What is the Old Town Ski Lodge?
The nearest ski run is a long drive north. The Old Town Ski Lodge is a flight of stairs. It is the upstairs venue at Wasted Grain, 7295 E Stetson Dr, and its whole premise sits in the line it uses for a motto: “Always Winter in Old Town Scottsdale.”
The lodge says its menu is “inspired by some of the coolest après-ski bars around the world,” and the food follows the theme further than you’d expect. There is a Swiss cheese fondue pot with pretzel bites, asparagus spears and roasted red potatoes. There is a Bavarian pretzel with stone-ground mustard, a charcuterie board, a brie flatbread with pear and figs, and cake pops for dessert. Alongside those are the bar standards that keep a late night going: a slider trio, carnitas tacos, boneless wings, chicken tenders and mozzarella sticks.
It’s a weekend room, with posted hours of Friday and Saturday, 9 p.m. to 2 a.m. The rest of the week, the building’s life is downstairs, where Wasted Grain books bands and hosts game-day watch parties.
You’ll hear it called the Old Town Ski Lounge, which is how plenty of locals, and our own Wasted Grain page, have referred to it. The venue’s site and social accounts say Ski Lodge. It’s the same room.
Planning a night at the lodge
Eat early in the shift. The lodge opens at 9, and the first hour is the time for the fondue pot and the charcuterie board, when there’s room to share them. By 11 on a Saturday the room is a bar, and the food becomes something you eat standing up. The site also advertises a daily 4-to-7 half-price happy hour (excluding special-event days), but with the lodge itself posting weekend-night hours, check before planning around it.
Do the whole building. The smart move is to treat 7295 E Stetson as one evening: dinner and the tree-shaded patio downstairs at Wasted Grain, then up to the lodge when it opens. Wasted Grain itself is closed Monday through Wednesday, opens at 5 p.m. Thursday and Friday and at noon on weekends, so a Friday or Saturday covers both floors.
Book groups through Wasted Grain. VIP tables, bachelorette parties and private events for both venues run through the same phone line and booking system. On WM Phoenix Open weekend, during spring training and through the spring bachelorette peak, booking ahead is the only way to skip the line.
Get there without a car. The building is in the middle of the Entertainment District, where weekend parking is scarce and the city stripes dedicated rideshare pickup lanes. Our nightlife guide maps how a night moves through the surrounding blocks.
The second floor that keeps reinventing itself
Few rooms in Old Town have had a more useful second floor. When Martini Ranch opened here in 1994, it was a bar and grill with a staircase up to the Shaker Room, where local and touring bands played for most of two decades. Martini Ranch closed on October 12, 2013, and the building was sold, renovated and reopened in 2014 as Wasted Grain, which kept live music at the address.
The Ski Lodge is the latest use of that upstairs space, and it reflects how the district works now. Through the 2010s and into the 2020s, Old Town’s bars shifted toward theme and occasion: rooms built for bachelorette photos, watch parties and one specific mood. A ski chalet in the Sonoran Desert is a joke that sells itself, and fondue and pretzels give it more substance than a backdrop alone would.
The theme also fits a city whose tourism has always leaned on contrast. Scottsdale’s winter visitors come to escape snow, and a weekend bar that serves après-ski food in a room built for 2 a.m. trades on the same humor that once sold Hamptons brunches and tiki volcanoes elsewhere in Old Town.
The honest assessment: this is a novelty bar, and it knows it. The kitchen downstairs and the band calendar are what keep the building anchored. But as a way to spend the last hours of a Saturday on Stetson, a cheese fondue and a fake ski lodge make a better story than most of the alternatives on the block.