What was Second Story Liquor Bar?
The best bar in Old Town for a stretch of the 2010s didn’t have a street-level door. You found the entrance off Scottsdale Road, climbed a flight of stairs, and came out somewhere darker, quieter and better than the neighborhood below had any reputation for.
Second Story Liquor Bar opened in 2013, when Old Town’s nightlife identity was clubs, cover charges and whatever was easiest to pour fast. Against that backdrop it was almost contrarian: a speakeasy-format cocktail den where drinks were stirred with classic-cocktail rigor, ice mattered, and — the genuinely unusual part — the kitchen ran at fine-dining altitude. Plenty of speakeasies serve an afterthought menu; Second Story plated food worthy of a tasting room, making it one of the very few Old Town addresses where the bar program and the kitchen were co-headliners.
For about a decade it was the connoisseur’s answer to “where do you actually drink in Old Town?” Then, in May 2024, owner Tommy Plato closed it — not in defeat, but in transition. Weeks later he opened The Ends, his Anthony Bourdain-inspired restaurant on Stetson Drive, carrying the team’s standards two blocks north.
The stairs are what everyone remembers. Climbing them was a small initiation, and the room at the top always felt like a reward — proof that Old Town, beneath the party-district costume, had serious taste hiding one floor up.
What made it work: rigor upstairs, chaos downstairs
Second Story’s formula was contrast. Scottsdale Road at street level meant bachelor parties and thumping patios; one staircase later, you were in low light with a bartender asking whether you preferred your Manhattan with rye. The hidden-entrance format wasn’t just theming — it filtered the crowd. Only people who knew came up, and people who knew behaved like it. The address itself had bar-history pedigree, sitting in a space tied to the lineage of Old Town’s tiki-era Drift lounge and its successor concepts; the second floor had been collecting good nights for a long time.
The drinks were the foundation. This was classic-cocktail scholarship — properly built Old Fashioneds, Sazeracs and their descendants, with the precision that the craft revival demanded and Old Town otherwise lacked in 2013. The back bar rewarded trust: bartender’s-choice was a legitimate ordering strategy, maybe the best one.
The food was the surprise. The kitchen ran closer to a chef’s tasting room than a bar — composed, ambitious plates that made “dinner at the speakeasy” a real plan rather than a compromise. That dual identity became the house signature: date nights that started as cocktails and became four courses, or dinners that dissolved into a long night of stirred drinks. Old Town had party bars and it had restaurants; Second Story was the rare room that refused to choose.
The regulars’ rhythm: arrive early enough to claim real seats (the room was intimate and filled fast), let the evening run long, and never rush the last drink. Places built around craft don’t reward efficiency, and nobody climbed those stairs to save time.
First of the cocktail generation, and the handoff to The Ends
Old Town’s drinking history runs in eras. The midcentury supper clubs gave way to the 1990s band-and-martini boom, which gave way to the mega-club 2000s — and then, nationally, the craft-cocktail revival arrived to re-teach America how a drink gets made. Second Story was that movement’s Old Town beachhead. In 2013, choosing rigor over volume on Scottsdale Road was a genuine bet; within a few years, cocktail lists all over the district were name-checking amaro and fat-washing, and the pioneer up the stairs had become the standard the imitators were measured against. It shares that first-mover credit with a small cohort — the eccentric, wine-soaked Kazimierz World Wine Bar had long proven Old Town would seek out hidden doors, and AZ88 held down the civilized end — but nobody in the neighborhood married cocktail scholarship to a serious kitchen the way Second Story did.
The ending is one of Scottsdale dining’s tidier stories. Rather than fading, Tommy Plato executed a deliberate metamorphosis: close the decade-old speakeasy in May 2024, and open The Ends in June — a Bourdain-inspired, globe-trotting restaurant in the former Kazimierz space on Stetson Drive. The through-line is visible to anyone who drank at both: the same conviction that Old Town diners deserve obsession-grade craft, re-potted from a cocktail den into a full restaurant. Old Town closures usually mean an ultra-lounge moves in; this one meant the operator leveled up.
Honest assessment: Second Story was never for everyone, and its intimacy was both charm and ceiling — a small room up a staircase can only ever serve the initiated. But its influence outsized its square footage. Every dim, serious cocktail room that has opened in Old Town since owes a structural debt to the one that proved the model, ten years before the neighborhood caught up. The stairs are someone else’s now. The idea climbed down and multiplied.