What is Eagles Buffet?
Eagles Buffet is the all-you-can-eat room at Casino Arizona, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community’s original casino at 524 N 92nd Street, the northeast corner of McKellips Road and the Loop 101. It is one of the five restaurants in the permanent building the Community opened in September 2000, alongside Cholla Prime Steakhouse, the Willows, the 24-hour Salt River Café and the Arizona Room patio grill, and it is the room the casino’s regulars mean when they say they are going for crab legs.
The format is the full casino buffet: stations of American, Mexican, Italian and Asian dishes, a carving station, a salad and fruit bar, seafood, pastas and a dessert island with sugar-free options. What makes it different from the buffets that have closed across the Valley is the calendar. Every day of its five-day week has a theme and a price. Wednesday is all-you-can-eat crab legs at $59.95. Thursday and Friday lunch is dim sum, with a pho bowl on Thursdays, at $19.95. Thursday dinner is “culinary favorites,” Friday dinner prime rib and champagne, Saturday dinner international, all at $39.95. Saturday and Sunday brunch, with Bloody Marys and mimosas included, is $29.95. It is closed Monday and Tuesday. Children five and under eat free, tax and tip are extra, and reservations run through Yelp.
The casino calls it “newly renovated,” without a date, and by Experience Scottsdale’s listing the room takes a group of 252 with a private section for 100. The crowd is the casino’s: East Valley and Scottsdale retirees, families on Sunday, players-club members with comps, and on Wednesday a line that forms before the 4 p.m. opening.
The record is thin on history. Phoenix New Times reviewed the new building’s dining in February 2001 and named only Cholla and the Salt River Café, so the buffet’s exact debut is not in the press we found. What is documented is that it closed with the casino in March 2020, stayed closed through the phased reopening while the café carried on, and came back on a reduced five-day schedule that it still keeps. Our verdict: the last real casino buffet on Scottsdale’s border, worth the trip on crab Wednesday and dim sum Thursday, and ordinary the rest of the week.
How to eat at Eagles Buffet
Pick the day before you pick the dish. The buffet’s menu is its weekly calendar, and the price changes with it. Wednesday, 4 to 8 p.m., is crab legs at $59.95, the most expensive sitting and the one with a line. Thursday and Friday run a $19.95 dim sum lunch from 11 to 2:30, with Thursday’s “Pho-nomenon” beef and chicken noodle bowls alongside; dinner Thursday through Saturday, 4 to 8, is $39.95, with prime rib and champagne on Friday. Saturday brunch is 10 to 2:30 and Sunday brunch 10 to 4:30, both $29.95 with Bloody Marys and mimosas. Monday and Tuesday it is dark. The casino’s specials line is (480) 850-7768; holiday menus and prices differ.
Go early on crab night. Every account we found, from Tripadvisor regulars to a January 2026 feature in Taking the Kids, says the same thing: the room fills after 5:30, the crab goes out steaming in clusters and you can go back, but the supply runs thin late, and more than one reviewer arrived at 7:20 to find it gone. Arrive before the 4 p.m. opening, or at the latest by 4:30. On Friday and Saturday dinner the add-ons are a half-pound of peel-and-eat shrimp for $10 and a buy-one-get-one crab cluster for $6.
Order from the carving station and the dim sum. The carving station is prime rib or turkey sliced to order, and the prime rib is the dish reviewers praise most often after the crab. The dim sum lunch is the best value in the building at $19.95. The steam-table Mexican and Italian stations are where reviews turn lukewarm, and the 2026 feature’s phrase, “quality varies by category,” is a fair summary. Desserts, including the sugar-free ones, are better than a $20 lunch suggests.
Discounts and the club. Children five and under are free on the casino’s own page, and the 2026 feature reports lower prices for children under ten, military discounts and players-club benefits; join the free Salt River Rewards club at the desk before you pay. Tax and gratuity are not included.
Getting there. Take the McKellips exit from the 101; self-parking is free and large, and the buffet sits off the gaming floor near Cholla. If the line is too long, the Salt River Café around the corner is open 24 hours, and Cholla next door takes walk-ins in its lounge. See our guide to the Talking Stick district for the rest of the Community’s dining, and the Wandering Horse Buffet for the one that did not survive.
The buffet that came back when the others did not
Casino buffets were a Valley institution for twenty years and then, in one season, mostly were not. The Community’s two casinos closed in March 2020 and reopened on June 1 with grab-and-go food only. On the McKellips side the phased-reopening notice listed what was open, the Salt River Café and the Coffee Station, and what was not: Cholla, the CAZ Sports Bar, the Willows and “The Eagles Buffet.” Up the freeway, the Wandering Horse Buffet at Talking Stick Resort was held closed in the same wave and never reopened; the resort rebuilt its dining around Orange Sky, Tash and the Blue Coyote rooms instead. Eagles came back. The Community’s tourism listing announced it with the line “the beloved Eagles Buffet is back,” open five days a week with a Friday seafood dinner and a Sunday champagne brunch, and the casino’s site now calls the room newly renovated. Neither source gives a date, and we have not found press that does.
The buffet belongs to the casino’s founding generation. The Community signed its first gaming compact on August 18, 1998, opened Casino Arizona that summer as a 47-table poker room in a temporary building, and replaced it with the permanent 100,000-square-foot building in September 2000, with 500 slots, 50 table games, keno, bingo and 1,200 employees. The restaurants came with the building. New Times’ Carey Sweet, reviewing the new casino in February 2001, spent her column on Cholla’s $85-for-two dinners and mentioned the café; the buffet was not yet the draw, or not yet open. By the 2000s it was, and a Tripadvisor review from 2012 records the crab-leg nights, then on Wednesday and Thursday, at $17.50 a head. The 2026 price for the same night is $59.95, which is less a statement about this buffet than about what crab and labor cost after the pandemic.
What the buffet has never had is a chef’s name or a critic’s review. Its press is the casino’s own pages, the Community’s listings and a travel-site feature, which is the record for most casino buffets, and we have written from it rather than around it.
Honest assessment: Eagles is a good casino buffet on its theme days and an ordinary one otherwise. The dim sum lunch is the smart order, the crab night is the event, and the Mexican and Italian steam tables are what every buffet’s are. It survived because the McKellips casino draws a local, older, loyal crowd that expected it back, and because the Community decided one buffet was enough. If you want prime rib and crab legs without a white tablecloth, this is it. If you want a buffet that competes with Las Vegas, the Valley no longer has one.