What it means
When a longtime Scottsdale resident says cowboy steakhouse, they are not describing a menu. They are describing a night: the drive past the last stoplight into open desert, mesquite smoke you could smell from the parking lot, picnic tables under the stars, a two-pound porterhouse and a scoop of cowboy beans on a tin plate, a country band, and a dining room that cheered when a server cut the necktie off a man from Chicago. The genre had a dress code (none), a price point (reasonable) and a geography (the far north end of town, around Pinnacle Peak).
It is now a historical term. The last of the big ones, Pinnacle Peak Patio, closed in June 2015, and the word survives mostly in the sentence “you should have seen it when.” The site has full guides to each lost house, and the steakhouse field guide explains what the city built in their place: expensive, excellent, and from anywhere.
Where you’ll meet it
In the memories of anyone who grew up here, in the “lost restaurants” pages of this site, in the gunfight shows at the relocated Rawhide, and on the walls of Handlebar J and the Rusty Spur, the two Scottsdale rooms that still play the soundtrack.
Where the word came from
Nobody coined the phrase; it is a description that stuck. The thing it describes was born in 1957, when a gas-station general store near Pinnacle Peak started grilling steaks for jeep-tour riders, and Jomax Road was still dirt. Pinnacle Peak Patio opened with room for 30 diners, in the middle of nowhere, and grew into one of the largest Western steakhouses anywhere, with sawdust floors, acres of picnic tables, hayrides, buses idling outside and a necktie ceiling that the restaurant eventually claimed held more than a million ties. Our own guide puts the count in the tens of thousands; either way, the scissors were the point.
A few miles east the Cavalliere family built the second pillar. Doc Cavalliere bought 47 acres at Reata Pass in 1955, on the site of an 1882 stagecoach stop between Phoenix and Fort McDowell, and by about 1958 Reata Pass Steakhouse was serving mesquite-grilled steak and beans on tin plates. In 1975 Doc opened Greasewood Flat next door as a retirement project, a walls-optional burger-and-beer corral built around an 1880s bunkhouse, with fire barrels and a crowd of bikers, ranch hands, snowbirds and executives that Scottsdale has never replaced.
The third was a theme park. Rawhide opened in 1971 on Scottsdale Road as a recreated 1880s town, and its steakhouse sold mesquite steaks, rattlesnake appetizers and “Rocky Mountain oysters” to millions of visitors along with staged gunfights and stagecoach rides. In Old Town, the Pink Pony was the indoor, prime-rib version from 1947, where spring training managers held court.
The genre fit the town’s self-image. Scottsdale called itself The West’s Most Western Town, the dude ranches had taught visitors to expect cowboys, and the steakhouses gave them one loud, smoky night where Arizona looked the way they hoped.
What it is not
It is not the modern Scottsdale steakhouse. Mastro’s, which opened near Pinnacle Peak in 1999, sells sizzling plates and butter cake in a piano lounge, and the resort rooms sell the mountain in the window. Those are good; they are a different animal. The cowboy steakhouse was cheap, outdoors, and in on the joke.
The fine print
The genre died of land values, not of indifference; the rooms were full to the end. Rawhide served its last Scottsdale steak in October 2005 and reopened at Wild Horse Pass on the Gila River Indian Community in 2006, and the Silverstone development rose on its old site. Reata Pass closed in 2012, three years after Doc Cavalliere died, and the family sold the land to a homebuilder in 2013 to cover estate taxes. Greasewood Flat poured its last beer on March 31, 2015, for the same reason. Pinnacle Peak Patio closed on June 28, 2015, after 58 years; the 10-acre site was sold for 55 patio homes. The Pink Pony, after closures in 2009 and 2011, shut for good in 2016.
What is left is partial. Rawhide still runs steaks, gunfights and 160-plus acres of event venues an hour’s round trip south, and is the closest thing to the original experience. Handlebar J on Shea and the Rusty Spur on Main Street keep the live country music indoors. Cave Creek’s roadhouses keep some of the outdoor spirit. The specific combination, mesquite smoke in open desert on historic ranch land with a bus tour and a biker at the same table, is gone, and the pages linked above are the record.
One detail for the curious. The mesquite was not decoration: it was the local hardwood, cheap and abundant, and the mesquite grilling tradition the steakhouses made famous predates them by centuries. When the bulldozers came to Pinnacle Peak Patio, longtime staff and regulars took ties home. Ask an old-timer in north Scottsdale and there is a decent chance one is in a drawer.