What it is
The Hideaway Grill is the motorcycle bar on Cave Creek Road, and in a town of saloons it is the one that belongs to the riders. Mark Bradshaw, who rides, opened it in the fall of 1998 with the stated idea that bikers needed somewhere to ride out of the city, have a few drinks and grab some food. Painted on the wall is the line that became the house rule: there are no such things as strangers, just friends who haven’t met yet. In most bars that would be a slogan. Here it is roughly how the room works.
Inside it is small, dark and papered in motorcycle memorabilia, with a bar, a few tables and a stage for live music and open-mic nights. Outside is the point: a patio and a gravel lot that on a cool-season weekend afternoon hold a few hundred motorcycles and the people who rode them, from retirees on touring Harleys to the custom-bike builders who have made the Hideaway a stop on their circuit. The food is burgers, wings, pizza and tacos, the drinks are cheap, the weekday happy hour comes with free pizza, and Monday nights in the fall are football with dollar wings.
Bradshaw’s second bar, the Cave Creek Roadhouse, is a few hundred yards up the road, bigger, with old bikes hanging from the rafters. Between them they run Cave Creek Bike Week each spring and a Biketoberfest in the fall, with daily organized rides leaving from both lots.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Scottsdale does not have one. Our dive bars note lists the honest bars that survive in the city, and none of them is a destination for anybody on two wheels. The Hideaway is where the Valley’s riders go on a Sunday, which makes it the best people-watching in the north Valley for the price of a draft beer, and a genuinely friendly room if you walk in without a motorcycle, which about half the customers do.
The practical version
Forty-two minutes from Old Town, on the right side of Cave Creek Road past the center of town, a short walk south of Harold’s and the Buffalo Chip. Open from mid-morning to two in the morning daily. No reservations, no cover, cash or card. The Roadhouse is at 6900 E Cave Creek Rd if the Hideaway is full. If you drink, somebody else drives; the road home is long and dark.
When to go
Sunday afternoon, November through March. This is the Hideaway’s hour. The Valley’s riders have been coming up Cave Creek Road since late morning, the lot is full by one, the band is on the patio, and the whole town’s bike population seems to be in the three blocks between here and Harold’s. Arrive by eleven for a table facing the road.
Cave Creek Bike Week, which runs for about ten days each spring alongside Arizona Bike Week at WestWorld, is the biggest version of the scene: vendors in the lots, organized rides each day from the Hideaway and the Roadhouse, builders and bike-world personalities, a raffle bike. It is crowded, loud and the thing to see once. Biketoberfest in the fall is the smaller, cooler-weather repeat.
Weekday afternoons are the opposite: a quiet local bar with a happy hour from three to six, free pizza with your drink, and the bartender who knows everyone. Monday nights in football season are the deal, with half-price pizza, five-dollar burgers and dollar wings.
Summer slows everything, but the bar is open and cold, and the Sunday riders still come up early before the heat.
What to order
A burger basket, or the tacos, and a draft beer. The pizza is free at happy hour and reasonable otherwise. Wings on a Monday. Nobody comes for dinner; if you want a full meal, walk up to Harold’s.
The neighborhood
The Hideaway sits in the middle of the saloon strip described in our Cave Creek guide. The Buffalo Chip runs bull riding two nights a week a few minutes north, Harold’s has the dance floor, and the Roadhouse has the live music and the bikes in the rafters. On a Sunday, people drift between all four. Children are legal but rare; this is a bar.
The story
Cave Creek Road was already a motorcycle road before 1998. It climbs out of north Phoenix into the Desert Foothills with long sightlines and little traffic, then continues past Carefree to Bartlett Dam Road and the Tonto National Forest, which makes it the Valley’s natural Sunday loop. What it lacked was a bar at the top that was for riders rather than merely tolerant of them. Mark Bradshaw, who had ridden the road himself, opened the Hideaway in the fall of 1998 as that bar, and it became what the riding magazines call a bucket-list stop: a small place where the custom-bike builders and television motorcycle personalities of the 2000s turned up, where the walls filled with their photographs, and where a ride up from Phoenix had a destination.
The Roadhouse followed, a bigger room up the street with vintage bikes hanging from the ceiling and space for a stage inside and out, and Bradshaw built an events calendar around the two: Cave Creek Bike Week in the spring, timed to the big rally at WestWorld in Scottsdale so that the tens of thousands of riders in town for it had somewhere real to ride to, and a Biketoberfest in the fall. The rides leave from the lots, the vendors set up in them, and on the last Sunday a raffle bike goes to someone who flew in from Ohio. Over the years Bradshaw has also bought into other Cave Creek bars, and the Hideaway’s web address now carries a national ambition, but the bar itself has not changed: it is still small, still papered in memorabilia, and still run on the line about strangers painted on the wall.
The Scottsdale connection
Arizona Bike Week is a Scottsdale event, held at WestWorld since the 1990s, and Cave Creek is where its riders go when the rally gates close. During that week Cave Creek Road is a river of chrome from the Carefree Highway to Harold’s, and the Hideaway is its headwater. The rest of the year the relationship is the same at smaller scale: Scottsdale is where the riders live, and the Hideaway is where they ride to.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road north to the Carefree Highway, west two miles to Cave Creek Road, then north about three miles; the Hideaway is on the right past the center of town, before Harold’s. Parking is the gravel lot, which on a Sunday is bikes only in practice; cars park on the side streets and walk. Forty-two minutes from Old Town, and there is no transit. Book a car home if you are drinking.