What is Rockbar?
Scottsdale nightlife has spent most of the last fifteen years chasing the same sound: house music, bottle service, a DJ with a light show. Rockbar Inc. has spent those years on Craftsman Court playing guitars.
It opened over Thanksgiving weekend 2011 at 4245 N Craftsman Ct, in the building that had been the Acme Bar & Grill. Co-owners Brian Mrochinski and Alex Mundy spent close to six months and roughly $500,000 on the conversion: dark wood and low light, an elevated stage up front, a new second-floor bar, an extended patio, and new wiring and plumbing to carry it. Their promise to Phoenix New Times at the time was blunt: “all rock, all the time,” local bands during the week, bigger acts when they could get them, and DJs spinning rock remixes instead of hip-hop or pop.
The formula held. Rockbar became the rock room in a neighborhood of dance clubs, with bars on both levels, VIP booths looking down on the stage and a rooftop bar with TVs and couches above it all. New Times readers voted it Best Rock Club in 2017.
Then it picked up a second identity. Since 2014, Rockbar has been the game-day home of EaglesWest, the Arizona fan club of the Philadelphia Eagles, and on fall Sundays the room is decorated, staffed and shouted at like a bar in South Philly. In 2023, when the Eagles played the Super Bowl in Glendale, Philadelphia reporters came to see it.
Bands, games and the rooftop
Pick your floor. Downstairs is the stage and the main bar, the place to be when a band is on. Upstairs is the second bar, plenty of TVs and a slightly calmer vantage on the room; regulars say it is the best seat for college football. Above that, the rooftop with its couches and screens is the neighborhood’s most relaxed open-air bar.
Check the calendar. Rockbar books live bands and DJs, rooftop events and watch parties; the events page and social accounts carry the schedule. The original plan was local bands on weeknights and bigger names on weekends, and weekends still draw the bigger crowds. It also hosts private events and birthday parties, and partners with a Scottsdale party-bike company, so expect the occasional pedal-powered group arriving at the door.
On Eagles Sundays, come early. The EaglesWest fan club fills the place for every Philadelphia game. Get there before kickoff for an outdoor bar seat and order a Philly cheesesteak; when the Eagles aren’t playing, every other NFL game is on. It is one of the most fun sports rooms in Old Town even if you root for someone else, as long as you keep that quiet.
Make a Craftsman Court night of it. The lane has become a small nightlife strip: Pour Decisions runs a rooftop with live music a couple of doors down, Taj Mahal serves North Indian dinner a door or two down, and the historic courtyard of Craftsman Court, home of FnB, is at the Fifth Avenue end. The free garage off Fifth Avenue and Scottsdale Road is the easiest place to park.
Rock on a lane built for craftsmen
Craftsman Court was built in 1955 for silversmiths, leather designers and weavers, and its historic courtyard at Fifth Avenue still looks the part. The stretch of the lane running south became something else: by the 1990s, Dos Gringos had made 4209 the neighborhood’s day-drinking capital, and a few doors up, the building at 4245 was the Acme Bar & Grill. Rockbar’s 2011 conversion of that building was part of a long tradition of Craftsman Court reinventing itself one storefront at a time.
The rock-only bet was contrarian. In the 2010s, Old Town’s nightlife money was moving into the entertainment district and its bottle-service rooms, where the soundtrack was electronic. Rockbar’s owners told New Times on opening weekend that they would not switch to hip-hop or pop, and they built a room for bands: a stage, sight lines, a second level. It gave the Valley’s local rock bands a regular stage in a neighborhood that mostly booked DJs.
The Eagles connection gave the bar a durability most music rooms never find. EaglesWest formed in 2014 under its president, Philadelphia transplant Ray Poserina, and made Rockbar its game-day home, filling it with memorabilia; the club has raised tens of thousands of dollars for local causes. Fan clubs keep a bar full every fall Sunday, whatever the music trends are doing, and when the Eagles reached the Super Bowl in Glendale in February 2023, reporters from Philadelphia came to Craftsman Court; Poserina told them visiting fans say, “You do it better here than you do in Philly.”
The honest assessment: Rockbar is a bar, not a restaurant, and it is loud on band nights and louder on Eagles Sundays. But fifteen years of live rock, a genuinely good rooftop and one of the most devoted fan-club scenes in Arizona have made it a Craftsman Court institution in its own right, on a lane that has seen plenty of bars come and go.