What was Praying Monk?
Praying Monk was a beer bar with a chef’s menu, run by the most restless restaurateur in Old Town at the time.
It opened in spring 2012 at 7217 E 1st St, on First Street in the downtown core, in the space where Aaron May had just closed Iruña, his casual Spanish restaurant, and where Pischke’s Paradise had fed downtown for years before that. May was coming off a hard stretch: his upscale DC Ranch restaurants Sol y Sombra and Autostrada had closed in 2009, and he had been locked out of his downtown Phoenix taco shop, Vitamin T, for nonpayment of rent. Praying Monk was the answer, and New Times read it as May continuing to go his own way.
The name was a nod to the Praying Monk, the red sandstone formation on Camelback Mountain, and the house line was “familiar-meets-fun ode to American food and boutique beer.” The beer was the point. It opened with 18 drafts and 39 bottles, later about 20 and 40, built around Trappist ales with beers from Belgium, England, Colorado, Oregon and Northern California, from a $4 house pale ale to a $23 bottle of La Trappe Tripel. The kitchen ran a single-page American menu that changed whenever May felt like it: shrimp and grits, pig ears, a Cuban, a wahoo sandwich, a duck breast, a LaFrieda burger and a flaming Baked Alaska.
It was a warehouse-like room of brick and reclaimed wood around a concrete-topped bar, with leatherette booths, vintage brewery photos and a small patio with a fireplace. In its last summer, Dave Johnson, the sommelier from the just-closed Davanti Enoteca, ran it and taught beer classes on Tuesday nights.
It shut on October 8, 2013, and the room became Bootleggers, the barbecue restaurant that is still there. Our verdict: a smart beer list and a burger worth the trip, attached to a menu that never decided what it was.
What the menu and the beer list were
The beer was the reliable part. Both New Times reviews agreed on this. The December 2012 review called the list maybe not the biggest in the Valley but possibly the most carefully crafted, and it was priced so that a casual drinker and a beer obsessive could both find something. The house Praying Monk American pale ale was $4 a glass; the Trappist and Belgian bottles climbed from there.
The opening menu leaned on novelty. The May 2012 First Taste paid $11 for Louisiana-style shrimp and grits with spicy pork and Creole seasoning, which it liked, and $16 for a foie gras torchon layered in a jar with housemade peanut butter and blackberry jam, which it did not. A $9 salad used cubes of grilled cheese sandwich as croutons. The Paia ($12), named for the town on Maui, was two thick pieces of wahoo with red onion and caper aioli, and the Kentucky fried quail ($15) tasted, the critic said, remarkably like KFC. Dessert was a Cap’n Crunch panna cotta. New Times put the price point at about $11 to $30 a person.
By winter, the burger had taken over. The December review’s best dish was the Praying Monk Burger: Pat LaFrieda beef, melted Vermont cheddar, caramelized onions and arugula on a grilled onion bun with sriracha mayonnaise, “just about as good as gourmet burgers get.” The other winners were the crispy potatoes with truffle aioli, Parmesan and chives, a skin-on duck breast over red cabbage, and a slow-cooked short rib with braised kale and jalapeño-cheddar grits. The Triple Chocolate Baked Alaskan was flambéed at the table and doused with warm chocolate sauce. The lobster tacos, the wings and the Cuban were the dishes to skip.
Summer School. In June 2013, the new general manager, Dave Johnson, who had worked with May at Sol y Sombra, launched Summer School at the Monk: four Tuesday classes from the last week of June to mid-August, beer lore and beer-and-food pairing with matched tapas, at $30 a class or $100 for all four, starting at 6:30 p.m., reservations required.
The crowd. New Times saw everything from the latest fashions to flip-flops, plus restaurant people stopping in after their own shifts, with May usually working the room. For where the city’s beer scene went next, see our guide to Scottsdale breweries and beer.
The monk that became a bootlegger
Praying Monk sits in the middle of Aaron May’s busiest decade. In 2012 New Times listed his places as Over Easy, The Lodge, Mabel’s on Main, May’s Counter in Tucson, Praying Monk and Renegade Tap + Kitchen, with Sol y Sombra, Autostrada, Vitamin T and Iruña already gone. The paper’s December review framed him as punk rock: a chef who did what he wanted, the way he wanted, with zero apologies, and whose menus worked like set lists, some songs fist-pumpers and some sending you to the bar. That was meant as praise and as a warning, and the restaurant lived up to both.
The First Street building had a long hospitality history before May. It was Pischke’s Paradise, then Iruña, the casual Spanish place May opened in Old Town after he and the DC Ranch developer could not agree on a new lease for Sol y Sombra; New Times listed Iruña among the January 2012 closings. Praying Monk followed within months, reusing the room and dressing it in brick, reclaimed wood and steel.
That build-out is why the space changed hands so smoothly. When Praying Monk shut on the night of October 8, 2013, New Times reported the next morning that it would become the second Bootleggers, the barbecue-pit-turned-gastropub that Rick Phillips, competition pitmaster Kevin Slade and chef Matt Carter of The Mission had opened in north Phoenix that May. Phillips said he had not expected a second location so soon, but May, a friend, called. “It’s got the wood, the steel,” Phillips said. “It already looks like a Bootleggers.” The partners promised to open in four to six weeks, and New Times listed Bootleggers in Scottsdale among its November openings.
The record does not give a reason for the closing beyond the deal itself, and May did not publicly explain it. A year later he closed The Lodge in Scottsdale as well and turned his attention to Goodwood Tavern on Stetson Drive. Bootleggers is still at 7217 E 1st St more than a decade on, which makes Praying Monk the shortest chapter in the building’s modern history.
Honest assessment: Praying Monk was a better bar than restaurant. The beer list was thoughtful, the burger was excellent, and Johnson’s summer classes were the kind of thing the 2010s Old Town needed more of. The menu’s appetite for gimmicks, a foie gras PB&J and cereal panna cotta, made it hard to love as a dinner destination, and at seventeen months it ended up as the bridge between Iruña and the smokehouse that outlasted both.