What was Devil’s Martini?
Scottsdale’s martini decade had three addresses, and Devil’s Martini was the imported one.
It came from Toronto, where Richard and Delania Geddes ran the original, and it landed in Old Town in 2001 in a squat, yellowish brick building with arched windows at 4175 N Goldwater Boulevard, at the Fifth Avenue shops. New Times’ Stephen Lemons, visiting in 2004, credited the building with a vague aura of malevolence, which was the idea. In 2003 the Geddeses opened a second room at 10825 N Scottsdale Road, just north of Shea, and the same year New Times’ Best of Phoenix named the chain’s drinks the best martini in the Valley.
The drink was the point and the drink was sweet. Vodka-based and fruit-flavored, no olives, no onions, three-ounce pours, $7.50 for a basic recipe, a cotton-candy punch in the critic’s words, with names like the Sex & the City and the Soprano. Around it the Geddeses built something closer to a nightclub than a lounge: a stark whitewashed main hall with raised platforms for go-go dancers, a second room with a big square bar and low eggshell couches, free cigarettes on the bar tops, bottles of Dom for anyone who could afford them, a velvet rope with bouncers in dark suits, a $10 cover for men and none for women.
It lasted a decade. On February 15, 2011 New Times reported that both Scottsdale locations would close for good after that Saturday; employees said the rooms had suffered a downturn and lost customers to nearby clubs. Arizona Foothills put it at the end of February 2011, and the Toronto location stayed open, which it described as remaining devilish. The honest verdict: Devil’s Martini was a well-made drink in a loud room, and the room outlived the fashion for the drink by about five years.
The martini, the rope and the cougar bar
Order from the sweet end. The 2003 award is the clearest record of the menu. The Sex & the City was vodka, amaretto, peach schnapps, orange juice and cranberry; the Soprano was Campari, triple sec, vodka and a splash of orange, the one pick with any bitterness in it. The Stoli-based Turner and Kaiser Soze rounded out the list, and the critic warned that the Stoli Razberi version was lethally poured. The house shooter, a year later, was a Red-Headed Slut: Jägermeister, peach schnapps and cranberry. If you wanted a dry gin martini, AZ88 on the Civic Center was and is the room for it.
Dress for the rope. The stated code was resort casual, and the dark-suited bouncers enforced it at the shoes. Women entered free; men paid $10. The crowd Lemons found in 2004 ran about 60 percent women, well dressed, 25 to 40, with bachelorette parties in the mix, and the night ended at 1 a.m.
Pick your room. The Goldwater lounge was the Old Town version, a block from the galleries and a short walk from Stetson Drive, where Martini Ranch had been pouring since 1994. The north room on Scottsdale Road served the Shea Corridor, and by its last five years it had become, in New Times’ words, a notorious haven for cougars, a reputation the paper repeated in the obituary without apology.
Know the calendar. Both rooms were built for the high season, when the resorts fill and a sweet three-ounce martini with go-go dancers is exactly what a visitor from Toronto expects of Scottsdale. The happy hour guide covers where the martini crowd drinks now; the Old Town nightlife guide has the current rope.
The martini wave and what it left
Devil’s Martini arrived at the top of a cycle. Martini Ranch had opened on Stetson in 1994 with a list that sprawled, AZ88 had been serving the serious version on the Civic Center since 1988, and by 2001 the Old Town bar map had a martini-bar tier between the dives and the new ultra-lounges like SIX. The Geddeses brought a Toronto formula into it, a nightclub that called itself a martini bar, and for a few years it worked well enough to clone north of Shea and to plan, in 2004, for San Diego and beyond.
The 2000s moved past it. The Entertainment District that grew up on Indian Plaza and Saddlebag Trail sold tables and bottles, not $7.50 cocktails, and the sweet-martini customer aged into the resort bars. By 2011 the employees’ own diagnosis was the simplest one: a downturn in business and patrons lost to other nearby clubs. The two rooms closed together, on the weekend of February 19 by the calendar, and the brand retreated to Canada. Who took either address afterward is not well recorded; we have not confirmed the current tenant of the Goldwater building or of 10825 N Scottsdale Road, and neither carries the name.
The Goldwater building is the better footnote. A squat brick box with arched windows on Goldwater Boulevard, a block from the Fifth Avenue shops, was an unlikely nightclub in 2001 and remains an unlikely site for one; the district’s gravity pulled east toward Saddlebag within a few years of the opening, and the Goldwater side of downtown went back to galleries, restaurants and hotels. The arched windows that Lemons found malevolent are the kind of detail that survives a tenant change, if the building has.
Honest assessment: Devil’s Martini was a competent, loud, slightly silly lounge that won a real award for a drink serious drinkers would not order, and that is a fair summary of Scottsdale nightlife around 2003. It belongs on every bar and club in Scottsdale in the lost column beside Martini Ranch, as the two ends of the martini decade: one closed because the district outgrew it, the other because the drink did.