What is Frasher’s Tavern?
There are two Frasher’s in Scottsdale’s history, and it’s easy to mix them up. The first, Frasher’s Steakhouse & Lounge, was a neighborhood steakhouse on south Scottsdale Road from 1999 to 2015. The second is this one: Frasher’s Tavern, at the northwest corner of Drinkwater Boulevard and Indian School Road in Old Town, run by the same man.
George Frasher is the owner, operator and chef. He studied hotel and restaurant management at the University of Missouri and learned the steakhouse business at Sam’s Steakhouse in St. Louis, where the owner, a retired Anheuser-Busch president named Denny Long, mentored him. When the Scottsdale Road steakhouse closed in 2015, Frasher kept going in Arcadia with Frasher’s Smokehouse and then Mrs. Chicken. The name came back to Scottsdale in 2019 as this tavern, which brought his steaks downtown.
The menu still reads like it came from Missouri. Steaks are Iowa Premium beef: filet, a 14-ounce ribeye, and prime rib on weekends. The starters include toasted ravioli, the breaded, fried ravioli St. Louis is known for, and the house salad uses Provel, the city’s processed cheese. Dessert is the Original Gooey Butter Cake, the St. Louis bakery cake Frasher plated at the first restaurant and says no one had served that way before. Fish comes from Scottsdale’s Chula Seafood, and there are ribs, a pork chop and a house cheeseburger for anyone not ordering steak.
It isn’t a scene steakhouse. It’s a chef-owned dining room and bar on a corner most visitors drive past, and it has collected Wine Spectator Awards of Excellence, a 2025 DiRoNA award and Phoenix Magazine’s best-desserts nods along the way.
Ordering, timing and the gooey butter cake
Start at the bar. Happy hour runs from 4 to 6 p.m. every day, which is unusual for a steakhouse, with $7 classic cocktails (martini, Old Fashioned, Moscow mule, margarita), $4 domestic beers, $6 wines and small plates like sliders, tacos and a cup of the peppercorn steak soup. For a pre-game dinner before a spring-training game at Scottsdale Stadium, a short walk south, this is the move.
Then order like a regular. The ribeye is the steak to get, and the filet comes petite or large. Prime rib is a weekend-only cut, so if that’s what you came for, book Friday or Saturday. Sides are à la carte and include green chile mac and cheese, au gratin potatoes, smoked corn and garlic mashed potatoes. For the table, the toasted ravioli, meat or jalapeño-cheese, is the St. Louis signature.
Don’t skip dessert. The gooey butter cake is the reason the Frasher’s name has a following, and it has stayed on the menu through every version of the restaurant. There’s also a house dessert of golden sponge cake with Baileys and butterscotch, crème brûlée and tiramisu, plus ports and Sauternes by the glass.
Logistics are easy. The restaurant validates parking, which is rare in Old Town. It’s across Indian School from the Civic Center, a short walk from the Hilton Garden Inn and the Scottsdale Marriott Old Town, and a few blocks south of the Stetson Drive bars. For more beef across the city, see the best steakhouses in Scottsdale.
How a south Scottsdale steakhouse ended up on Drinkwater
Frasher’s story starts in the Midwest. At the University of Missouri, Frasher studied hospitality; at Sam’s Steakhouse in St. Louis, he learned from Denny Long, who had run Anheuser-Busch, and he picked up wine knowledge through the Bommarito family. He brought all of it to Arizona in 1999, when he opened Frasher’s Steakhouse & Lounge on the stretch of Scottsdale Road between Thomas and McDowell. It was an independent steakhouse in a part of town the dining press mostly ignored, with St. Louis dishes nobody else in the Valley served.
That restaurant lasted almost sixteen years and closed in 2015 after its landlord died. Frasher had already started a barbecue business on the side, which became Frasher’s Smokehouse in Arcadia, followed by Mrs. Chicken, his Nashville hot chicken shop. He didn’t give up on steak. In 2019 he reopened the steakhouse idea downtown as Frasher’s Tavern.
The location matters. The corner of Drinkwater and Indian School is the civic end of Old Town: the Civic Center is across the road, the Hilton Garden Inn down the block stands on part of the old Scottsdale High School campus, and the tall white pillars at this intersection copy the columns of the school’s Old Main. Drinkwater itself, named for Mayor Herb Drinkwater, is part of the one-way loop the city built to carry traffic around downtown. Spring-training crowds, City Hall staff and hotel guests walk past, but it’s quieter than the bar blocks to the north or the gallery blocks to the west, which suits a steakhouse with regulars.
The honest assessment: Frasher’s Tavern doesn’t compete with the national steakhouses for glamour, and prices for the big cuts are steakhouse prices. What it has is a chef-owner on the premises, a St. Louis menu you won’t find elsewhere in Arizona, and a dessert whose history here goes back to 1999. When the original closed, south Scottsdale lost its steakhouse. Old Town got the next one.