What is Pour Decisions?
For nineteen years, the place to drink on a roof in Old Town without checking into a hotel was a fake beach cantina on Craftsman Court. Pour Decisions Patio & Kitchen is what that address became.
It opened in 2023 at 4209 N Craftsman Ct, the building that housed Dos Gringos from 1996 to 2015 and its short-lived successor, Old Town Gringos, until 2019. Owner Jackson Armstrong of Armstrong Hospitality Group reworked it into a bigger, more polished version of the same idea: more than 10,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor space across two buildings joined by an outdoor patio, plus a rooftop with views toward Camelback Mountain. Up top there is a four-sided bar and a drink rail overlooking an outdoor stage; below there are three bar areas, a cocktail and event garden, more than twenty TVs and a 16-foot LED screen.
The pitch was explicit. Pour Decisions is aimed at people roughly 30 to 60 who still want a big night out with friends but have outgrown the bottle-service clubs a few blocks east. That means live bands (country and rock), DJs, a sports-bar screen and a kitchen that takes bar food a notch up: a chopped salad shaken tableside in a mason jar, made-to-order street tacos, hot-toasted sandwiches and individual artisan pizzas.
It is one of the few non-hotel rooftop bars in Old Town, and for anyone who remembers the Dos Gringos rail, standing on that roof again at sunset is the point.
Rooftop strategy, game days and the menu
Go up early. The rooftop is the prize, and the best spots are the four-sided bar and the rail over the stage. In the cool season, arrive an hour before sunset to watch the light go orange over the Fifth Avenue rooftops; in summer, the rooftop is at its best after dark and the patio below does the daytime work.
Order the salad, seriously. The interactive chopped salad, shaken in a mason jar and dressed at the table, is the menu’s signature and a nice nod to the neighborhood, whose most famous dish is the chopped salad at Citizen Public House around the corner. Street tacos and the individual pizzas are the sharing plates; hot-toasted sandwiches handle a real appetite.
Drink the house specialties. The bar pours a curated lineup of wines, local beers and classic cocktails, but its own creations are more fun: the Loose Skrew, made with house peanut butter whiskey ice cream, an espresso martini and a run of tropical drinks for the patio.
Plan around the calendar. Weekly live music and DJs fill weekend nights. In football season the 16-foot screen runs with the sound on, and the bar posts game-day specials, including all-day happy hours, on Instagram. For a quieter evening on the same lane, FnB and the historic courtyard of Craftsman Court are steps away; for a rock show, Rockbar is a couple of doors up the lane. The rooftop bars and sunset patios note covers the rest of Old Town’s high ground.
The second life of a Craftsman Court rooftop
Craftsman Court was built in 1955 as a quiet lane of studios for silversmiths and designers, and its northern end, the historic courtyard at Fifth Avenue, still feels that way. The stretch of the street running south toward Third Avenue went a different direction. In 1996, Brian Roerich opened Dos Gringos at 4209, a two-story Rocky Point-style cantina with a patio bar and a rooftop bar, and for nearly two decades it was where Old Town drank in daylight. Its run, and its unhappy ending, are told on the Dos Gringos page: a 2015 sale, a rebrand as Old Town Gringos, and a 2019 lockout by the landlord.
The building sat between eras after that. By the time Pour Decisions opened in 2023, Old Town’s nightlife center of gravity had long since moved to the bottle-service rooms of the entertainment district, and most of the new rooftops in town belonged to hotels. Armstrong’s bet was that there was still a market for the old Dos Gringos promise, a roof, a band and a drink, if it was rebuilt for an older, steadier crowd.
The design reflects that. Where Dos Gringos was cheap and loose, Pour Decisions is engineered: a stage with a drink rail, a giant screen, separate bar zones, an event garden for private parties. Where Dos Gringos sold buckets of beer, Pour Decisions sells a tableside salad and dessert-in-a-cocktail. It is the same address answering the same question, where do grown-ups go to have fun outside in Old Town, a generation later.
The honest assessment: Pour Decisions is a big, busy entertainment bar, and on game days and weekend nights it is loud by design. Food is bar food, elevated rather than reinvented. But one of the few non-hotel rooftops in Old Town, with live music and a crowd that is not twenty-two, fills a real gap, and it gives one of the neighborhood’s most storied rooftops a second act.