What is Clancy’s Pub?
Old Town Scottsdale has plenty of bars designed for visitors. Clancy’s Pub is designed for the people who moved here from somewhere colder and still want their team on the television.
It sits at 4432 N Miller Rd, a few blocks east of Scottsdale Road in a stretch of small restaurants and apartments that sees far less of the weekend crowd than the entertainment district. The format is Midwest neighborhood sports bar and grill, and the roots, as the pub tells it, go back to Omaha, Nebraska. The family behind it dates the business to 1977.
That heritage shows in the schedule. Clancy’s is an official watch site for the Nebraska Cornhuskers and the Green Bay Packers, two of the most loyal traveling fan bases in American sport, and on a fall weekend the room fills with red on Saturday and green and gold on Sunday. Big screens cover the walls for everyone else.
The food is pub food, done straight: burgers, a prime melt, pizza, wings, salads, sandwiches and breakfast. The kitchen stays open until 2 a.m., which makes Clancy’s one of the more useful late-night meals in central Scottsdale. And once a year, on St. Patrick’s Day, it becomes something else entirely: live music, bagpipes and drums, green beer and corned beef and cabbage.
Game days, late nights and parties
Pick your game. On Nebraska and Packers game days, Clancy’s is a fan club with a kitchen; arrive early for a seat with a view. On other days it is a relaxed neighborhood bar with the screens on, and any game you ask for is likely to be on somewhere.
Use the late kitchen. The pub is open from morning until 2 a.m., and the kitchen keeps cooking late. After ten, when most of Old Town is serving bar snacks or nothing, a burger here is a better plan than the drive-through. The breakfast menu covers early kickoffs and weekend mornings.
Book the Clancy Jack Room. The whiskey-themed private room is the pub’s party space, sized for birthdays, office gatherings, fantasy drafts and game-day groups. It is the right call for anything more than a table’s worth of friends.
Plan St. Patrick’s Day. March 17 is the pub’s biggest day, with bagpipes and drums, live music, green beer and corned beef and cabbage. Arrive early and expect a crowd.
Know the block. Miller Road is quieter and easier to park on than the bar district around Saddlebag Trail and Stetson. A few doors down are Pasta Brioni, the family-run red-sauce Italian room, and Wok ‘N Roll, the rock-themed sushi and karaoke spot, so a group can split dinner and still meet at the bar. For more of the same spirit, see the guide to Scottsdale dive bars.
The transplant bar
Scottsdale is a city of people from somewhere else, and a large share of them came from the Midwest. They brought their winters’ worth of habits with them, and one of the most durable is the neighborhood bar organized around a team: the place where people from home gather on game day, where the bartender knows the schedule, and where nobody has to explain why they are wearing red in October.
Old Town’s nightlife mostly grew in the opposite direction. From the 2000s on, the entertainment district around Stetson and Saddlebag became a place built for weekends and visitors, with clubs, party bars and rooftop patios. The blocks east of Scottsdale Road along Miller Road developed differently, as a mix of apartments and small restaurants that serve the people who live nearby, and they have kept that character.
Clancy’s belongs to that second Scottsdale. Its long hours, its late kitchen, its private room for birthdays and its alliances with the Huskers and Packers all point at regulars rather than tourists. Nights like the one in December 2023, when Creighton alumni gathered here to watch their team play Nebraska, are the pub doing exactly what it is for.
The honest assessment: Clancy’s is not a destination for anyone who does not care about the game, and the food is honest pub fare rather than a reason to cross town. But for a Nebraska fan, a Packers fan, or anyone who needs a burger at midnight a few blocks from Old Town, it is the kind of bar every neighborhood needs and fewer and fewer have.