What is Pinard Wine Bar & Lounge?
Pinard Wine Bar & Lounge is the European wine bar on the southeast corner of Hayden Road and Thompson Peak Parkway, at 20469 N Hayden Road, and it opened on Thursday, November 7, 2024. The name is French slang for red wine, and the owner is Letty Ebel, a Denver native who had visited the Valley since the early 1990s, bought a vacation home here in the early 2000s and moved to Scottsdale full-time in 2020. Her husband, Jason Ebel, co-founded Two Brothers Brewing in Illinois, and the family’s restaurants run from Two Brothers Tap House and Roundhouse in the Midwest to The Craftsman Cocktails & Kitchen, which occupied this very room from October 2020 until Pinard replaced it.
The pitch is a slower European evening in a corner of North Scottsdale that mostly eats at 6:30 and leaves by 8. Ebel’s family travels to Paris as often as it can and her daughter spent a year in Milan, and the bar is built around what they found there: a daily aperitivo from 3 to 6 with complimentary bites, a list of more than 40 wines by the glass and more than 200 bottles, mostly European and chosen with a lead sommelier through local importers, and a cellar that goes out of its way to pour things the Valley’s other wine bars do not, like an Aglianico from Campania that Ebel singled out in the opening announcement.
The kitchen belongs to Sidney Goodman, an Arizona-born Marine veteran of several Middle East tours who went to Le Cordon Bleu in Orlando after the service and cooked at Tonto Bar & Grill in Cave Creek, Binkley’s and Houston’s before this. His menu is classic European with a steakhouse’s comfort level: beef bourguignon over mashed potatoes, ratatouille, moules frites, foie gras and cheese plates, a bone-in veal chop with Gorgonzola, wine-braised pork cheek and several cuts of prime steak. The room is a casual bar, a “vibey” dining area in the owner’s word, a west-facing patio and a private wine room reserved for members of Le Club Pinard.
It is for the Grayhawk and DC Ranch neighborhoods that surround the corner, and for anyone north of the 101 who has run out of patience with cabernet-only lists. Our verdict: the wine program is the most European in north Scottsdale, the happy hour is a genuine bargain on it, and the food is better than a wine bar needs, which is the Craftsman’s inheritance.
How to drink at Pinard
Come for the aperitivo. Happy hour runs 3 to 6 p.m. every day the bar is open: 20 percent off every pour and every bottle, $2 off cocktails and beer, food specials, and complimentary small bites with a glass of wine or a cocktail. Because the discount applies to the whole list rather than a short house pour, it is the best hour to explore the European side of the cellar. The room is quiet at 3; by 5:30 on a Thursday it has filled with neighbors, and the dinner crowd from Grayhawk and DC Ranch arrives around 6. See our happy hour guide for the competition.
Let the sommelier pour. The list is more than 40 by the glass and more than 200 by the bottle, mostly French, Italian and Spanish, sourced through local distributors and importers. Ask for the Aglianico, or for whatever southern Italian or Loire bottle is open; the point of the place is the things you have not tasted. There are cocktails and beer, but a Two Brothers family room that chose to lead with wine is telling you something. For the wider field, see Scottsdale’s wine tasting rooms.
Order the bourguignon. Ebel names the beef bourguignon over buttery mashed potatoes as her own favorite, and it is the dish the opening coverage led with. The posted menu lists shareables at a steakhouse’s price: grilled beef skewers with chimichurri and blistered peppers ($22), pan-seared crab cakes with charred lemon and citrus aioli ($24), moules frites ($24), Cubano empanadas of roast pork, ham and Swiss with mustard-lime crema ($18), American wagyu sliders on brioche ($24) and a trois fromages flatbread ($18). Entrées include ratatouille, the bone-in veal chop with Gorgonzola, wine-braised pork cheek and prime steaks; entrée prices were not on the page we could read. Dessert is a Basque cheesecake ($12) or seasonal gelato ($9).
Timing and booking. Listings we found put hours at Tuesday through Saturday 3 to 9 p.m. and Sunday 3 to 8 p.m., closed Monday; the bar’s own site confirms the daily 3-to-6 happy hour and the Monday closure but does not post full hours, so check before a late dinner. Reservations are on OpenTable, where the bar carries a 4.5 rating on a few dozen reviews and an “expensive” price tag; walk-ins are easy before 6. The members’ lounge is open Thursday through Saturday nights. Private events book through the bar, and ticketed Wines of the Moment tastings were listed for October 24 and 31, 2026.
Getting there. The corner is Hayden and Thompson Peak, north of the 101, in the strip center on the southeast corner with its own lot. The patio, which the Craftsman built for sunsets, is the seat from November through March. The crowd is the neighborhood, which here means golf-club members, second-home owners and the snowbird season. What to skip: the cocktails, which are fine but are not why you drove here.
From a brewer’s gastropub to a wine bar on the same corner
The corner has a short, telling history. It had been Tavern Americana. In October 2020 Jason Ebel, co-founder of Illinois’ Two Brothers Brewing, took the space and opened The Craftsman Cocktails & Kitchen there, in the middle of the pandemic, with Christopher Nicosia, an Arizona Culinary Hall of Fame inductee, running a scratch kitchen of Volcano Pork, chashu ramen and chickpea-cake sandwiches. The Craftsman prospered when it should not have, added a Tempe location in December 2022 and a Litchfield Park one in October 2023, and that, by Mouth by Southwest’s later account, was the peak.
Pinard was the family’s next idea for the original room, and it was Letty’s. She announced it in October 2024 as a concept built on decades of French and Italian food and wine and years of travel, with chef Sidney Goodman, a list heavy on bottles no other Valley bar carried, a daily aperitivo and a members’ club. “Our goal is to offer a place where everyone can relax and try new wines,” she said in the announcement. It opened on Thursday, November 7, 2024, with a grand-opening party, holiday-party bookings already open, and the Craftsman’s patio and bones intact.
The timing was good for the wine bar and bad for the rest of the family’s Valley portfolio. The Litchfield Park Craftsman closed in 2025; the Tempe one closed abruptly in March 2026, its website and phone gone without a notice, leaving Pinard as the Ebels’ only Valley restaurant. That makes the wine bar more than a side project. It is the concept that survived, and the one the family has chosen to put its name behind. Scottsdale.com profiled Ebel in February 2025 in its Feature Friday series, the Scottsdale Independent, City Sun Times and In Business ran the opening, and the bar has built a steady calendar of ticketed tastings and private events since.
It also fills a real gap. North Scottsdale’s wine bars have mostly been at the Kierland & Quarter end of Scottsdale Road, Sorso chief among them, and the Hayden corridor north of the 101 has been steakhouses and country-club bars. A European-leaning list with a 3 p.m. aperitivo at Grayhawk’s edge had not existed. What the record does not say: the seat count, the square footage, the price of a Le Club Pinard membership, the entrée prices, and whether Goodman is still at the stove in late 2026; the bar’s site and OpenTable listing were live when we checked.
Honest assessment: Pinard is a neighborhood wine bar with a better cellar than its corner deserves and food that remembers the gastropub it replaced. It is not cheap, the hours are short, and it is not a destination for anyone south of Shea. For the 2020s north Scottsdale resident who wants to taste a Campanian red at 3:30 on a Thursday for 20 percent off, it is the only answer on Hayden Road, and a good one.