What is Goldie’s Sports Cafe?
Every neighborhood in Scottsdale that was built in the 1980s got one shopping center, and the lucky ones got a bar in it that never left. Scottsdale Ranch got Goldie’s Sports Cafe, which has been in the Mercado at Scottsdale Ranch at 10135 E Via Linda, Suite E-123, on the corner of Via Linda and Mountain View Road, across from Scottsdale Ranch Park, since 1993.
It is family-owned and operated, by one family who, as the website puts it, live here as well. That family also runs Zipps Sports Grills, which dates its own run to 1995 and now lists 14 Valley locations, with Goldie’s first on the list. Both brands make the same point in the same words: not a chain, not a franchise, not a national brand. Goldie’s is the older sibling, with its own name, its own website and a few of its own dishes.
The layout is the reason it works. Downstairs is a large, family-friendly dining room, a kids’ arcade game room, a wall of HD screens and a misted patio. Upstairs is adults only: pool tables, darts, shuffleboard, Golden Tee, pinball and a Buckhunter machine. One building serves a Little League team dinner and a fantasy-football draft at the same time without either side noticing the other.
The kitchen is a large scratch menu with personalized kids’ menus, wings in the family’s golden sauce, burgers, a honey balsamic salad that regulars top with golden wings, three specialty pizzas offered only at Goldie’s, and a house margarita called the Goldierita. There is a happy hour every day. Our verdict: the most useful sports bar on the east side of the 101, and at price level one, the cheapest.
Downstairs for the kids, upstairs for the game
Hours worth knowing. Monday through Wednesday 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., Thursday and Friday to midnight, Saturday 9 a.m. to midnight and Sunday 9 a.m. to 11 p.m., with the kitchen closing half an hour before the bar. The 9 a.m. weekend opening is for the early kickoffs; Saturday the kitchen starts at 10, Sunday at 9, so a Sunday NFL breakfast is a real option.
Pick your floor. With children, stay downstairs: the dining room is big, the kids’ menus are personalized, the arcade takes care of the wait and the patio misters make May and September bearable. Without children, go up. The adults-only room has pool, darts and shuffleboard and a regular Sunday fantasy league that has met there for years, which makes it the quietest loud room in Scottsdale on a football afternoon.
What to order. Wings, golden; the honey balsamic salad with golden wings on it, which sounds wrong and is the regulars’ order; a burger; or one of the three Goldie’s-only pizzas. The Goldierita is the house drink, and the daily happy hour is the time to have two. Prices are the family’s trademark, well under anything in Old Town for the same plate.
The calendar. Spring training brings the Salt River Fields crowd down Via Linda in March; Cardinals Sundays, Suns playoff nights and March Madness fill every screen. Youth-sports weekends at Scottsdale Ranch Park across the street send whole teams over after games, and the bar books large-party events through its website.
Getting there. Shopping-center lot parking at Via Linda and Mountain View, south of Shea and east of the 101. It is the natural stop after a greenbelt ride or a day at the park, and ten minutes from the Shea Corridor hotels. For the rest of the city’s screens, see our happy hour guide and Scottsdale with kids.
The family bar that grew a chain
Scottsdale Ranch was a 1980s master-planned community around a man-made lake, and the Mercado at Scottsdale Ranch was its Main Street, with, from 1993, a sports bar with a kids’ room. Goldie’s opened into a Scottsdale that still had its neighborhood taverns, and it built one for families on purpose, which was less common then than it is now. The two-story split, adults upstairs and everyone downstairs, was the smart idea, and it has not changed in three decades.
Two years later the same family opened the first Zipps Sports Grill, and the chain that grew out of it, 14 rooms from Ahwatukee to Gilbert, is the one most of the Valley knows. The site’s guide to the Camelback Road Zipps covers the sauce and the game-day ritual; the Hayden Road original is the McCormick Ranch sibling three miles west. Goldie’s sits outside the naming, which is why it is easy to miss that the oldest room in the family is the one with its own name. The family has never published founders’ names or an origin story for either brand, and we are not going to invent one.
In the city’s bar history Goldie’s belongs with the survivors of the 1990s neighborhood-bar era, alongside older rooms like Mabel Murphy’s, and it has outlasted the Via Linda bars that came and went around it, Teakwoods among them. The 2010s sports-bar boom put chains on every corner of the Airpark; the 2020s saw Zipps close its Frank Lloyd Wright room. Goldie’s did not move, expand or rebrand.
Honest assessment: the food is good sports-bar food, not a destination, and the downstairs is loud by design. The upstairs is one of the better-kept secrets in east Scottsdale, and the price-to-screen ratio is unbeatable. Goldie’s earns its place on our list of every bar and club in Scottsdale as the family-owned original behind the Valley’s best-known sports-grill name.