What was Dos Gringos?
For nineteen years, if you wanted to drink outdoors in Old Town before the sun went down, you went to a fake beach bar on a real shopping lane.
Dos Gringos opened on Craftsman Court in 1996, the creation of Brian Roerich, who mortgaged his house and maxed out his credit cards to build it. The concept was borrowed from the beach cantinas of Rocky Point, the Sonoran resort town Arizonans have driven to for long weekends since the 1970s: open-air, cheap, loud, indifferent to the clock. Roerich put that idea in a two-story, roughly 9,000-square-foot building with a patio bar downstairs and a rooftop bar above, and Old Town — then a town of galleries, cowboy steakhouses and a nightlife scene still finding its center — took to it immediately.
It became the neighborhood’s day-drinking headquarters and its weekend engine. Spring-training afternoons, post-golf Fridays, bachelorette Saturdays: the rooftop filled first, the patio filled next, and by dark the whole court hummed. The food was Mexican-adjacent bar fare and nobody pretended otherwise. The margaritas and buckets of beer were the business.
Roerich turned the formula into a chain — Tempe near ASU, then Chandler and Mesa — and a string of theme bars, before IRS troubles in 2008 forced a 2009 sale. The Scottsdale original outlived his ownership by six years, poured its last as Dos Gringos on November 17, 2015, and was reborn within a week as Old Town Gringos under Chicago owners. That version ended in June 2019, when the landlord changed the locks. The verdict, honestly: Dos Gringos was never a good restaurant. It was a great bar, and Old Town has not replaced it.
What an afternoon there was actually like
The ritual started with the stairs. You could drink downstairs on the patio, and plenty did, but the rooftop was the point — a rail over Craftsman Court, the Fifth Avenue rooftops beyond, and enough sun to justify the sunglasses at noon. Regulars claimed rail spots early on spring-training days, when the Cactus League crowds walked over from the ballpark bars, and stayed until the light went orange.
The menu was simple and honest about itself. Margaritas by the glass or pitcher, buckets of beer on ice, shots that arrived in numbers, and a kitchen turning out tacos, nachos and burgers that existed to keep people upright. Nobody reviewed the food; nobody asked for the wine list. The staff were young, fast and unbothered, and the soundtrack was whatever the decade’s beach-bar playlist demanded.
The crowd moved through the day in shifts. Lunch brought the office escapees and golfers; afternoon brought the day-drinkers and out-of-town bachelor parties; by nine the patio belonged to the club crowd warming up before heading to the entertainment district blocks. Friday and Saturday nights turned Craftsman Court itself into an overflow room, and the noise carried down to Fifth Avenue in a way the galleries did not always appreciate.
What made it work was the contrast. Craftsman Court is one of Old Town’s oldest and quietest shopping lanes — a 1950s cul-de-sac with shaded courtyards, the same block where Trader Vic’s had held its corner from 1962 to 1990 and where FnB would later win James Beard hardware. Dropping a Rocky Point bar into that setting was either sacrilege or genius, and for nineteen years the till said genius.
Rocky Point on Craftsman Court, and how it ended
Dos Gringos arrived at a hinge moment. In 1996, Old Town’s nightlife was still anchored on Fifth Avenue — Anderson’s Fifth Estate and its neighbors had run the scene since the 1970s — but the money and the crowds were beginning to drift toward the blocks that would become the entertainment district. Roerich’s bar sat exactly between the two, and it borrowed from both: the Fifth Avenue location and the party-district energy. The beach-cantina concept was also, in retrospect, a perfect piece of Arizona anthropology. Rocky Point was where the state went to drink without rules; Dos Gringos offered the same thing without the four-hour drive.
The founder’s arc was pure Scottsdale nightlife. Roerich leveraged the original into a mini-empire — the college-town Tempe location, the East Valley outposts, Sugar Daddy’s in Scottsdale and Joe’s Apartment in Tempe — and then hit the wall that catches many bar impresarios: IRS troubles in 2008, a forced sale in 2009 to a group that later developed the Bourbon Jacks concept. The Scottsdale original kept running under new hands, but the entrepreneur who built it was gone.
The end came in two acts. In November 2015, Chicago-based Glass Half Full Hospitality bought the Craftsman Court location, closed it on the 17th and reopened it roughly a week later as Old Town Gringos, keeping the cantina bones and promising a new concept to follow. What followed was a slow fade; the same group’s Phoenix ventures also struggled, and on June 10, 2019, landlord Southwest Retail Group took possession of the building and locked the operators out.
Honest assessment: Dos Gringos was a product of its time, and its time — the 2010s shift of Old Town’s drinking to the bottle-service rooms around Indian Plaza, like Whiskey Row and El Hefe — is what killed it as much as any landlord. But it was the last great cheap rooftop in the neighborhood, and the people who spent their twenties on it remember exactly which rail they stood at.