What was Cajun House?
The most expensive nightclub the Valley had ever seen, when it opened, was a copy of New Orleans set down in the middle of downtown Scottsdale.
Cajun House opened in March 1997 at 7117 E Third Avenue, near Craftsman Court and beside the Kimsey Building, which had been City Hall in the 1960s. Its owner, Victor Perrillo, a Los Angeles real estate investor who had never run a club, paid for it himself, about $8 million. For that he got four levels and roughly 25,000 square feet: a main room built as Bourbon Street, down to the cobblestones, with an indoor-outdoor stage, plus a bayou with “snapping gators,” a coffeehouse, oyster and piano bars, a billiards gallery, a banquet room and balcony suites. The logo was an alligator playing a saxophone.
The stage is what people remember. Over its first decade Cajun House booked Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Semisonic, Cheap Trick, the Black Crowes, Joe Strummer, They Might Be Giants, Ben Folds, Wilco, Guttermouth, Todd Rundgren and Iggy Pop, along with blues and roots acts paid well above the going rate. If you went to concerts in Old Town around the turn of the century, you went here.
It changed names twice: to the Venue of Scottsdale around 2004, when new management chased corporate events, and to The Venue Scottsdale with a 2010 remodel. It went up for sale in 2019 and closed. The building is gone now. The AC Hotel Scottsdale Old Town, with the Cielito rooftop bar, opened on the same address in 2026.
A theme restaurant with a real stage
The theme was the pitch, the bands were the point. The idea was a New Orleans supper club and blues hall, which is why the first name was Cajun House of Blues until the House of Blues chain objected. By late 1997 the swamp-blues theme had become, in New Times’ phrase, so much window dressing, and the booking had gone wide. That turned out to be the right call.
The economics were unusual. Entertainment director Glen Parrish, who had managed Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks, explained that the dinner and bar crowd let him pay far more for talent than the market rate and still keep ticket prices low: give people a cheap show, he said, and they spend their money inside. He paid Louisiana’s Terrance Simien about $4,000 to open a New Year’s Eve show in 1997, roughly double his usual fee, which made rival bookers grumble.
The neighbors were a problem from week one. The stage was partly open-air. Within weeks of the opening, guests at a nearby motel were complaining about the noise, and in mid-April 1997, under pressure from the city, Cajun House stopped booking live music until it could cut the sound leakage. It came back, and so did the complaints from people it had fallen out with: a founding partner, Jim Carlin, sued Perrillo for $2 million, claiming a handshake deal for 30 percent of the club, and two operations directors left that fall.
What it became. By January 2004, when the State Press reported the rename to the Venue of Scottsdale, the managing partner said the place had not really been a bar for three years. It opened for shows and private events, mostly 21-and-over, with the Bourbon Street room intact and a supply of Western, Harley and Mexican-themed sets for corporate clients. The annual Mardi Gras party stayed.
From Bourbon Street to a Marriott
Cajun House belongs to a particular moment in Scottsdale, the late 1990s, when downtown was looking for a nighttime identity and a lot of money was betting on theme. The same years produced Axis-Radius and Sanctuary on Indian Plaza and the run of clubs that turned into the Entertainment District. Cajun House was the odd one out: a concert hall in a district that would come to prefer DJs, and a Louisiana fantasy in a town that sold the West.
For a decade it worked better than its doubters predicted. New Times wrote in its first year that the club’s inexperienced management would be its undoing, and instead it became one of the Valley’s main rooms for touring rock, roots and alternative acts, the place between the bars and the arenas. Under the Venue name it turned into an event hall that took concerts when they came. When a 2010 remodel added granite bar tops and chandeliers, New Times wrote that the place had been past its prime for years, booking hip-hop acts ten to twenty years past theirs along with fetish nights, and that the corporate upgrade fit its new customers better.
The end came in two steps. In June 2019 the building, by then 38,000 square feet with nine event spaces and a courtyard under a retractable roof, was listed for $12.5 million, still owned by Perrillo, who by then ran a similar Venue on Fremont Street in Las Vegas. The business closed around then. In 2021 PEG Companies won approval for The Kimsey, a $150 million hotel and apartment project on the north side of Indian School Road between Marshall Way and Scottsdale Road. The Venue and the two-story Howard Johnson next to it were demolished; Ralph Haver’s 1960s Kimsey Building, Scottsdale’s City Hall from 1963 to 1968, was kept. The six-story AC Hotel opened at 7117 E Third Ave in 2026.
Honest assessment: Cajun House was a folly, and one of the more useful follies Scottsdale has built. It overspent, fought with its partners and its neighbors, and never quite made sense as a New Orleans club in the desert. It also put Wilco, Joe Strummer and Iggy Pop on a stage a few blocks from Fifth Avenue, which no one has done in Old Town since. For where to hear bands now, see live music in Scottsdale; for most of it, you will be driving to Phoenix.