What is Cold Beers & Cheeseburgers?
Restaurant naming is an art of suggestion — evocative words, borrowed geography, the occasional apostrophe of mystery. In 2011, a north Scottsdale sports bar took the opposite path and named itself after its inventory: Cold Beers & Cheeseburgers. Fifteen years and a multi-state footprint later, it stands as maybe the most successful act of literalism in Arizona restaurant history.
The concept launched in the Grayhawk area of north Scottsdale and worked for the least mysterious reason possible: it delivered. The cheeseburgers were legitimately great — not bar-adequate, actually great — the beer list ran deep with Arizona brewing well represented, and the rooms were built for watching sports the way theaters are built for movies, with roughly 30 TVs apiece and sightlines from every seat. No theme, no chef narrative, no small plates. Beer, burgers, games.
The formula proved so repeatable that the brand became one of Arizona’s great homegrown chains, expanding across the Valley, the state, and eventually beyond it. Along the way the founding Grayhawk storefront itself went dark — retired while its offspring multiplied — and the Old Town location on Scottsdale Road took over as the brand’s hometown flagship, catching the spring training tide, the game-day crowds, and every foursome coming off a morning round.
Eating there feels exactly like the sign promised. In a city of concepts, that’s weirdly refreshing.
Game-day operations manual
The order is preordained. Get a cheeseburger. The menu offers builds from classic to indulgent, plus the expected wings-and-apps supporting cast, but the burger is the franchise and the kitchen’s pride — cooked properly, stacked sensibly, engineered for one-handed consumption during a critical third down. First-timers should take a build as-written before freelancing.
Work the taps like a local. The beer program is the name’s other half: a deep list where Arizona breweries get real shelf space alongside the nationals. Treat it as a rotating tour of the state’s brewing scene — the staff can steer you — and note that “cold” is enforced with the seriousness other bars reserve for wine temperature.
Timing is everything, and the calendar is brutal. The Old Town room sits at the south gateway of the neighborhood, minutes from the ballparks, which makes March its Super Bowl: Cactus League season floods the place before and after every nearby game. Actual big games — NFL Sundays, March Madness, anything involving Arizona teams — fill the TVs and the tables alike. The play is simple: arrive an hour early, claim your screen, and settle in. Weekday lunches and off-season afternoons are the mellow inverse, when it’s just a very good burger bar with highlights on mute.
Know your alternatives within the family. Multiple Scottsdale locations spread the load; the Old Town flagship has the energy, while the northern rooms serve their neighborhoods with shorter waits. Post-golf refueling is a founding use case and remains the brand’s spiritual core — nowhere in Scottsdale does the 19th hole better at scale.
Budget: price level two and honest about it. You will not be surprised by this bill, which after a weekend in Old Town can feel like a gift.
How a literal name conquered Arizona
Cold Beers & Cheeseburgers arrived at a telling moment in Scottsdale’s bar history. By 2011, the city’s drinking economy was splitting into extremes — Old Town accelerating toward bottle-service clubs on one end, craft-cocktail seriousness rising on the other — and the humble middle, the great American sports bar, was mostly ceded to national chains. The founders’ insight was that the middle was underserved, not obsolete: build the chain-quality operational machine, but with genuinely good food, local beer, and Arizona DNA, and the market was enormous.
The growth vindicated them at scale few local concepts reach. From the single Grayhawk room, the brand expanded across Scottsdale and the Valley, then statewide, then into other states — the kind of trajectory Scottsdale had previously produced with concepts like P.F. Chang’s and the Mastro’s empire, except built on fifteen-dollar burgers instead of expense accounts. That the original location eventually closed while the chain thrived is the standard biography of successful concepts: the prototype gets outgrown by the brand it proved.
The Old Town flagship, meanwhile, slots into a proud local lineage. Scottsdale’s sports-bar tradition runs deep — from old-guard hangs to the eternal Zipps rivalry — and the burger-forward wing of it includes cult rooms like Rehab Burger Therapy. Cold Beers competes by out-executing: more screens, colder beer, and a burger that doesn’t hide behind the game. During Phoenix Open week and the March baseball crush, it operates as critical infrastructure for the city’s sports-tourism economy.
Honest assessment: this is not a restaurant that will surprise you, and it isn’t trying — culinary adventurers should look elsewhere, and the big-game crowds are not for the noise-averse. But as a machine for delivering exactly what its name promises, it’s close to flawless, and there’s real integrity in that. Scottsdale exports a lot of glamour. It’s fitting that one of its most successful exports is just a great burger and a cold beer, correctly executed, thirty screens deep.