What was Mabel’s on Main?
Some Old Town addresses change hands and some change souls. 7018 E Main St did both in 2009.
For decades the building at Main Street and Goldwater Boulevard had been Mabel Murphy’s, a neighborhood bar with, by the end, a lot of Green Bay Packers on the walls. In 2009 chef Aaron May, then known for Over Easy and Sol y Sombra, bought it without knowing what he would do with it. When the Packers stuff came down, he said, he saw what a great space it was.
He and builder-designer Jason Anderson turned it into Mabel’s on Main, a “Mad Men-esque” lounge: walnut wainscoting, chocolate leather booths and wingback chairs, a pressed-tin ceiling, chandeliers against exposed brick, and a sign in the window about the dress code. The menu was dinner-only and pointedly grown-up, with raw-bar plates, oysters Rockefeller, wagyu Salisbury steak and deviled eggs with caviar, alongside long scotch and martini lists. It opened around the turn of 2010.
For four and a half years it was one of the places Old Town went for a proper cocktail, and the one with the best secret: a VIP room behind a bookshelf door, with a two-way mirror onto the bar. In August 2014 May sold it to Genuine Concepts, the group behind The Vig. They kept almost everything, added a patio and opened The Beverly on August 28. If you want to sit in Mabel’s room, you still can.
How to have done Mabel’s
Go at Matinee time. The happy hour was named like a cinema showing and priced like one: one menu flipped from regular prices to Matinee prices, about half off drinks and plates, from 5 to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday in 2012. Deviled eggs three ways, with caviar, bacon or chive, were $4 to $5; a butter lettuce salad with golden beets was $4; flatbreads were $6. By 2013 there was a reverse happy hour from midnight to 1:30 a.m. too.
Order the cocktails, and pick carefully. Mabel’s had a reputation in the Valley’s bartending world for its drinks, and its Vintage and Vinyl Sundays, launched in 2011 with half-price drinks for restaurant workers, were in New Times’ words the closest thing to a free master’s course in the art of the cocktail. Full price was $12, which reviewers called steep. A 2013 happy-hour review found the room and the staff spot on and the drinks uneven, a gin Lavender and Lace that smelled mostly of egg white among them.
Use the room for what it was. This was not a dance floor or a sports bar. It was low light, deep booths and a place to talk, on the gallery stretch of Main Street rather than the bar blocks to the north. In the early evening, New Times found it warm and welcoming; after sunset it got sleek and exclusive, and the hidden room did the rest.
Know who else was in the neighborhood. May was busy in the same years. He ran The Lodge in Old Town, opened the beer café Praying Monk on First Street in 2012 (it became Bootleggers in 2013) and later turned Shotgun Betty’s on Stetson into Goodwood Tavern.
A handoff, not a demolition
Most Old Town closings end with a bulldozer or a brand-new concept that erases the old room. Mabel’s on Main is the rare case where the closing preserved the place. When Genuine Concepts bought it in 2014, they said they would not touch the interior; they changed the name, softened the attitude toward something more “approachable and lively,” brought in chef Jorge Gomez and bar manager Rich Heider, and added a patio. A 2015 review noted that regulars might not even notice the name had changed. The dark wood, brick and tin ceiling that May and Anderson built in 2009 are still the room at The Beverly on Main.
That continuity runs through people as well as walls. The Beverly was named for the coastal Massachusetts hometown of Tucker Woodbury, a Genuine Concepts partner who had opened Old Town’s Rockin’ Horse Saloon across from the Coach House back in 1991. And the building itself has now been three different bars without leaving the drinking business, which on a block where galleries close at six is its own kind of record.
Mabel’s also marks a turn in Scottsdale’s drinking. It opened at the end of 2009, the year New Times kept a running list of dead Scottsdale nightspots, when big clubs and ultra-lounges like SIX were closing. What came next, in our reading, was smaller: cocktail lounges, hidden rooms and bartenders as the draw, and Mabel’s, with its bookshelf door and its Sunday cocktail classes, was early to it. Its descendants are the rooms in our guide to Scottsdale speakeasies.
Honest assessment: the drinks were sometimes better in the description than the glass, and $12 cocktails in 2011 earned the side-eye they got. But the room was one of the best-designed bars Old Town has had, and it was so good that its buyers kept it. That is the highest compliment one bar owner can pay another.