What it is
The Porch is the bar at the loud end of Arcadia’s restaurant row. It opened in late 2017 at 4017 East Indian School Road, on the 40th Street corner, in a building that had been Little Shanghai, a neighborhood Chinese restaurant the recession closed and left empty, and it took the one thing the corner lacked, which was a big patio bar for people under 35, and supplied it. The bones are simple: a long bar, a wall of screens, a wide patio along the street, a weekend brunch from ten, and on Friday and Saturday nights a DJ, which makes it the only dance floor in a neighborhood of dining rooms.
The building’s history survives in a cocktail. When the Porch opened, its general manager told Uptown Magazine that the drinks list was built to be tasty and photogenic and that one of them, Big Trouble in Little Shanghai, was the nod to what the room used to be. The bar has been remodeled since, and the name has gone to sibling Porches in Tempe and Gilbert; the Arcadia room is the original.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Scottsdale has this bar, several times over, on Saddlebag Trail and Indian Plaza, at Scottsdale prices with a Scottsdale door. The Porch is the same night at Arcadia prices, eleven minutes west, on a corner where you can eat properly first. Our happy hour guide covers the city’s patios; this is the one across the line that the city’s own bar crowd drives to when they want a different room. In daylight it is a different place entirely, a patio with games on and the neighborhood walking by, and that version is for everyone.
The practical version
Eleven minutes west of Old Town on Indian School Road, north side at 40th Street, with a lot and street parking. Open daily from eleven (ten on weekends) until ten, midnight on Friday and Saturday. Price level two. No reservations needed by day; after ten on a weekend expect a line. Eat at the Vig or LGO a block east first, come here for the game or the dancing, and ride home.
When to go
Saturday and Sunday brunch, ten until two, is the Porch for people who do not go to nightclubs: the patio, the college games and a brunch menu. Game days in the fall and during March basketball fill the screens and the patio by kickoff. Friday and Saturday after ten is the other bar, with DJs, a line and a crowd that skews to its twenties; go early to be inside before the line forms, or go to the Vig.
Summer is patio-free until dark and the room is a sports bar with the air conditioning doing its job; the DJ nights do not stop for the heat.
What to order
Brunch is the menu to take seriously, and the patio is where to eat it. The rest of the day the food is bar food, shareables, sandwiches and burgers, built to go with a game, and the drinks list is where the effort went: the house cocktails are made to be photographed, which is a fair description of the whole bar, and the Big Trouble in Little Shanghai is the one with a story. Beer is the right order for a game.
With kids
Brunch and daytime weekends, yes, on the patio. After dark, no.
The neighborhood
The 40th Street corner is the center of Arcadia’s restaurant row: the Vig, with its bocce court, is a block east; LGO and Postino are around the corner on 40th; Chelsea’s Kitchen is on the canal to the north. The Porch is where the people from all of them end up at eleven. The best brunch in Scottsdale note has the sit-down brunches on both sides of the line; the bachelor party note is where this bar belongs for a group weekend.
The story
Arcadia’s restaurant row grew up in the 2000s around La Grande Orange, Postino and the Vig on 40th Street, and for its first decade it was a neighborhood of dinner and brunch rooms that closed by ten, which is what the neighborhood wanted. The recession took a few of the corner’s older tenants, among them Little Shanghai, a Chinese restaurant in a low building at the northeast corner of 40th and Indian School, and the building sat for years.
The Porch opened there in late 2017 with a plan to be what the corner was missing: a patio bar with the games on, a brunch, and a drinks list built for Instagram, which in 2017 was the new idea and is now the default. Uptown Magazine profiled it in September 2018, nearly a year in, as a fixture, and the general manager explained the Little Shanghai cocktail. The room was remodeled in the years after, and the owners took the name to Tempe, near Arizona State, and to Gilbert’s suburbs. The Arcadia original added the weekend DJ nights that made it the row’s one late room, and the neighborhood, which had spent a decade going to bed at ten, mostly made peace with it.
The Scottsdale connection
Old Town’s bar district is the model the Porch is working from and the competition it undercuts: the same patio-bar-to-dance-floor night, eleven minutes west, without the Entertainment District door. Arcadia’s east end is inside Scottsdale, so a share of the Friday crowd has driven over from the same zip codes as the visitor reading this.
Getting there
Indian School Road west from Scottsdale Road about four and a half miles, across 64th Street into Phoenix, past 44th Street, to 40th Street; the bar is on the north side at the corner with a lot and street parking on the side streets. From the corridor resorts, 44th Street south to Indian School and right. This is a rideshare night in both directions; the getting around note has the math.