What is Bottled Blonde?
Old Town’s entertainment district has never been short of places to drink. What it lacked, until January 2014, was a place to drink where the food was the point until it wasn’t.
Bottled Blonde occupies 7340 E Indian Plaza, one half of the building that housed Axis-Radius, the most influential nightclub of Scottsdale’s 2000s. When that club closed, Evening Entertainment Group — the company Les and Diane Corieri have run in Old Town for nearly three decades — split the space in two: a concert venue called Livewire on one side, and on the other a 9,000-square-foot pizzeria and beer garden, most of it covered patio, with wood-fired pizza, charcuterie boards, a long list of local and imported beer and communal picnic tables. The design brief was an East Coast brewery crossed with a German biergarten. The business model was simpler: feed the district by day, then turn the lights down.
That flip is the whole identity. From 3 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. brunch on weekends, Bottled Blonde is a casual pizzeria where the crust — crisp with a touch of char, airy, chewy — earns its keep. Somewhere after nine on a Friday, the picnic tables become bottle-service tables, a DJ takes over, a line forms on Indian Plaza and the dress code kicks in. Same room, same pizza oven, different city.
The honest verdict: as a pizzeria, it is better than a nightlife company’s pizzeria has any right to be. As a nightclub, it is exactly what the entertainment district sells, at volume. Know which one you are walking into.
Eating at a nightclub, correctly
Eat early. The window between opening and roughly 8 p.m. is when Bottled Blonde is a restaurant — the kitchen is unhurried, the covered patio is pleasant from October through April, and the picnic tables belong to families, shoppers walking over from Scottsdale Fashion Square and office groups on their second pitcher. Weekend brunch, from 9 a.m., is the most civilized version of the place and the one most visitors never see.
Order the pies that made the reputation. The Margherita is the control — sauce, mozzarella, basil, and the crust doing the work. The Salsiccia, with spicy Italian sausage and pickled onions, is the house favorite and the one to argue over. The Deep V loads vegetables for the table’s token healthy eater. The charcuterie boards are the right starter for a group working through the beer list, which runs local, domestic and imported at real depth.
Understand the flip. After dark on weekends the venue reorganizes around the nightlife program: reserved tables, bottle service, a cover at the door, a dress code that will turn away flip-flops and the Cactus League jersey you wore to the game. If that is the evening you want, book ahead — during the WM Phoenix Open week, spring training and January’s auction crowds the room sells out and the line on Indian Plaza runs long. If it is not, be gone by nine.
Placement is strategic. Indian Plaza is the beating heart of the entertainment district, with Whiskey Row and Wasted Grain within a stumble, and the Old Town hotels a short walk south. Rideshare in; parking here on a weekend night is a lost cause.
From Axis-Radius to the beer garden
To understand Bottled Blonde you have to understand the building. Axis-Radius opened on Indian Plaza in the late 1990s and, through the 2000s, defined Scottsdale nightlife — the twin-club complex that pulled the entertainment district to Indian Plaza and away from the older Fifth Avenue bars like Anderson’s Fifth Estate. When it closed, the question was what could possibly follow it. The Corieris’ answer was to stop trying to build a bigger club and instead build a hybrid: a room that made money twelve hours a day instead of four.
That was the smart read of the 2010s. The pure nightclub economy that Axis-Radius represented was aging out; the new Old Town customer wanted a patio, a pizza and a beer at four in the afternoon, then wanted the same address to turn into a party without moving. Evening Entertainment Group — already running The Mint, RnR, Hi Fi and Sandbar on nearby blocks — understood that the district’s daytime traffic, especially the spring-training and golf-week crowds, was being lost to restaurants that closed early and bars that opened late. Bottled Blonde captured both ends of the day with one lease.
The pizza deserves more credit than a nightlife group usually gets. Old Town’s serious pizza had been Grimaldi’s coal-oven pies on Scottsdale Road and the wood-fired rooms like Craft 64 on Main Street; Bottled Blonde’s crust held its own in that company, and the beer list — deep, local, not an afterthought — gave the beer-garden half of the name some honesty.
Honest assessment: this is a nightlife company’s restaurant, and after nine on a weekend it stops pretending otherwise. Diners who want a quiet pizza should eat elsewhere or eat early. But as the room that showed the entertainment district how to run a kitchen and a club under one roof, Bottled Blonde is a genuine piece of Old Town history, and the Salsiccia is still worth the trip at four in the afternoon.