What was Kelly’s at SouthBridge?
SouthBridge was supposed to be Old Town’s grown-up restaurant row, and for most of its life it has been a revolving door. Kelly’s was the tenant that stayed.
Kelly’s at SouthBridge opened in 2012 at 7117 E 6th Ave, an 8,000-square-foot restaurant, bar and lounge on the canal side of the development, across the water from the Scottsdale Waterfront. The pitch was a gastropub in the specific 2012 sense: traditional pub classics, fish and chips and wings and a serious burger, alongside more ambitious modern plates, in a room big enough for a game-day crowd and a patio pointed at the busiest walking route in Old Town.
The burger did the rest. In 2013 the Four Cut Burger, built from a blend of four cuts of beef, was voted Best Burger in the Valley by both Phoenix Magazine and Arizona Foothills Magazine, and the same year the terrace collected Best Outdoor Patio from Arizona Foothills and Best Place to People Watch from Scottsdale Living. For a first-year restaurant on a block that had already buried better-reviewed concepts, that was a remarkable haul.
Kelly’s ran for years as a happy-hour and weekend fixture on 6th Avenue while the neighborhood’s nightlife boom roared a block south. It closed without a farewell announcement; the directories flipped to permanently closed and the website now points at an unrelated business. Honest verdict: it was never a great kitchen, but it was a very good pub with one great burger and the best seat on the canal, which is a rarer combination in Old Town than it sounds.
The patio, the burger and the block
The patio was the product. SouthBridge’s canal walk connects the Waterfront shops and the bridges to Stetson Drive, which means everyone crossing Old Town on foot passed Kelly’s terrace. A late-afternoon table there, especially in the January-to-April season when the weather is the whole reason people move here, put you in front of a parade: gallery-walk couples, bachelorette parties in matching shirts, spring-training crowds in the wrong team’s hat. The 2013 people-watching award was not a stretch.
The Four Cut Burger was the order. Medium, with fries, and a beer from the tap list rather than the cocktail menu. The burger was what the kitchen did best by a wide margin, and the awards made ordering anything else feel like a first-visit mistake. The rest of the menu, fish and chips, wings, salads, a rotating list of more modern plates, was competent pub food priced in the friendly two-dollar-sign range.
Happy hour was the rhythm. The room’s size made it a natural for the after-work crowd from the Scottsdale Road office towers and the pre-game crowd heading to the Stetson Drive bars. Weekend brunch and big-game afternoons filled the inside; weekday evenings belonged to the patio.
Geography helped and hurt. Kelly’s sat a few doors from Geisha A Go Go and a short walk from the Stetson clubs, close enough to catch the overflow and far enough to avoid the worst of it. During Phoenix Open week and spring-training Saturdays the patio was a battle worth fighting; the rest of the year it was simply the best casual seat on the water.
The tenant that outlasted SouthBridge’s promise
To understand why a decent gastropub deserves a page, you have to understand the block it sat on. SouthBridge opened in 2008 as the canal-front development that was going to give Old Town a design-forward restaurant row, and it launched into the teeth of the financial crisis. Its early tenants were ambitious and doomed: Digestif, Payton Curry’s Cal-Italian kitchen with one of the Valley’s first serious cocktail programs, lasted barely two years; Peter Kasperski’s Cowboy Ciao across Stetson Drive hung on until 2018 and then collapsed in a single day. For its first decade, SouthBridge was the place Old Town’s best ideas went to run out of money.
Kelly’s arrived in 2012 with a less romantic thesis: the block did not need another auteur, it needed a big, friendly pub with a patio. That read was correct. The 2013 awards gave it a burger reputation to match the location, and the happy-hour economics of an 8,000-square-foot room on the neighborhood’s main pedestrian artery carried it through years when more celebrated neighbors closed. It occupied the same gastropub territory that Citizen Public House had claimed on 5th Avenue in 2011, minus the chef pedigree and plus the canal, and it lasted long enough to watch the 2010s nightlife boom transform the district around it.
The ending was undramatic, which is its own kind of Old Town story. No bankruptcy filing, no last-night party covered by the press; the restaurant simply stopped, listings flipped to closed, and the domain drifted to an unrelated business. SouthBridge has kept cycling tenants, and the 6th Avenue stretch has lost other long-runners, Geisha A Go Go among them.
Honest assessment: Kelly’s was a solid B-plus pub with an A-plus location and one A-plus burger, and its real achievement was durability in a spot that had defeated better restaurants. Locals who spent years of happy hours on that terrace still call the corner Kelly’s, which in a neighborhood this forgetful is about as much immortality as a gastropub can expect.