What was Bobby McGee’s Conglomeration?
Somewhere in 1971 Scottsdale, a nightclub operator named Bob Sikora looked at the American supper club and asked the question that would define a decade: what if the waiter was a pirate?
Bobby McGee’s Conglomeration — the name alone is a period piece — was Sikora’s answer, and it worked outrageously. The format stacked three entertainments in one building: a prime-rib supper club where every server worked in character (pirates, nuns, superheroes, gorillas, whatever the costume closet and the staff’s nerve allowed), a salad bar installed in an antique claw-foot bathtub, and an attached disco that received the dining room, table by table, as the night deepened. Dinner was the opening act, and you never had to change venues for the headliner.
It sounds like a fever dream now. In the 1970s it was a license to print money. From the Scottsdale original, the concept multiplied across the Sun Belt and beyond — at its peak, roughly 24 locations, reaching as far as Australia — making Bobby McGee’s one of the most successful restaurant ideas ever exported from this city, decades before Scottsdale’s modern concept factories existed.
The original’s run wound down in the 1990s, as the theme-dining tide went out (the exact closing year has gone soft, the way theme-restaurant history does). Sikora sold off the chain’s remains in 2005 — keeping one restaurant, which he reinvented as Phoenix’s Bobby-Q barbecue house. The bathtub era ended. The stories, dressed as a nun and carrying a tray, refuse to.
The formula: dinner as variety show
Bobby McGee’s understood something its era’s earnest restaurateurs didn’t: most people don’t go out for food. They go out for an evening, and food is the excuse. The Conglomeration engineered the whole evening under one roof.
The costumes were the engine. Every server picked a character and worked it — sword-flourishing pirates, deadpan nuns, superheroes taking dessert orders with cape aplomb. The bit turned each table’s service into a small improv show, and it did something subtler: it dissolved the formality of the supper club. You cannot be stuffy about your prime rib when Batman is refilling your water. Birthdays escalated into full productions, and the room’s default volume was celebration.
The bathtub salad bar was the perfect gag. An antique claw-foot tub, filled with ice and salad fixings — a one-joke installation that guests never tired of, because it photographed like a dare and functioned like furniture. Every theme chain of the following decades chased that formula: a signature absurdity you’d describe to coworkers on Monday.
The disco closed the loop. The Conglomeration’s nightclub half meant the evening had no natural exit ramp. Dinner at seven became dancing at ten became last call, all without moving the car — an integrated night out that predated the modern “eatertainment” concept by forty years. Sikora, a nightclub man first, had effectively bolted a restaurant onto the front of his real business, and the machine ran both directions: diners became dancers, dancers came back as diners.
The food itself? Competent supper-club standards, prime rib foremost, priced for the middle. Nobody left quoting the kitchen. Everybody left with material.
Scottsdale’s theme-dining dynasty
Bobby McGee’s belongs to a genuinely underappreciated chapter of local history: 1970s Scottsdale as a theme-restaurant superpower. The same city that had spent the ’50s and ’60s selling the cowboy West — the era of Pinnacle Peak Patio’s necktie scissors and Lulu Belle’s gay-nineties saloon theatrics — spent the ’70s industrializing the experience restaurant in every genre at once. Tiki at Trader Vic’s, ice-cream vaudeville at Farrell’s, country-kitsch at the Quilted Bear — Scottsdale diners were the most theme-conditioned in America, and Sikora read the room perfectly. His innovation was aiming the formula at adults’ nightlife instead of families’ dinners, then welding it to the decade’s disco boom.
The export success matters historically. Two dozen locations across multiple continents made the Conglomeration arguably Scottsdale’s first restaurant-concept empire — the proof, long before Fox Restaurant Concepts formalized the model, that this city could incubate hospitality ideas that traveled. The DNA is traceable: the integrated dinner-to-dancing arc reappears in every modern Old Town concept that morphs from restaurant to club at 10 p.m., which is to say, half of them.
The decline was generational, not scandalous. Theme dining’s magic depends on surprise, and by the ’90s the surprise had been franchised, imitated, and finally embarrassed into extinction; the discos aged even faster. Locations winked out gradually — Scottsdale’s original among them, sometime that decade — until Sikora’s 2005 sale closed the book. His coda is the best detail: the last restaurant became Bobby-Q, a sincere and well-regarded Phoenix barbecue house. The man who spent thirty years selling spectacle ended up selling brisket, and the Valley approved of both.
What was lost isn’t the food — it’s the permission. Bobby McGee’s operated on the premise that dinner could be ridiculous on purpose, that a grown adult could order prime rib from a gorilla and be better for it. Today’s Scottsdale does glamour, wellness, and steak at scale. Ridiculous, though — earnest, bathtub-salad-bar ridiculous — went out with the costumes.