What it is
Bitter & Twisted is a cocktail bar on the ground floor of the Luhrs Building, the ten-story 1924 Beaux-Arts tower at the corner of Central Avenue and Jefferson Street at the south end of downtown Phoenix. The rooms it occupies once housed the office that enforced Prohibition in Arizona, a fact the bar prints on everything, and since it opened on May 30, 2014, it has become the cocktail bar in the metro that the national lists agree on: North America’s 50 Best Bars in 2022, Liquor.com’s best bars in America, Tales of the Cocktail’s top ten for both the world’s best cocktail menu and the best high-volume cocktail bar in the country. The menu is the thing people talk about, a thick spiral-bound book of original and classic drinks with illustrations, and the kitchen is a real one, with bar food, shareable plates and entrées until late.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Scottsdale has a lively hidden-bar scene, and our speakeasies note walks through it; it has good lounges like Second Story, and it has the bars on the nightlife circuit. What it does not have is a bar that national cocktail people rank with the best on the continent, and that bar is 25 minutes from Old Town, two blocks from the arena, in a 1924 building with a Prohibition joke built into the floor plan. If you take cocktails seriously, this is the one drink in the metro worth a drive, and it pairs with a game, a concert or a dinner downtown so that the drive is never for a drink alone.
The practical version
Open Tuesday through Saturday from 4 PM, until midnight on weeknights and 1 AM Friday and Saturday; closed Sunday and Monday. Happy hour Tuesday through Friday, 4 to 6. No reservations for small groups; the crush is before Suns games and after 8 on weekends. The entrance is on Jefferson at Central. The Jefferson and 1st Avenue light rail stop is two blocks west, which makes the train the right way to arrive if anyone is drinking the way the menu invites.
When to go
Tuesday through Thursday at 4, in any month. The happy hour is on, the room is quiet enough to read the book, and the bartenders have time to talk. Weekends after 8 are loud and good in a different way. Game nights are their own category: the Mortgage Matchup Center (the Suns arena, formerly Footprint Center) is two blocks east and Chase Field four, and from two hours before tipoff the bar is standing room; either come at opening and stay through, or come after the game when the first wave has left. Summer is fine; this is an indoor bar in a thick-walled old building, and downtown’s summer nights are empty of the winter crowds.
What to order
Read the book first. It is organized by mood and spirit rather than by category, and the drawings are half the fun. Pick something you have never heard of from the back half; the house originals are where the awards came from. If you want a classic, the classics are made exactly, which is rarer than it should be. Tell the bartender a spirit and a direction, bitter or bright or boozy, and let them choose if the book overwhelms. For food, the shareable plates carry a table of four through an evening, and the kitchen runs late on weekends, so a late dinner here after a show is realistic. The happy hour menu covers both.
With kids
No. It is a bar, and the whole premise is the drinks. Families downtown have Hanny’s two blocks north, which is a restaurant first and takes children early in the evening.
The neighborhood
The Luhrs block is the historic south end of downtown: the Luhrs Building and the 1929 Luhrs Tower beside it, the old city hall and county courthouse a block west, the arena two blocks east, the ballpark beyond that, and the Hotel San Carlos four blocks north on Central. Hanny’s, in the 1947 department store, is two blocks north on 1st Street and the natural second stop. On a night with a show at the Orpheum, three blocks west, the whole evening is on foot.
The story
George Luhrs was a Phoenix businessman old enough to have sat on the first city council in 1881. In 1923 he broke ground on a ten-story office building at Central and Jefferson, designed by Trost & Trost, the El Paso firm responsible for much of the Southwest’s best early-twentieth-century architecture, and when it opened in May 1924 it was the tallest building in Arizona, a distinction it held briefly before Phoenix’s building boom of the late 1920s overtook it. Luhrs added the Luhrs Tower next door in 1929. The buildings anchored downtown’s business district for decades, and among the tenants in the Luhrs Building’s ground floor was the office that enforced Prohibition in the state, which lasted in Arizona from 1915, five years ahead of the national ban, until repeal in 1933.
Downtown emptied in the second half of the century and the Luhrs block went quiet. The arena opened two blocks east in 1992 and the ballpark in 1998, the light rail in 2008, and the historic buildings started filling again. Bitter & Twisted opened in the old Prohibition rooms on May 30, 2014, with a cocktail menu printed as an illustrated book that was unlike anything in the state, and within a few years the national recognition followed: Liquor.com, Tales of the Cocktail, and in 2022 a place on the North America’s 50 Best Bars list. The Pinnacle Guide, the British cocktail-bar ratings, gave it two pins. It is still in the same rooms with the same joke on the door.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale’s cocktail scene learned from this bar. The hidden-door rooms that opened in Old Town through the late 2010s borrowed the menu-as-book idea, the house-syrup technique and more than one bartender, and the speakeasy conceit that Scottsdale leans on is a riff on the Prohibition theme that Bitter & Twisted lives inside literally. Our speakeasies note and happy hour guide are the Scottsdale side of the same conversation; this is where that conversation started.
Getting there
From Old Town, west on McDowell Road to Central Avenue, then south through downtown to Jefferson Street; the Luhrs Building is on the southwest corner and the bar’s door is on Jefferson. Garages on the surrounding blocks price for events, so on a game night expect to pay. The light rail stop at Jefferson and 1st Avenue is two blocks west, and the train is the right way to do a night of serious drinking downtown; our getting around note covers the schedule and the rideshare math back to Scottsdale.