What it is
Big Earl’s Greasy Eats is a burger and breakfast counter inside a 1930s Standard Oil gas station at the south end of the Cave Creek Road strip. The station was built near Sunnyslope, on the north edge of Phoenix, when gas cost about nineteen cents a gallon, and was trucked up to Cave Creek in the 1950s, where the Elrod brothers ran it as the town’s service station for decades. The canopy and the pumps are still out front, the interior kept its art deco lines when the kitchen went into the service bay, and the restaurant that took it over plays 1950s music on a loop and is said to be the last Standard Oil station still standing in Arizona.
The food is what the name promises. Burgers come in a third-pound or a half, as a double or a triple, with a veggie and a turkey patty for the reluctant; the Cave Creek BBQ Burger stacks onion rings, bacon and barbecue sauce. Breakfast, served from seven on weekends, is chicken-fried steak and eggs with homemade sausage gravy, a cowboy burrito of sausage, bacon and eggs, and deep-fried French toast. Milkshakes come two ways: the regular menu, where the peanut-butter shake is the one, and a separate list of boozy ones for the adults.
Brooke Dallas started here as an employee, bought the place from its previous owner in her mid-twenties and runs it with her husband Collin. She has said the look will never change, and it has not.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Not on its own; nobody drives forty minutes for a burger, even a good one. But a Cave Creek day needs a lunch that is cheap, fast, outdoors and fine for a seven-year-old, and this is it. Scottsdale’s burger counters, Rehab Burger Therapy included, are good; none of them has gas pumps, a road full of Harleys to watch and a lawn with a movie on it.
The practical version
Forty minutes from Old Town, on the right as Cave Creek Road enters town. Counter service, no reservations, a shaded patio on the road and a back yard with picnic tables. Open from seven on weekend mornings and nine on weekdays, to nine at night and later on Friday and Saturday. A family of four eats for what a resort charges for two salads.
When to go
Weekend breakfast before a hike. It opens at seven on Saturday and Sunday, which makes it the only proper breakfast between Scottsdale and the Spur Cross trailhead; eat, then drive the last ten minutes north to Spur Cross before the lot fills.
Weekday lunch is the quiet version: the patio to yourself, the bikes mostly gone, a burger and a shake in twenty minutes. Weekend lunch between noon and two is the busy one, and the busiest of all is during Arizona Bike Week in April, when the lot is motorcycles to the road.
Saturday nights are the sleeper. The back yard, which used to be a sand volleyball court, shows a movie after dark in the cooler months. Families eat on the lawn and stay. It is the best free evening in the north Valley and almost nobody from Scottsdale knows about it.
Summer: the patio is for mornings only, but the inside is air-conditioned, the shakes are the right answer to 108 degrees, and the station canopy throws real shade over the outdoor tables after four.
What to order
A single burger, with onion rings on it rather than beside it, is the right amount; the triple is a dare. At breakfast the chicken-fried steak and eggs is the one people drive for. The Big Kahuna chicken sandwich, with grilled pineapple and teriyaki mayonnaise, is the non-burger order. A peanut-butter shake to share, or a boozy one from the second list if you are not the driver.
With kids, and the neighborhood
This is the family stop in Cave Creek, in a town whose other restaurants are mostly saloons. Picnic tables, a lawn, gas pumps, 1950s music, a plain-burger menu, and a Saturday movie. Our Scottsdale with kids note has it as the lunch on the Cave Creek day. Frontier Town, with its gallows and shops, is a two-minute walk up the road; the Cave Creek guide has the rest of the strip.
The story
Standard Oil built filling stations across Arizona in the 1930s to a house style: a canopy over the pumps, a small office, a service bay, a little art deco in the trim. This one went up near Sunnyslope, then a tuberculosis colony and farm settlement north of Phoenix, and sold gas for about nineteen cents a gallon to the traffic heading up Cave Creek Road. In the 1950s the whole building was lifted and moved twenty miles north to Cave Creek, where a gas station was more useful, and the Elrod brothers ran it as the town’s service station for decades.
When the pumps finally stopped, the building did what the best old gas stations do and became a place to eat. The restaurant kept the canopy, the pumps, the deco interior and the service-bay proportions, named itself after a fictional greasy-spoon proprietor, and built a following on breakfast. By 2012 the then-owner wanted out and approached Brooke Dallas, a 24-year-old employee; she bought it two years later, in her mid-twenties, and has run it since with her husband Collin, adding the back lawn, the Saturday movies and the boozy milkshakes without touching the look. “I’ll never change it,” she told a Phoenix television station, and a 2025 national food site called it the quirkiest burger joint in Arizona, which is about right.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale has one surviving building of this vintage doing this job, the Sugar Bowl on Scottsdale Road, which has served ice cream in a 1958 pink room for sixty-odd years. Big Earl’s is the Cave Creek version of the same idea: a building from the first automobile age, left alone, serving the simplest food it can. Sunnyslope, where the station started, was also one of the health-seeker settlements that made the north Valley; the tubercular cabin at the Cave Creek Museum up the road tells that part.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road north to the Carefree Highway, west two miles to Cave Creek Road, north about two miles into town. Big Earl’s is on the right at the south end of the strip; look for the gas pumps under the canopy. Parking is in the lot beside the building and spills onto the dirt behind. Forty minutes from Old Town, twenty from the Pinnacle Peak resorts.