What it means
Everywhere else, happy hour is a drink discount. In Scottsdale it is a second menu, and for people who live here it is a schedule. From roughly three to six on weekday afternoons, the bar and the patio at most of the city’s good restaurants run a separate card: smaller plates of the dining room’s dishes, house cocktails and wines at a few dollars off, oysters by the dozen at a price the dining room would never print. The dining room itself is not included. A local who says “let’s do happy hour at Pinyon” means dinner, at 4:30, under the olive trees, for half the bill.
The custom exists because Scottsdale’s restaurants are priced for visitors on vacation and the residents are not. The bar menu is the workaround, a parallel economy that lets a schoolteacher eat at a steakhouse. The site’s happy hour guide names the rooms and the deals; this page explains the word and the rules behind it.
Where you’ll meet it
On the sandwich boards outside every Old Town restaurant at three o’clock, in the bar at Mastro’s City Hall and the other steakhouse lounges, on the Postino patio before five, at Cien Agaves and Diego Pops in the afternoon foot traffic, and in the phrase “reverse happy hour,” which you will not hear until an industry friend lets you in on it.
Where the word came from
The phrase is Navy slang. In 1913 the crew of the battleship USS Arkansas organized semi-weekly “smokers,” evenings of boxing, wrestling, music and dancing, and by June of that year they were calling them happy hours. The term spread through the fleet by the end of World War I and came ashore with the sailors. Prohibition gave the idea its drinking shape, the speakeasy “cocktail hour” before dinner, and by the early 1950s bars near California naval bases were advertising happy hours. A 1959 Saturday Evening Post article about servicemen at Caribbean missile-tracking stations is the citation most dictionaries use for the modern bar sense.
Then came the backlash. Concern about drunk driving made Massachusetts the first state to ban happy hours outright, in 1984, and other states passed restrictions of their own. Arizona took a narrower path. Rather than banning discounts, it banned the dangerous forms: paragraph 23 of ARS 4-244 makes it unlawful for a bar to run drinking contests, to sell “an unlimited number of spirituous liquor beverages during any set period of time for a fixed price,” or to put more than 50 ounces of beer, a liter of wine or four ounces of distilled spirits in front of one person at one time, or even to advertise those things. The discounted drink and the cheap plate survived.
That law is why Scottsdale happy hour looks the way it does: no bottomless margaritas, no all-you-can-drink brunches, instead a lower price on a normal pour and a food menu good enough to be the point. The restaurant business, which would rather sell you a $9 slider than a $4 beer, was happy to oblige.
What it is not
It is not brunch, which is a weekend institution with its own guide, and it is not the dining room. If the host seats you at a table inside without asking, you are paying dinner prices for the same food. And a “social hour” at a resort is usually a free pour for hotel guests, a different animal governed by a different section of the law.
The fine print
The rules of the window, as locals practice them. Bar and patio only, and say “happy hour” at the door. Weekdays; the few weekend windows are shorter. Order before the bell: most rooms honor the time of the order, not the time the food arrives, so a round for the table at 5:50 is a legitimate strategy. Tip on the full price, because the bartender is doing full-price work. And read the board, because the day’s card beats anything printed online, including ours.
Summer changes the math. From June through September the city empties of visitors, the resorts cut rates, and happy hours lengthen; a few rooms run all-afternoon deals to fill seats while the patio misters hiss. Pair it with patio season, which runs the opposite direction: the best happy-hour weather is October through May, and the best happy-hour prices are the four months in between.
The reverse happy hour is the insider’s version. A handful of kitchens, mostly in Old Town, run a second window late on weeknights, after the dinner turn, for the cooks and bartenders getting off shift and anyone who can eat at 9:30. Ask the bartender during the regular window where they go afterward.
One note on the steakhouses, where the window saves the most. The bar menus at the Mastro’s rooms, Dominick’s and Bourbon & Bones run sliders, oysters and discounted martinis under live piano, the whole steakhouse experience minus the bill. The steakhouse field guide covers the dining rooms; the happy hour guide covers the bars.