What is 40 Love?
40 Love is a tennis score, a country-club fantasy and, since December 13, 2025, one of the larger restaurant openings Old Town has seen in years. It fills 7,000 square feet at 7117 E 6th Ave, between Stetson Drive and Scottsdale Road, in the SouthBridge space that was Kelly’s at SouthBridge.
The people behind it are an unusual mix. Co-founders Sean Mulholland and Avery Johnson Jr. of 40 Love Group run it with two famous partners: Irish singer-songwriter Niall Horan and DeAndre Hopkins, the wide receiver who starred for the Arizona Cardinals. The restaurant’s own account traces the name to a country-club bar Mulholland opened on La Cienega Boulevard in West Hollywood in 2018, which the pandemic closed. A Scottsdale pop-up during the 2023 Super Bowl “filled and kept filling,” and the partners decided to stay.
The room was designed by John Sofio of Built, the Los Angeles studio behind Delilah and The Nice Guy, and the brief was “a country club, with European weight”: two bars, three private rooms, a private patio and vintage tennis racquets on the walls. The kitchen calls its food “familiar flavors, uncommonly cooked,” which in practice means a modern American menu with a steakhouse top end: caviar, a raw bar, pastas, Chilean sea bass and Snake River Farms wagyu.
It’s a big-money room in a neighborhood that has seen plenty of them. The difference here is the hours: 40 Love runs a cheap afternoon happy hour and a real late-night kitchen, which makes it easier to try than its price tags suggest.
Ordering, timing and the late shift
Use Love Hour. From 3 to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, appetizers and salads are half off, as are well spirits, beer and wine by the glass. That’s the best-value way in: the pull-apart brioche with pecorino and orange-blossom honey, caviar nuggets with crème fraîche semifreddo and gribiche, and caramelized wagyu meatballs in a New York-style vodka sauce make a meal on their own.
Choose your main lane. Seafood people should look at the Chilean sea bass with potato pavé and beurre blanc, the Maine diver scallops with gnocchi and lobster butter, or the lobster pasta. Steak people get a short list of signature cuts, from an 8-ounce USDA Prime filet to an 18-ounce Snake River Farms bone-in ribeye, with truffle bordelaise or chimichurri. Share the cast-iron corn bread with honey butter.
Or come late. On Friday and Saturday the kitchen runs until 1 a.m. and the bar until 2, which makes 40 Love one of the few places in Old Town where a sit-down dinner after a show or a night on Stetson is possible. Our late-night food guide covers the rest.
Logistics. Reserve online; parties of eight or more should call. The restaurant notes valet parking next door, and the Waterfront garage is a short walk across the canal. It’s closed Mondays. For private events, the three rooms seat 10 to 25, and a full buyout holds 200 inside and 93 on the patio.
Sixth Avenue’s long-awaited tenant
The 7117 E 6th Ave space has a history of big rooms. Kelly’s at SouthBridge opened there in 2012 as an 8,000-square-foot gastropub, won Best Burger honors in 2013 for its Four Cut Burger and owned one of Old Town’s best people-watching patios before closing quietly. Around it, SouthBridge has spent nearly two decades cycling through tenants, from Peter Kasperski’s Digestif to Geisha A Go Go a few doors down Sixth Avenue.
40 Love took a while to arrive. It was first slated to open in spring 2024, and construction delays pushed the debut to December 2025. The timing put it in the middle of what venue operators were calling Old Town’s “luxury era,” a 2020s wave of supper clubs, relaunched day clubs and celebrity-backed restaurants chasing a more polished crowd, along with the city’s $40 million “Spruce Up Old Town” program.
The celebrity-partner model isn’t new to Scottsdale, but 40 Love’s version is grounded in a story with local roots: a Super Bowl pop-up that worked well enough to become permanent. Its design pedigree comes from the Los Angeles studio behind some of that city’s best-known scene restaurants, and its kitchen is aiming at the same steak-and-seafood market as the big rooms up and down Scottsdale Road.
The honest assessment: at these prices, 40 Love is competing with Scottsdale’s established steakhouses and supper clubs, and a year in is too early to say whether it has the staying power Kelly’s didn’t. But the afternoon Love Hour, the late kitchen and a room this carefully designed give it more ways in than most luxury openings, and Sixth Avenue has needed a tenant this ambitious for years.