What is Dynamite Grille?
The best-kept secret in north Scottsdale dining is not a secret at all. It is a clubhouse restaurant with a sign on Dynamite Boulevard, and most people drive past it on the way to something more expensive.
Dynamite Grille is the restaurant at Troon North Golf Club, the 36-hole desert landmark that Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish carved out of the boulder fields below Pinnacle Peak. The Monument course opened on March 13, 1990; the Pinnacle course followed five years later, and its 18th green now sits directly under the grille’s patio. Behind the green, filling the sky, is Pinnacle Peak itself. There is no better-placed dining room in the city, and it is open to anyone with a car.
That last part is the point. Troon North is a daily-fee public club, and the grille serves breakfast, lunch and dinner to walk-ins seven days a week. A renovation turned the old clubhouse room into a modern indoor-outdoor space with fire tables on the terrace, a full bar, a daily happy hour and theme nights through the week. The menu is contemporary American without pretension — a prime rib and cheddar croissant, ahi sliders, mahi tacos, meatloaf, a beer-can chicken served with the house garlic bread, and a Friday fish fry that draws the neighborhood as reliably as the golfers.
Honest verdict: the cooking is solid clubhouse food, done with more care than the category requires. The view is the reason to come, and the view is worth the drive.
Eating at Troon North without a tee time
The formula is simple once you know the club is public: arrive as a diner, park where the golfers park, and walk through the clubhouse to the patio.
Timing is everything. The grille runs from early breakfast through dinner, but its two great hours are late morning, when the first groups are making the turn and the terrace is calm, and the last hour before sunset from November through April, when the Pinnacle’s finishing hole fills with foursomes and the mountain behind them turns the color of the restaurant’s name. Happy hour lands in that window. Fire tables come on as the temperature drops.
Order like a regular. At lunch, the prime rib and cheddar croissant is the sandwich people drive up for, the sunset ahi tuna sliders are the light option that isn’t, and the Baja mahi tacos are the patio order. Dinner belongs to the beer-can chicken — a whole bird, the Dynamite garlic bread beside it — or the meatloaf if the night is cool. The Friday fish fry is a neighborhood event. Gluten-free options are marked on the menu, which is rarer than it should be at golf clubs.
Sit on the rail. Inside is handsome and air-conditioned, which matters from May to September, but the patio’s front row over the 18th green is the seat. Ask for it; the staff are used to non-golfers wanting the view.
Logistics: Dynamite Boulevard is the road, the club’s lot is free and enormous, and the drive from Old Town is a real forty minutes. Pair it with a hike at Pinnacle Peak Park or a morning at Troon’s practice range and it becomes a day rather than a detour.
From cowboy steakhouses to clubhouse patios
Before Troon North, this end of Scottsdale ate at picnic tables. The Jomax and Alma School corridor a few miles south held the cowboy steakhouse belt — Pinnacle Peak Patio, Reata Pass, Greasewood Flat — where mesquite smoke and country bands were the entire dining proposition and the peak was a backdrop for tourists in paper bibs. Troon North’s arrival in 1990 signaled the replacement: gated golf, resort money and a quieter kind of night out. When the Four Seasons opened at Crescent Moon Drive in 1999 with Troon North as its home course, the transformation was complete, and one by one the steakhouses closed.
Dynamite Grille is what took the cowboy steakhouse’s place as the public room under the mountain. That is not a knock. Weiskopf’s 2007 reconfiguration of the two courses, which blended holes and reset the sequence, left the Pinnacle’s 18th under the clubhouse and gave the restaurant its stage. The subsequent renovation of the grille itself — modern lines, an indoor-outdoor wall, fire tables — was a bet that neighbors in Troon, Estancia and the Pinnacle Peak foothills would treat a golf club as their local, the way Grayhawk had trained its own neighborhood to do. The bet paid.
It also fills a gap the resort corridor leaves open. Talavera at the Four Seasons is the special-occasion room out here, priced accordingly; the grille is the Tuesday version, with much the same mountain in the window. For anyone working the city’s public courses without a membership, it is also the rare clubhouse where the food is a reason to stay rather than a reason to leave — see our notes on golf without a membership.
Honest assessment: Dynamite Grille will not appear on a best-restaurants list, and it doesn’t need to. It is a good kitchen with the best view in Scottsdale, open to the public at clubhouse prices, at the end of a road named for what the developers used to blast the boulders. Go at four in February. Order the chicken. Watch the peak change color.