What was Dakota?
Dakota was the Yari family’s answer to a question nobody in the Entertainment District had asked before: what if the nightclub also sold breakfast?
It stood at 7301 E Indian Plaza, on the Buckboard Trail side of the district, in a single-story building wedged between the W Scottsdale and Maya. All three belonged to the same people. Shawn Yari’s Triyar Entertainment Group ran the club and the hotel, and Phoenix New Times reported Dakota open on December 31, 2014, calling it a “California bistro-style restaurant” that became a bar and party venue at night. The architects at Brick & West, working for the Yaris’ Stockdale Capital, built it new: 4,700 square feet inside (New Times said 4,500), wood-plank floors, and glass doors that opened onto a 1,600-square-foot wraparound patio under mature olive trees.
The daytime pitch was local and organic food from 7 a.m., with a walk-up coffee and juice bar called Comoncy pouring cold-pressed coffee from 6:30. W guests could charge it to their rooms. After dark the movable dining tables cleared for a dance floor, a video grid of LED panels came on over it, and Dakota ran as a Top 40 club with live DJs and bottle service until 2 a.m. The lighting company that wired it said the brief was simple: the room had to be ready for the morning coffee crowd at 6 and the VIP crowd at midnight.
It lasted about five years. By the time Spellbound, the renamed Triyar, merged with Riot Hospitality in December 2019, ABC15 was calling it “the now-closed Dakota nightclub.” Nobody published the last night. The parcel is now The REMI., the hotel that opened on July 22, 2025. Our verdict: a clever idea in a good location that the owners outgrew, and the only Old Town club we know of that was replaced by something taller.
One room, two shifts
The morning was the honest part. Dakota’s patio, with its olive trees, gas lamps, lounge seating and fire pits, was one of the few genuinely pleasant places to sit on Indian Plaza before noon, and it had the only early coffee bar on the block. Breakfast ran daily from 7, lunch and dinner until 10 p.m., with a menu built around organic and local sourcing, comfort dishes, bar food and lighter plates. If you were staying at the W, it was the obvious place to eat without crossing a street.
The night was the business. Weekends were the draw. The doorman set the cover at his discretion, the dress code banned tank tops, shorts and flip-flops, cocktails ran about $15 to $20 and bottles $200 to $500, and the music was Top 40 cut with old-school hits and hip-hop. The club listings of the day recommended eating dinner there first and expecting a 20-to-40-minute wait at the door on a Saturday. In other words, it worked like every other room on the block once the sun went down, with the difference that you could watch the dining tables being wheeled away.
The events were the Yari style. In November 2015 Dakota hosted a Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show viewing party with a pre-party, a type of promotion the district’s clubs still run. Lighting trade magazines wrote it up for its Elation rig: moving-head fixtures over the tables that doubled as club effects, a 7.62-millimeter-pitch LED video grid over the dance floor, LED tape in the glass bar shelves, wash lights on the facade and the coffee-bar patio.
Getting there was never a problem; street parking was easy by district standards, and the W’s valet was next door. The Old Town nightlife guide covers what the block does now.
From the Yari bistro to the Yari hotel
Dakota belongs to the second act of the Yari family’s Entertainment District. In the 2000s Shawn and Steven Yari assembled the blocks between Fashion Square and Old Town and anchored them with the W Scottsdale in 2008. Maya, the pool day club, came in 2013 on the lot where Myst and Suede had stood. Dakota filled the gap between those two properties at the end of 2014, a small new building designed to feed hotel guests by day and keep them on the block at night.
It opened into a crowded 2010s market. Evening Entertainment Group had just split Axis-Radius into Bottled Blonde and the Livewire concert hall a block away, and the district’s dominant rooms were Riot Hospitality’s El Hefe and Whiskey Row on Saddlebag Trail. Dakota’s hybrid model, a real breakfast on one end of the day and bottle service on the other, was a hedge against the pure-nightclub economics that had worn out Axis-Radius. It is also the format that Bottled Blonde and HiFi later made standard on the block.
What killed it was not the crowd but the real estate. In December 2019 Spellbound Entertainment, the renamed Triyar, merged with Ryan Hibbert’s Riot Hospitality Group into a company called Culinary Culture; ABC15’s story on the deal listed Dakota as already closed. Five months later the Yaris’ Stockdale Capital unveiled the 264-page Scottsdale Collection master plan for the district, and its very first entitlement request was to replace “the Dakota Bar” with a boutique hotel. The Development Review Board approved a hotel of roughly 163 rooms, planned as the Maya Hotel and timed for the 2023 Super Bowl. Construction problems pushed it back more than two years, and it opened on July 22, 2025, as The REMI., Scottsdale’s first Autograph Collection hotel, with its lobby running straight into Maya.
Honest assessment: Dakota was a good patio and a competent club, and in a district full of rooms that were only one thing, being two things was a real idea. But it was always a placeholder for the land under it. The hotel that stands there now is the building the Yaris wanted all along. The full list of every bar and club in Scottsdale tracks the rest of the block’s turnover.