably getting people from Taco Bell like we were. They don’t know that food is more than moving it from here to here. There’s like a whole thing. So watching the faces of these guys at the Trattoria light up when they realize, ‘Oh, I think I love and understand the beginnings of my career in culinary.’ All of a sudden, the light bulb goes off.”
They have two sous chefs working for them now who started with the company in high school.
“They’re 21 now, and they’re sous chefs because they bought in,” Vibber says.
“They listened. They learned the basics in the beginning. That restaurant’s so big, it’s like a culinary school. At different times of the year, I have 45 or 50 cooks on the schedule because 15 or 20 are working at one time to push out 1,000 or 1,200 people on a Saturday. It matches the biggest restaurants I’ve ever managed and operated or owned. But those were in Chicago, San Francisco, Rome, big cities where you’re drawing from a huge wealth of knowledge.”
Queen B will complement its sushi with locally sourced wine and produce
Most of the food in their restaurants has been locally sourced.
“Between mushrooms, tomatoes, shisos, basil, we grow as much as we possibly can,” Vibber says. “So it’s different. It’s different going to a really good Italian restaurant that gets really good eggs from someone and gets the best local flour. We get our flour milled in Phoenix. We raise our own ducks for our own duck eggs.”
Queen B Sushi obviously won’t be growing its own seafood, but Vibber will be taking that same care to make sure it’s the best available.
“I’ve worked with the guys that provide a lot of our seafood,” he says. “I’ve worked on their boats. I’ve used their seafood for 20 years in Japanese restaurants and in my own restaurants.”
The culinary culture they’ve been nurturing is how they’re able to recruit a chef with the experience and talent Kato brings to Queen B Sushi.
“The things that are provided in this company as far as cooking goes are something every good chef dreams about,” Vibber says.
“You have farms, you have greenhouses, you have a winemaker for an owner. You have all these things I chased down like a dog for years and years — good local farmers, good local chickens and eggs. The chefs attract good cooks to work for them. The managers attract good managers. It’s starting to become like a big city where it’s like, ‘Hey, go grab the stack of resumes. I know there’s, like, 15 good cooks in there.’”
That all goes a long way toward defining what your patrons get from the experience.
“There are only probably three or four other restaurants in North America that have this much farming backing them up,” Vibber says.
“And I mean, you’re talking Stone Barns in New York. You’re talking some very serious things. And that’s the message for me to convey not only to our guests, but to our employees — that this is a special place. If I’ve been doing this for 30 years all around the world and I’ve become the happiest in this place, maybe take note of that.”
Extending the Queen B brand (and Keenan’s logo) was the logical choice
Extending the Queen B brand to the new venture seemed like a perfectly logical move for Keenan.
“It just made sense that this is a sister location,” Keenan says. “Branding makes sense. We can use the licensing for sake. It’s the same license over there. And the conversation was Jen and I talking about sushi and all of a sudden, this guy raised his hand going ‘I can do that.’”
Keenan hand-designed the Queen B logos for both businesses, handing his designs off to people he says “are way better than I am” to finish it off.
“Initially, I’d taken the Puscifer character and turned her into a food ninja,” he says.
“That was the original logo, with her horns done up like that, but in an apron, holding a fork and knife behind her. That was the original logo. Then I took it to professionals to go, ‘OK, give me 12 different poses of this person with sushi, with rolls.”
There will be a distinct local flavor to the offerings at Queen B Sushi.
“You can expect really high-quality, traditionally prepared ingredients through the scope of an Arizona lens,” Vibber says. “We have so much good produce in Arizona and so much good wild food, indigenous food that there’s always a way for a chef to tweak his sushi to make it unique to this location.”
At the end of the day, though, it’s sushi.
“We’re not reinventing the wheel on quality sushi, but it is going to be quality sushi,” Keenan says.
“We’re not gonna give you a bunch of silly made-up rolls. It’s gonna be some amazing traditional stuff with the twist of it being partly there’s some local ingredients attached to it. And it’s gonna be fun. It’s gonna be a fun vibe. Casual but serious. What we’re doing behind that bar is serious. What we’re putting in your drinks and the bottles, that’s serious. But you’re gonna have fun.”
How Maynard James Keenan found himself in Cottonwood
Keenan also has another venture on the way in Cottonwood, a gin project called 13 Moons.
“We’re switching over what was the fried chicken place to a gin project in that old building,” he says. “We’re still waiting for the glass to come in.”
He still has his Caduceus Cellars and Merkin Vineyards Tasting Room in Jerome. And he’s looking at a place in Scottsdale to open another Caduceus tasting room.
As to the appeal of having all these business in Cottonwood?
“Well, compared to Jerome, there’s parking,” he says, with a laugh.
“That’s literally the biggest thing is that it actually has parking. But the person who really tipped it down here was Eric Jurisin, who has the Haunted Hamburger in Jerome. Eric put in the Tavern and Nic’s across the street. Then he ended up doing Crema and his wife did Pizzeria Bocce. Eric was the one that came down here and bought the building you buy for a dollar and turned it into an actual destination restaurant. That was the tipping point.”
Keenan mentions Eden and Aqui as other examples of Cottonwood’s thriving dining culture.
“That’s why we’re here,” Keenan says. “Because we can mold it. There’s no preconceptions of what is here. We can raise the bar without anybody trying to drag us back down to Kentucky Fried Chicken. Nothing wrong with KFC. I’m just sayin’.”
Vibber sees what’s happening in Cottonwood as very similar to all the upscale restaurants that sprouted up around the wineries in the Willamette Valley, the Russian River Valley, Napa, and Sonoma.
“Forty years ago, Jerome was next to no one left there and Cottonwood was boarded up on Main Street,” Vibber says.
“And I know that because I grew up an hour and a half from here (in Scottsdale) and this was approaching a ghost town. That definitely was. And between Eric and Maynard and some of these other winemakers, this is not the Cottonwood that I remember growing up in Arizona. It’s become a destination. If you have a destination that’s established off of good wines, well you’d better match it with some good food.”
Reporting by Ed Masley, Arizona Republic
