What is the Roadrunner Lounge?
From the outside, Phoenix New Times once wrote, it looks like “a mob front.” From the inside, the Roadrunner Lounge is the warmest room in South Scottsdale: holiday lights up year-round, googly eyes stuck to anything that holds still, walls covered in photo collages of the people drinking under them, and a shelf of board games deep enough to lose a Tuesday in.
It sits at 3219 N Hayden Road, between Thomas and Osborn, on the same stretch as Carlsbad Tavern, with a Starbucks across the street that the New Times writers found funny in 2009. The building was a bar called Bucky’s and then Castaways before it became the Roadrunner; the paper, which has covered it four times, could find no record of when the change happened. What it did record is who ran it: Willie and Cassie Franano, a mother and daughter, for years, until both died. The 2022 citation that named it Best Dive Bar said the current owners were “happy to keep things that way,” and they have.
The hours are the first clue to the philosophy. It opens at 6 a.m. and closes at 2 a.m., 365 days a year, including every holiday, which, with The Well on Scottsdale Road and the Coach House on Indian School, makes it one of three bars within two miles built for people whose shifts end at dawn. Drinks are cheap and, in the paper’s words, “never shy on liquor.” The jukebox is country and western; a Johnny Horton singalong is a house tradition. Karaoke runs Tuesday and Thursday at 10.
New Times has given it Best Dive Bar in 2009 and 2022, Best Manhattan in 2010 and Best Neighborhood Bar in Scottsdale in 2012. We would add one more: best staff. They cover your drink with a napkin when you step out, lend you a dollar for the vending machine, and call you a ride when you need one. It is the dive on our dive bar list that feels most like somebody’s living room, because it was.
How to drink at the Roadrunner
Mornings are legitimate. The 6 a.m. open is not a stunt. Bartenders and cooks from the Old Town rooms a mile west come in after close, early golfers come in before tee times, and the room at 8 in the morning is as civil as any coffee shop, with better lighting than you would expect. If you want to see the Roadrunner at its most itself, this is when.
Order simply, and let them pour. Beer in cans, well drinks and the house cocktails are the point. New Times gave the Manhattan an award in 2010, and the 2009 citation warned that the “cheapo cocktail” comes heavy. Prices have moved since the $1.50 PBR days the regulars still talk about, but the Roadrunner remains one of the cheapest rounds in Scottsdale. There is no kitchen; the potluck table and its Crock-Pot cover holidays and big games, the vending machine covers the rest, and the late-night list covers you afterward. Night Owl at Hayden and McDowell does pizza late.
Play something. The pool table, arcade cabinets and darts are the obvious moves; the board-game shelf is the one nobody expects. Ask for a game and a table and you will not be rushed. Tuesday and Thursday at 10 p.m. the microphone comes out for karaoke, and the country jukebox sets the register the rest of the week. The smoking patio is dog-friendly, and on a cool night it is the best seat.
The calendar. Spring training is the busy season: Scottsdale Stadium is a mile and a half southwest and the 6 a.m. open means the Roadrunner is already going when fans head for the gates. Phoenix Open week brings a wave of people who stayed on the Hayden motels, and the staff absorbs all of it without changing the drink prices. Parking is the small lot in front; rideshare is the smart play after dark, and the bar will call one for you.
Bucky’s, Castaways and the Franano years
The bar’s early history is thin on the record and we will not pad it. Phoenix New Times’ own writers, naming it Best Dive Bar in 2009, admitted they had never covered the place and found “nothing in the archives,” which for a paper that has reviewed every bar in the Valley since 1970 is a kind of compliment. What the listings agree on is the sequence of names, Bucky’s, then Castaways, then the Roadrunner, and the fact that by the late 2000s it was a mother-and-daughter operation run by Willie and Cassie Franano.
The Franano era is the one the regulars remember and the one the current owners have chosen to preserve. The 2022 citation reads like a eulogy and a mission statement: cheap booze, holiday lights, colorful walls covered with photo collages of patrons, googly eyes everywhere, a board-game collection the writer called one of the largest he had seen, a staff that naps your drink and spots you a dollar, and customers who drive in from across the Valley “for the sense of family the bar cultivates.” That is a description of a culture, not a decor package, and it survived a change of ownership because the new proprietors understood which one they had bought.
Its place in Scottsdale’s bar history is as the north end of a short, stubborn row of Hayden Road rooms south of Indian School that never went upscale: Carlsbad Tavern since 1995 a block north, Duke’s on McDowell since 1998, and the Roadrunner between them. The condo towers that replaced the motels along this stretch in the 2010s gave the bar a new generation of walk-in customers who discovered that the old dive on the corner was, as the 2009 writers predicted, exactly where South Scottsdale’s hipsters would end up.
Honest assessment: the Roadrunner is not the best-looking dive in the city, or the best stocked. It is the kindest, and in a town where most bars want your money and your photo for their feed, a room that wants your photo for the wall is rare enough to be worth the drive. It belongs near the top of every bar and club in Scottsdale, and it would be embarrassed to hear that.