What it is
Organ Stop Pizza is a pizza restaurant in a hall that seats hundreds on Southern Avenue in Mesa, and the restaurant is the least of it. The building exists to house a Mighty Wurlitzer theater organ whose core was installed in the Denver Theatre in 1927 to accompany silent films, bought and rebuilt for this restaurant in 1975, and expanded ever since until it now runs to four manuals, 82 ranks and more than 6,000 pipes, the largest of them 32 feet long. The console rises out of the floor on a lift. The pipe chambers line the walls behind glass, lit so you can watch the shutters move, and around them hang the toys a theater organ was built with: drums, cymbals, xylophone, a glockenspiel, car horns, bird whistles and a bubble machine, all played from the keyboard.
An organist plays every night the restaurant is open, which is every night but two a year, starting half an hour after the doors. The set is standards, movie themes, show tunes, a Sousa march for the room, and requests on paper slips handed up to the console. The pizza is thin, standard and cheap, ordered at a counter and carried to long tables on a tray. Nobody has ever driven from Scottsdale for the pizza.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because there is nothing else like it within a day’s drive, and because it works on everyone. Grandparents remember the Phoenix original; parents remember being brought as children; children who have never heard a pipe organ sit transfixed when the console comes up out of the floor playing the theme from a movie they know. It is the one dinner in our kids note territory that needs no persuasion, and against everything in the live music note, the most reliable nightly show in the Valley is in a pizza parlor in Mesa.
The practical version
Thirty-two minutes from Old Town via the 101 and the 60 to Stapley. Doors around 4 PM on weekdays and 3:30 on weekends, dinner only. Order at the counter, find a table, write a request. Weekends have a line; weeknights do not. Allow two hours and sit in the middle of the room.
When to go
Weeknights are the local way: doors at four, no line, a quiet first set and a hall that fills slowly. Friday and Saturday are the full spectacle, with a line out the door at opening and every table taken by six; the line moves faster than it looks, and the room at capacity has an energy a Tuesday lacks. December brings carols and the East Valley’s visiting relatives; come early.
What to order
Pizza, obviously, and keep it simple: the cheese and the pepperoni are what the kitchen does best, and a large feeds a family. The salad bar is big and useful for the vegetables. Beer and wine are available. The food is inexpensive by any standard and arrives fast, which is the point; eat while the organist plays the first set.
The show
The organist works a set of about forty-five minutes, breaks, and plays again, through the evening. Listen for the things a theater organ does that a church organ cannot: the tuned percussion rail, the shutters opening on the chambers for a crescendo, the toy counter’s horns and whistles in a novelty number. Requests on the slips get played in order received, so write early. The second set, after the dinner rush, is usually the better music, when the organist plays for the people who stayed.
With kids
This is the best children’s dinner in the Valley and has been for fifty years. Pair it with Golfland Sunsplash, a few minutes west on the 60, for the classic Mesa family day, or with the air museum at Falcon Field in the afternoon.
The story
Pizza-and-pipe-organ restaurants were a national fad in the early 1970s, when theater organs pulled out of demolished movie palaces were cheap and a generation of organists who had grown up on them were looking for places to play. Bill Brown opened the first Organ Stop Pizza at Seventh Street and Missouri in Phoenix in 1972 and a second in Mesa, near Southern and Dobson, in 1975, and for the Mesa room he bought the Wurlitzer that had sat in the Denver Theatre since 1927, idle since the talkies, and had it rebuilt.
The fad faded everywhere else. Brown sold the Phoenix restaurant in 1984 to a developer who closed it, and the same year sold the Mesa one to its manager, Mike Everett, and his partner Brad Bishop. They did the opposite of what the market suggested: they kept the organists on nightly, kept adding ranks of pipes and percussion to the instrument, and in 1995 built a new hall a few miles east near Southern and Stapley, twice the size, with the pipe chambers designed around the organ rather than the organ squeezed into a restaurant. By the restaurant’s own account it is the largest Wurlitzer theater organ in the world in regular public performance, and it is certainly the last of the organ pizza parlors still doing the thing at full scale.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale never had an organ pizza parlor; it had the Pink Pony and the Sugar Bowl and a different idea of a family night out. But two generations of Scottsdale children have been driven down the 101 to Mesa for this, and Scottsdale grandparents, many of whom arrived in the 1970s, remember the Phoenix original on Seventh Street. The lost midcentury Scottsdale note mourns a good deal of that era’s roadside entertainment; Organ Stop is the rare piece of it still operating, and bigger than it was.
Getting there
The 101 south to the 60 east, exit Stapley Drive, north to Southern Avenue, west a few blocks; the restaurant is on the north side of Southern with a large lot. Thirty-two minutes from Old Town, forty from the Camelback corridor, fifty from North Scottsdale. There is no useful transit; it is a drive. The getting around note has the rideshare math, which on a weeknight is reasonable.