What is Casa Amigos?
Indian Plaza’s biggest building has changed format three times, and Casa Amigos is what one half of it became most recently.
The address is 7320 E Indian Plaza, the side of the old Axis-Radius complex that Evening Entertainment Group first ran as the Livewire music hall. In 2017 Les and Diane Corieri announced they would replace Livewire, and they put about $4 million into a two-level replacement: a Mexican restaurant called Casa Amigos on the ground floor and a bowling lounge called Sky Lanes upstairs, more than 16,000 square feet in all. They hired Alison Victoria, the host of HGTV’s Kitchen Crashers, to design it. Her ground floor had bright white walls, colorful custom art, traditional Mexican tile and window walls that folded away to a shaded patio. Both levels opened on January 26, 2018.
The original menu was tacos and tequila: crispy octopus and picadillo beef tacos, street corn, queso fundido, a bacon-wrapped Sonoran hot dog and build-your-own guacamole. Since then Casa has moved further toward nightlife. It now calls itself a club that “brings Tulum” to Old Town. It opens late, Tuesday to Saturday, with DJs, bottle service and a rooftop, and its posted menu is all drinks: margaritas, a long tequila list and Champagne in large formats.
Next door, in the other half of the old Axis-Radius building, is its sister venue Bottled Blonde. Between them, the Corieris operate most of this block of Indian Plaza.
Doing Casa right
Know which nights it’s open. Casa is closed Sunday and Monday. It opens at 10 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, at 9 p.m. on Friday and at 8 p.m. on Saturday, and everything ends at 2 a.m. That makes Saturday’s early window the only time it isn’t packed. Come then if you want the rooftop.
Drink the margaritas. Tequila is what the bar does best. The Picante (Los Sundays silver, Cointreau, sweet and sour) and La Flaca, a skinny margarita made with Teremana, agave and soda, are the standards. A classic margarita comes from the draft line. For something different, the Pasado de Mado is a Mexican old fashioned with Maker’s Mark and Nixta corn liqueur, and the carajillo with Licor 43 and cold brew is a good late-night coffee drink. The tequila list starts at Casamigos and Teremana and goes up to Clase Azul and Don Julio 1942 if someone else is paying.
Eat first. The taco menu that opened the place is not on the current website, so eat dinner beforehand. Bottled Blonde’s wood-fired pizza is right next door, and El Hefe and Whiskey Row are a short walk away on Saddlebag Trail.
Plan for the door. Groups and bachelorette parties should book a table for Friday or Saturday. During WM Phoenix Open week and the spring-training weekends, the line on Indian Plaza gets long. Take a rideshare in, because parking anywhere near Indian Plaza on a weekend night is hard to find.
Livewire, bowling, and the Tulum turn
You can trace Old Town nightlife through this one building. Axis-Radius helped make Indian Plaza the center of Scottsdale’s club scene in the 2000s. When it closed, Evening Entertainment Group split it in two. The 2014 Bottled Blonde half became a pizzeria and beer garden that turns into a club. The other half became Livewire, a concert hall. Bottled Blonde worked. A rock venue in a district built for DJ nights was a harder sell, and in 2017 the Corieris replaced it.
The replacement covered every option. There was a restaurant downstairs that could feed the district by day, bowling upstairs for groups who wanted something to do besides drink, and enough design budget that a TV designer’s name went in the announcement. The pitch for Sky Lanes was retro-modern decor, DJs, bottle service and a soundtrack of pop and ’80s and ’90s throwbacks. Like Bottled Blonde, it was built to make money at more hours of the day.
The years since have shown which part paid off. On Indian Plaza, late nights are what make money, and Casa’s hours and menu have narrowed to match. Skylanes is now rented out by the event: a sky-lit bar, a retractable roof, two private lanes and a 360-degree bar for corporate parties and buyouts. The fold-away windows and white walls are still there, now as the setting for a Tulum-themed party.
Honest assessment: Casa Amigos is a nightclub with a tequila list, not the taco restaurant it opened as, and you should treat it that way. As a nightclub it gives you an easier entry than the bigger clubs, a rooftop and margaritas that are better than the club average, all in the building that has shaped this block of Old Town since the Axis-Radius years.