Why he matters
Scottsdale in the 1970s sold the cowboy West to tourists and served its own residents a surprising amount of theater. Bob Sikora was the producer behind the biggest show. He came to restaurants from the nightclub business, and when he opened Bobby McGee’s Conglomeration in Scottsdale in 1971 he built a room that treated dinner as the first act of a night out: servers in costume, a salad bar in an antique bathtub, prime rib for the middle of the market, and a disco waiting when the plates were cleared.
The formula traveled. Bobby McGee’s grew to about two dozen locations, making it one of the first restaurant ideas to leave Scottsdale and succeed elsewhere, decades before the city’s modern restaurant groups made a business of it.
Where to find his mark today
Bobby McGee’s Conglomeration. The Scottsdale original closed in the 1990s, but it is still the story most longtime residents of South Scottsdale tell first about eating out in the 1970s.
Mabel Murphy’s. The overflow bar he opened in 1972 on Main Street in Old Town lasted until 2009, and the corner at Goldwater is still in the bar business.
The nightclub man’s restaurant
Sikora’s earlier career explains the Conglomeration. By the late 1960s he had run a pancake house, coffee shops and beer bars, the Magoo’s nightclub, and Mr. Lucky’s, a 19,000-square-foot hall on Grand Avenue in Phoenix with country music upstairs and rock downstairs. He knew how to fill a room after dark. Bobby McGee’s put a supper club in front of that knowledge, and it was, by his account, the first place in the Valley where a DJ played prerecorded dance music instead of a band.
The costumes came from a buying trip. Sikora was in Los Angeles shopping for antiques for the new restaurant when he found a Hollywood costume company closing down, and he bought its stock. Every server picked a character, and the bit did the work that decor usually does.
Mabel Murphy’s followed in 1972, when the waits at Bobby McGee’s ran long enough to need a place of their own. It is the rare overflow room that became a destination, and it outlived its parent in Scottsdale by more than a decade. The 1970s chapter sets the scene around both.
The full story
Bob Sikora was born in Huntington, West Virginia, and moved to Arizona when he was about ten. At 15 he dropped out of school to fry hamburgers at a McDonald’s at Central Avenue and Indian School Road in Phoenix, one of the first franchises in town. In 1959, at 20, he opened his own place, Bob’s Pancake House near Camelback Road and 20th Street, and through the 1960s he moved steadily from coffee shops toward nightlife: Magoo’s in 1964, then Mr. Lucky’s in 1966, where Waylon Jennings, Glen Campbell and Willie Nelson played.
In 1971 he opened Bobby McGee’s Conglomeration in Scottsdale, in south Scottsdale. It was a supper club and a disco under one roof, and that was the whole idea: prime rib and a bathtub salad bar in front, a dance floor behind, costumed servers carrying the evening from one to the other. A year later, with crowds waiting an hour or more for tables, he opened Mabel Murphy’s at 7018 E Main St in Old Town to hold them.
Through the boomtown era and into the 1980s the concept expanded to about 24 locations, from Honolulu and Charlotte to Australia. Theme dining aged quickly, though, and the discos faster. The Scottsdale original closed sometime in the 1990s; the site does not have a firm year for it and neither do the sources this page could check.
In 2005 Sikora sold all but one of the remaining restaurants. The one he kept, a former Bobby McGee’s in Phoenix, became Bobby-Q, a barbecue and steak house built after he toured barbecue towns from Tennessee to Kansas. Mabel Murphy’s closed when its building sold in 2009. The site’s records give no birth year for Sikora, and this page won’t guess one. What they record is a Scottsdale-born concept that went further than almost any restaurant the town produced before 2000.