What it is
Hanny’s is a bar and restaurant in the former Hanny’s men’s clothing store at the corner of 1st and Adams Streets in downtown Phoenix. The building is the reason to know about it: a 1947 International Style store by Royal Lescher and Leslie Mahoney, the local firm behind the Orpheum Theatre and the old Phoenix Motor Company showroom, with the glass walls and clean vertical lines that made its opening, in the words of a newspaper of the day, an archetypal divergence for a downtown of brick and awnings. The store closed in 1986. The city bought the empty building and used it for years as a place to train firefighters, which left its mark. In 2005 Karl Kopp, a Milwaukee restaurateur and property owner whose family business is Kopp’s Frozen Custard, acquired it and turned it into what it is now: a two-level room of thin-crust pizza, sandwiches, salads and classic cocktails, with a mezzanine looking down the length of the old sales floor, a few deliberately odd rooms, and a kitchen that serves late.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Not for the pizza alone, which is good and not the point. For the room, and for the fact that downtown Phoenix’s events, a Suns game two blocks east, a Diamondbacks game four blocks south, a show at the Orpheum or Symphony Hall, all end in the same question of where to eat, and this is the answer that stays open. Scottsdale lost nearly all of its midcentury commercial buildings, as our lost midcentury Scottsdale note mourns; Hanny’s is what it looks like when a city keeps one and lets a restaurant live in it. It is also, with Bitter & Twisted two blocks south, half of downtown’s best two-stop evening.
The practical version
Open seven days: lunch and dinner Tuesday through Friday from 11:30, dinner only Saturday through Monday from 5, until midnight or 1 AM, kitchen late. No reservations needed except around games and shows, when the room fills from 5:30. Two blocks from the Washington and Central light rail stop. Twenty-four minutes from Old Town. Moderate prices; two people eat and drink for the cost of one Scottsdale steakhouse entrée.
When to go
Any month; this is an indoor room in a glass building, and it is as good in July as January, arguably better, since downtown’s summer nights are empty and the room is yours. The schedule to watch is the arena’s and the ballpark’s: on a Suns or Diamondbacks night, the hour before the game is standing room and the hour after is a second wave, with the kitchen still open. On a non-event weeknight at 7 the room is calm and you can sit where you like. Weekday lunch, Tuesday through Friday, is a quiet way to see the building in daylight, when the glass does what the architects intended.
What to order
Pizza, thin and blistered, two for a table of three, and a salad to pretend. The sandwiches are for lunch. The cocktail list is classics made properly, which in a city of themed cocktail menus is a relief; order a Manhattan or a Negroni and judge the bar on that. There is beer and wine for the people who want them. Prices are downtown-fair rather than Scottsdale-resort.
With kids
Early in the evening, yes; it is a restaurant with pizza and a mezzanine that children find exciting, and the oddities of the building are a scavenger hunt. After 9 it is a bar. The bathrooms will produce questions.
The neighborhood
The historic core, where downtown’s surviving 1920s-to-1940s buildings cluster: the Hotel San Carlos two blocks north on Central, the Luhrs Building and Bitter & Twisted two blocks south, the Orpheum four blocks west, Symphony Hall two blocks east, the arena beyond it. A visitor can do the whole district on foot in an evening with Hanny’s as the dinner stop, and should.
The story
Hanny’s opened on November 22, 1947, and the Arizona Times recognized at once that something had changed on Adams Street: a men’s clothing store in a glass-and-steel box with no ornament, designed by Royal Lescher and Leslie Mahoney, whose firm had spent the previous two decades giving Phoenix its Spanish Baroque Orpheum and its Art Deco office blocks and now turned, like the rest of American architecture, to the International Style. For nearly forty years the store was where the Valley’s men bought good suits. It closed in 1986, in the same decade that downtown Phoenix emptied of retail entirely, and after a short vacancy the city bought the building and put it to a use that would make a preservationist wince: a training ground for firefighters, who practiced in its stairwells and on its floors for years.
Karl Kopp found it in 2005. Kopp, whose family runs Kopp’s Frozen Custard in the Milwaukee area and who also owned Elsa’s on the Park there, bought the building and spent the following years converting it, keeping the glass, the structure and the proportions and adding the mezzanine, the long bar, a pizza kitchen and the rooms that people now talk about more than the food. The restaurant’s own history page does not give an opening date and we will not guess one. What Kopp made is the rare restaurant where the architecture is the brand, and downtown Phoenix, which had demolished most of its midcentury buildings by then, got one back.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale built its own International Style and midcentury commercial buildings in the same postwar years, along Scottsdale Road and in the shopping centers that came with the resorts, and has lost most of them; our lost midcentury note is the inventory. Hanny’s is the model Scottsdale rarely followed: a 1940s commercial building kept whole and given a second life as a restaurant rather than a parking lot. The city’s speakeasy-style bars borrow the idea of a room with a story; Hanny’s has the room and the story without having to pretend.
Getting there
From Old Town, west on McDowell Road to Central Avenue, south through downtown to Adams Street, then east one block to 1st Street; the restaurant is on the corner, with garages on the surrounding blocks priced for events. The Washington and Central light rail stop is two blocks south, which makes this an easy train trip from Tempe or the Camelback corridor stations; our getting around note has the schedule and the rideshare math, and the late-night food note covers what is open in Scottsdale when you get back, in case the pizza was not enough.