What it is
Venues Café is the restaurant that keeps Carefree’s downtown fed between the grand gestures. It occupies the building at the foot of Easy Street directly beside the sundial, across from the Desert Gardens, and it is open when most of the town is not: lunch through dinner Tuesday to Saturday, brunch on Sunday. The owners call the food American comfort food with a Southwest flair, which is exactly right. The small plates run to deviled eggs with bacon jam, street tacos, and braised short ribs over wasabi mashed potatoes; the entrées to a prime filet, a seared salmon, chicken schnitzel with lingonberries, bacon-wrapped shrimp, and a grilled meatloaf that is the dish regulars have been ordering for years. Lunch adds sandwiches, a quesadilla, a sloppy joe done properly and sweet potato fries.
The room earns the name. It is built against a 30-foot natural rock wall, the granite Carefree sits on, with brick, copper and wood around it, a fireplace next to a stocked wine cellar, and a bar with televisions that is the closest thing downtown has to a sports bar. The patio faces the plaza.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
You would not drive 38 minutes for this meal alone, and the café would be the first to say so. You drive up for the sundial, the galleries, the art festivals, a spa day at Civana or a stay at the Boulders, and Venues is where lunch happens, because it is good, it is open, and it is forty steps from the dial. Sunday brunch is the exception: the only brunch in Carefree, with bottomless mimosas, and a reason in itself to make the town a Sunday-morning destination from North Scottsdale.
The practical version
Tuesday to Saturday from 11:30 straight through to dinner (eight on weeknights, nine on Friday and Saturday); Sunday 10 to 3 for brunch; closed Monday and Sunday night. Happy hour daily three to six. Reservations on OpenTable for brunch and festival weekends; walk in otherwise. Park on Easy Street or in the town lots behind the plaza.
When to go
Lunch is the café’s best use: after the sundial and the garden loop, before the galleries, around one o’clock when the first wave has left. Sunday brunch from 10 to 3 is the other reason, and the one to reserve; the mimosa package makes it a long morning. Happy hour, three to six daily, has domestic bottles, house wine and house-made sangria and well drinks at prices Scottsdale stopped charging a decade ago, and it is where the town meets. Tuesday is burger night, a burger, a side and a drink for one price.
Carefree’s season is October to April and its biggest crowds come on the fine-art festival weekends, when the plaza next door fills with booths and the café’s patio becomes the best seat at the fair. Book those days. In summer the room is cool, the rock wall helps, and lunch is quiet.
What to order
The deviled eggs with bacon jam to start, shared. Then the meatloaf if you want to eat like a regular, the schnitzel if you want the dish the kitchen is proudest of, the filet if it is a celebration. At lunch the sloppy joe is better than it has any right to be. At brunch, whatever comes with the mimosas. The wine list is short and fairly priced; the sangria is the house drink.
The neighborhood
You are at the center of Carefree: the sundial next door, the gardens across the street, the English Rose Tea Room up Easy Street for the sweet alternative, Keeler’s steakhouse and the Black Mountain Coffee Shop in the Spanish Village two minutes down Ho Hum Road. El Pedregal and the Boulders are five minutes south.
With kids
Easy. Burgers, quesadillas and fries at lunch, a patio where they can see the sundial, and early dinner hours. The bar televisions keep a teenager occupied through a slow course.
The story
Carefree was planned in the 1950s as a town where nothing happened, and its downtown restaurants have come and gone with the seasons and the resort cycles: the Carefree Station in the Spanish Village lasted nine years and closed in 2013, and others have had shorter runs. Venues has outlasted most of them by doing the unglamorous thing well. It is family-owned, it keeps steady hours in a town that does not, and it built its reputation on a dining room that uses the one material Carefree has in unlimited supply, granite, as its back wall. The name is a small joke about being the place for whatever the occasion is: lunch, a birthday, the game, Sunday.
The Scottsdale connection
Easy Street is where Scottsdale Road ends, more or less; it changes its name at Carefree Highway and runs out of road a mile later. The café’s regulars are the residents of Carefree and the far north Scottsdale neighborhoods that surround it, Troon, Desert Mountain, the Boulders, who treat the plaza as their village square and this as its kitchen. For visitors the connection is simpler: it is the lunch on the day you drive north, and our brunch note has the Scottsdale rooms for every other Sunday.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road north across Carefree Highway, where it becomes Tom Darlington Drive; right on Cave Creek Road, left on Easy Street. The café is the first building on your right, beside the sundial. From Cave Creek, it is five minutes east on Cave Creek Road. Allow 38 minutes from Old Town, 15 from Pinnacle Peak; parking is free on the street and in the lots behind the plaza, which fill only on festival weekends.