What was RnR Gastropub?
For fifteen years the best seat for a game in Old Town was on a balcony over Scottsdale Road, and the balcony belonged to RnR.
RnR Gastropub opened in March 2010 at 3737 N Scottsdale Rd, a block south of Indian School Road, under the longer name RnR Mad Chef Gastropub; Phoenix New Times listed it among the month’s new restaurants that April. The Mad Chef went away and the building stayed: two stories of exposed brick facing the street, burnt orange seats, misters, and an open-air second level that RnR advertised, with some justice, as “the only two-story dining patio overlooking the street.” The owner was Evening Entertainment Group, Les and Diane Corieri’s company, whose Axis-Radius was still the district’s flagship nightclub. RnR was an early example of the seven-day, food-and-screens room the company would later build out of Bottled Blonde, Bevvy and Sandbar, and it was the sports bar in that portfolio.
It was never a destination so much as a reliable one. The gastropub menu was broad, the screens were everywhere, the upstairs rail filled on game days and warm evenings, and it sat on the walk between the Waterfront and the bars of Stetson Drive. It appeared on the Waterfront’s own nightlife list and in New Times’ 2023 description of EEG as “the team behind Sandbar, RnR, Bevvy and Bottled Blonde.”
Then, in a spring when EEG was trimming, it went. Phoenix New Times reported on June 5, 2025 that RnR had “shuttered on Sunday,” which was June 1, two months after the company closed Chauncey Social up north. General Admission, a Los Angeles sports gastropub, was announced for the building with a fall 2026 opening. Our verdict: a good building running a plain concept for a long time, which in Old Town is a rarer achievement than it sounds.
The patio, the games and the strip it anchored
Go upstairs. The whole reason to choose RnR over a dozen other screens in Old Town was the second-story patio: open air over the sidewalk, a rail to lean on, misters for the months that need them, and the traffic of Scottsdale Road below for entertainment between innings. Our guide to rooftop bars and sunset patios lists what has taken over that role.
It was a sports bar with a kitchen that tried. The gastropub label was earned by a broader menu than wings, though the wings were there too, and the room was built for a crowd watching the same thing. Spring training afternoons, when Cactus League crowds walk down from Scottsdale Stadium, were its natural season, with football Sundays and the WM Phoenix Open week behind them. On those days the downstairs filled first with people who had not learned about the stairs.
It was cheap for its corner. It cost a good deal less than the Waterfront’s steakhouses across the street, which made it a natural happy hour stop for the offices along Scottsdale Road, and a sensible first stop for groups starting a night that would end on Saddlebag Trail. For the current version of that formula, the same owners’ Mother Tucker’s Tavern does it with forty screens.
Getting there. Street and garage parking off Scottsdale Road, and a ten-minute walk to the Entertainment District. The block had already changed by its last year: STK across the Waterfront closed in the same spring, and the two empty two-story buildings became a local talking point about Old Town looking empty.
Fifteen years of EEG on Scottsdale Road
RnR arrived at a turning point for its owners. In 2010 Evening Entertainment Group’s identity was still Axis-Radius, the double nightclub that had built the Entertainment District in the late 1990s, and the Corieris were starting to think about what came after it. RnR, a daytime-to-late-night gastropub with a patio and a sports crowd, was an early version of the answer. When Axis-Radius closed in June 2013, the replacements the company built in its shell, Bottled Blonde and then Casa Amigos, were variations on the same seven-days-a-week model that RnR had been running on Scottsdale Road for three years. The sports bar was the prototype.
It outlasted most of the 2010s rooms around it. Bevvy, the party pub on Saddlebag, came and went and became Mother Tucker’s in 2024. Livewire opened and closed. The Waterfront across the street cycled through tenants, the last of them STK, which anchored its Southbridge stretch from 2021 and left in 2025. RnR simply stayed, which is how a plain concept earns a place in the city’s bar history.
The end was part of a pattern. EEG closed Chauncey Social, its north Scottsdale experiment, on April 1, 2025, and RnR on June 1. New Times covered RnR’s closing in a story headlined around two prominent Old Town eateries, pairing it with STK, and the local real-estate blogs noted that the two corners that made Old Town look empty were “already spoken for.” For RnR’s corner the taker was General Admission, the Los Angeles sports gastropub of brothers Kamran and Kourosh Pourkazemi, which runs rooms in LA and at the UnCommons development in Las Vegas: a darker interior, a long bar, booths and televisions, a deliberate contrast to RnR’s brick. The promise was fall 2026. We will update this page when it opens.
Honest assessment: RnR was never anyone’s favorite bar and was a great many people’s regular one, and its patio was the best cheap seat over Scottsdale Road for a decade and a half. Its closing says more about its owners’ priorities than about the room. The full record of what Old Town has opened and lost is in our list of every bar and club in Scottsdale.