What is Brittlebush Bar & Grill?
Every resort has a room where the guests eat and a room where the locals do. At the Westin Kierland, the locals’ room is the golf clubhouse, and it serves haggis.
Brittlebush Bar & Grill sits in the Westin Kierland Golf Club clubhouse on Clubgate Drive, a separate building from the resort. The room is lodge-style — copper and wood-beam accents, an expansive rock fireplace, a bar with a proper Scotch list — and the patio looks out over the fairways toward the McDowells. The name is the desert’s: the brittlebush is the Sonoran shrub that turns the hillsides yellow every spring. The menu is Scotland’s, because the resort is. The Westin Kierland built its identity around Scottish golf heritage — a kilted bagpiper plays the sun down by the pool every evening, and the Scotch Library pours one of the state’s deepest whisky lists — and the clubhouse grill carries that theme onto the plate.
The kitchen’s voice came from chef Graeme Blair, a Scotland native and Arizona resident who built the menu around homeland favorites and family recipes with an Arizona twist. The signature is Piper’s Ale fish and chips — beer-battered haddock with a caper and malt-vinegar aioli — poured beside the house-label Piper’s Pale Ale. Around it: short-rib-loaded Yorkshire puddings, a lobster mac and cheese with Scottish cheddar, burgers, and a sticky toffee bread pudding with Drambuie caramel.
The honest verdict: this is a golf grill, not a gastronomic destination. It is open to the public, priced like a neighborhood bar, closes mid-afternoon, and offers the best-value meal on the Kierland grounds with the best view.
Lunch at the turn
It is a daytime room. The resort currently lists Brittlebush open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., serving “bar bites and grilled meats.” Dinner is not the point. Late morning through mid-afternoon, when foursomes are making the turn and finishing the 18th, is when the room is alive, and a weekday lunch around 12:30 gets you the patio with the fairway view and a kitchen at full speed.
Order the Scottish page. The fish and chips is the signature for a reason — the haddock is thick, the batter is made with the house ale, and the malt-vinegar aioli is the kind of detail a chef from Scotland insists on. The loaded Yorkshires — popovers filled with braised short rib and Stilton — are the dish people photograph. If you are here for breakfast on a weekend, the Full Scottish Breakfast sandwich stacks bacon, pork loin, egg, and mushroom on a potato cake, and the haggis sausage and black pudding are on the menu for the adventurous. End with the sticky toffee bread pudding.
Drink accordingly. Piper’s Pale Ale is the house beer; the Scotch list is smaller than the resort’s Scotch Library but real, and a dram on the patio after a round is what the room was built for.
Logistics. No tee time or room key required. Park at the clubhouse off Clubgate Drive rather than the resort’s main entrance — it is a separate building, a few minutes’ walk from Kierland Commons. The patio is dog-friendly and the lawn beside it has held croquet courts and a giant chess set, which makes it a reasonable family lunch. Prices land at a fair level two. For the resort’s evening rooms, see Deseo and its successors; for a $20 lunch with a fairway view, this is the answer.
Scotland by way of Greenway Parkway
The Westin Kierland opened in 2002 with a theme most Scottsdale resorts would not have dared: Scotland, in the desert, on purpose. The Kierland development’s founding family had Scottish roots, golf gave the idea a natural hook, and the resort committed fully — bagpiper at sunset, a Scotch Library, Scottish touches in the design, a 27-hole course meant to evoke the game’s origins on a Sonoran canvas. It was a distinct identity, and it needed a casual room to carry the theme without the dining-room price.
Brittlebush was that room. By 2010 the clubhouse grill was serving Blair’s menu of Scottish comfort food with Arizona ingredients, and in 2011 it launched the Brittlebush Breakfast — haggis sausage, black pudding, Scottish breakfast sliders — on a lawn with croquet and a giant chess set. The room’s dual audience was set from the start: hotel guests looking for a cheaper lunch, and Kierland neighbors who never checked in but treated the clubhouse as their own.
That second audience is why the place has lasted. Kierland Commons and the Scottsdale Quarter across Scottsdale Road built a restaurant row of national names through the 2010s, and the resort’s own evening rooms turned over; in 2026 the property is mid-transformation with its signature dining rooms closed until fall. Through all of it the clubhouse grill has stayed open, doing the same thing. A public gastropub with a Scottish chef’s menu and a rock fireplace is a rare middle between private-club formal and snack-bar basic, and WM Phoenix Open week at TPC a few miles north sends it an annual overflow of golf tourists.
Honest assessment: Brittlebush is a good clubhouse grill, not a great restaurant, and the hours limit it to lunch. But as an entry point to a resort course you can play without joining, and as the cheapest way to eat well on the Kierland grounds with a view, it earns its place — and the sticky toffee pudding earns a return visit on its own.