What is Boondocks?
Most of Old Town’s bars are rooms. Boondocks Patio & Grill is a yard. The bar at 4341 N 75th St is built around what it bills as one of Scottsdale’s largest climate-controlled patios, an open-air compound of seating areas, bars and games that the owners call the “Boondocks Backyard Experience.” Inside the fence there are pool tables, bag toss, dart boards, a basketball pop-shot game and giant Connect-4, a stage for live music, and enough TVs that it doubles as a sports bar on Sundays and playoff nights.
The bar has held this lot since 2014, when it took over from Spanish Fly. It is run by brothers Luke and Jake Kory, who later added a second Boondocks in Tempe and, down the street, the wood-fired Mexican steakhouse Pistoleros Parrilla. The pitch is casual: comfort food, a wide spread of beer, spirits and wine, and a place where a group can spread out without a cover charge or a bottle minimum.
That makes it a counterweight to the clubs a couple of blocks away in the Entertainment District. Boondocks stays open until 2 a.m. every night and gets loud when a band is on, but its regulars are as likely to be shooting pool at 4 p.m. on a Tuesday as dancing at midnight.
The honest read: the food is bar food done properly, not a destination. The patio is the reason to come, and it is a good one.
How to use the backyard
Order for the table. The kitchen’s strength is shareable fried food: duck fat fries with Parmesan and bacon bits, mini corn dogs, beer-battered cheese curds, fried pickles and buffalo cauliflower. The burgers are made with local Stock Yards beef; the Stetson BBQ Bacon Burger with Irish cheddar and an onion ring and the jalapeño-marmalade Sin Burger are the two to argue over. Tuesday brings street tacos, and on Friday and Saturday nights a $5 late-night hot dog appears from midnight to 2.
Pick the right hour. Weekdays open at 3 p.m., Friday at 1 and weekends at 10 a.m. with a brunch menu. Afternoons are the best time for the games and the dog-friendly patio; the bar publishes a doggy menu. Evenings bring live music, which the bar says ranges from acoustic sets to local bands and national acts, plus theme nights like Monday Night Football and industry night. Check the events page before you go.
Mind the fine print. The menu notes a 3 percent venue fee on all transactions and an automatic 20 percent gratuity for parties of eight or more. Groups can book sections of the patio for birthdays and corporate events through the website.
Make it a block crawl. Next door at 4363 N 75th St, The Hot Chick adds hot chicken and retro arcade games, and Pistoleros Parrilla is a short walk away on Civic Center Plaza for a sit-down steak dinner. The Scottsdale Civic Center lawns are a few minutes south on foot. For how this corner fits the rest of the night, see our Old Town nightlife guide.
Three bars, one lot
The address has been a bellwether for Old Town nightlife for twenty years. In the 2000s it was Drift, a Polynesian tiki lounge from Bryan Chittenden and Greg Donnally, part of the team behind Stingray Sushi and Geisha A Go Go. Drift served scorpion bowls under puffer-fish lamps years before the tiki revival, and it closed in late 2010.
The same group, with partner Andrew Nam, rebuilt the property as Spanish Fly, announced in January 2011 as a “Mexican beach club”: Mexican beach food and sushi, a resort-style pool with VIP cabanas and day beds, and weekend pool parties. It was a smaller cousin of the pool-party scene the W Scottsdale had made fashionable on Camelback, and the group repeated the idea the following year at El Santo Cantina near Scottsdale Quarter.
The pool-party era was short. By 2014 Spanish Fly had closed and Boondocks had taken over, replacing cabanas and bottle service with pool tables, bag toss and burgers. It was a shift that ran through the 2010s across Old Town, as the clubs of the previous decade gave way to all-day patios and sports bars that make money in the afternoon as well as after midnight.
Boondocks has outlasted both its predecessors on the lot, and the Kory brothers have built on it, with the Tempe location, Pistoleros Parrilla on Civic Center Plaza, and additional property across the street. More than a decade on, the backyard has lasted longer than the tiki lounge and the beach club that came before it combined.