What was Chauncey Social?
Chauncey Social was Old Town’s biggest nightlife company trying its formula ten miles north, and for five years it mostly worked.
It opened at 8 p.m. on Thursday, December 12, 2019, at 17767 N Scottsdale Rd, Suite 100, on the southeast corner of Scottsdale Road and Chauncey Lane, just south of the 101 in what its owners called north Scottsdale’s fast-growing entertainment district. The owners were Evening Entertainment Group, Diane and Les Corieri’s company, which had built Axis-Radius and then Bottled Blonde and Casa Amigos on Indian Plaza. “We’ve had our eye on North Scottsdale for several years,” Diane Corieri said, calling it a “highly desirable place for residents to settle in.”
The room was built as a restaurant that could become a lounge. It seated more than 130 inside, including more than 30 at the bar, with a 50-person wraparound patio overlooking Scottsdale Road, and it was decorated in what the press release called retro-modern: natural woods, iron, burnt orange and gray, high-tops and couches. Thirty TVs lined the walls and a 10-by-50-foot LED wall, billed as the largest in the area, ran the games. The kitchen belonged to Joe Absolor, the founding chef of Stock & Stable in Phoenix and a Devour Culinary Classic Golden Ticket winner, who cooked American food with global touches and an all-natural “Never Ever” protein program. Dinner started at 4, social hour ran 4 to 6, and DJs played late.
EEG closed it on April 1, 2025, and two months later closed RnR Gastropub in Old Town. The space reopened on September 16, 2026 as Kuza, a robata and raw-bar restaurant from Clive Collective. Our verdict: a well-built room that proved north Scottsdale will eat and watch a game at a bar, and will not, in numbers, go clubbing at one.
Social hour, game night and the late shift
The early evening was the strength. Social hour from 4 to 6 daily, at a 30-seat bar with a patio over Scottsdale Road, made Chauncey Social the north end’s natural after-work stop for the office parks on either side of the 101. The menu was more ambitious than a sports bar’s, with Absolor’s resume behind it, and the owners promised lunch and weekend brunch for the new year. Our happy hour guide covers what the corridor does now.
Game nights were the business plan. Thirty screens and a 10-by-50 LED wall put it in the sports-bar market, and by fall 2020 Phoenix New Times was listing its NFL food and drink specials. The wall was pitched at sporting and special events from the start. This is the same model EEG later refined in Old Town at Mother Tucker’s Tavern, where forty screens and early weekend openings turn a party pub into a football bar.
The late shift was the Old Town import. After the kitchen slowed, the DJ took over and Chauncey Social ran as a nightclub, the only one of its kind on that stretch of Scottsdale Road. It drew on big weekends. Barrett-Jackson week, when WestWorld is minutes away, put it on New Times’ where-to-eat list in January 2020; Phoenix Open week, with TPC Scottsdale a short drive north, did the same. On an ordinary weeknight the DJ booth was playing to the bar.
Getting there was easy by north Scottsdale standards: a surface lot, the freeway a block away, rideshare straightforward. The neighbors on the block told the story of the corridor’s upgrade. The Americano opened a few doors north in 2021, and Tell Your Friends, the jazz speakeasy beneath it, in May 2024. By then Chauncey Social was the oldest room on the block.
EEG goes north, and comes back
Chauncey Social was a 2020s venue that opened eleven weeks before the pandemic, which is the first thing to know about its history. Evening Entertainment Group had spent two decades on Indian Plaza, from Axis-Radius in 1997 through Livewire, Bottled Blonde and Casa Amigos, and by 2019 it operated in Arizona, Illinois and Texas. North Scottsdale was its next market, a corridor of office parks, new apartments and hotels along Scottsdale Road at the 101, with the Penske dealerships and the Penske Racing Museum along Chauncey Lane on the Phoenix side of Scottsdale Road. The name was the street’s.
It survived 2020, which plenty of Valley bars did not. Through 2021 and 2022 it was the lounge of record for the north end, and it watched the block fill in around it with Clive Collective’s The Americano and Tell Your Friends. That company, with Scott Conant and then Beau MacMillan in its kitchens, was building a different kind of north Scottsdale night: dinner, jazz, a cocktail dress code. Chauncey Social’s LED wall and DJ booth belonged to the other kind.
The closing came on April 1, 2025, confirmed by Phoenix New Times in June when it reported that EEG had also shuttered RnR Gastropub in Old Town, its fifteen-year-old sports bar on Scottsdale Road. Two closures in two months read like a company trimming to its core, which is Indian Plaza. Mouth by Southwest asked what would replace the north Scottsdale space on April 21; the answer, when it came, was the neighbor. Clive Collective took the lease and opened Kuza on September 16, 2026, its sixth restaurant and its third on this short stretch of Scottsdale Road, built around an open robata grill and a raw bar, with executive chef Erik Davila running the kitchen after MacMillan, who developed the concept, left the group earlier in the year.
Honest assessment: Chauncey Social was a good restaurant-bar with a nightclub bolted on, and the bolt never quite held. North Scottsdale has money and early bedtimes, and the rooms that thrive there now serve dinner and jazz, not bottle service under an LED wall. It earned its five years. The rest of the north end’s turnover is in our list of every bar and club in Scottsdale and the North Scottsdale guide.