What was Stax Burger Bistro?
There was a moment in the late 2000s when every city in America decided the hamburger needed a lounge, a wine list and a choice of seven animals. Old Town Scottsdale’s version was called Stax, and it was more fun than it had any right to be.
Stax Burger Bistro opened in the late 2000s at 4400 N Scottsdale Rd, the complex at Scottsdale and Camelback just south of the Soleri Bridge, from the same team that runs the Breakfast Club at the same address. Where the Breakfast Club owned the morning, Stax was built for the after-work and pre-bar hours: a “nuevo-lounge,” as one visiting critic put it, with dark surfaces, modern lighting and a menu that consisted entirely of sliders.
The hook was the build. You chose a protein from beef, turkey, salmon, lamb, veal, buffalo or ostrich, then stacked on toppings from a list that ran to dozens, cheeses, sauces, grilled pineapple, foie gras for those with more money than sense. Or you trusted the kitchen’s grinds, chef-designed combinations like a wild boar slider with Asian slaw and coconut curry sauce. Sides were the comfort canon, tater tots, mac and cheese, regular and sweet potato fries.
Stax lasted roughly a decade, long enough to outlive the burger-lounge fad that birthed it. By January 2018 notes on the doors read “Stax is closed. New concept coming soon,” and that was the entire announcement. Honest verdict: a clever format, an inconsistent patty and a room that was better for happy hour than for dinner. Locals liked it more than critics did, which tells you it was doing its actual job.
How to eat the sliders right
Skip the beef, or at least do not lead with it. This was the open secret. The kitchen’s beef patty was, in the words of a traveling burger blogger who rated the place 5 out of 10 in 2009, “over-worked and over-thought,” handled too much and seasoned too politely. The exotic column was where Stax earned its keep: lamb with something salty, buffalo with something sharp, ostrich because you would never order it anywhere else. Two or three sliders across the proteins was the correct order for one person.
Use the grinds as a guide. The chef-designed combinations existed because a menu with seven proteins and dozens of toppings is a trap for the indecisive. The wild boar with Asian slaw and coconut curry was the one people talked about, sweet and hot and slightly ridiculous. Build-your-own was for the second visit, once you knew which proteins the kitchen cooked best.
Order the sides like they are the meal. The tots came out hot and crisp, the mac and cheese got scraped, and both outperformed the burgers on plenty of nights.
Go at happy hour. The room was a lounge first, and its best hours were the ones between the office and the bars, when the lighting made sense and the drink prices dropped. Stax was a place to stack a few sliders and drinks before the Stetson Drive clubs; lunch worked too, quieter and quick.
The gourmet-burger wave, and what washed it away
Stax opened into a specific national moment. In the late 2000s the “better burger” boom hit every American city at once, and its upscale wing, burger bistros with wine lists, wagyu and foie gras, promised that the hamburger could be a chef’s medium. Scottsdale’s own version of the era ran from the pink-leather flourishes at Sam Fox’s Modern Steak to a wave of burger-and-beer concepts along Scottsdale Road. Stax was the Old Town expression of the trend: a slider format that turned the burger into a tasting menu, priced for a neighborhood that wanted to try seven animals before ten.
Its parentage explains its endurance. The Breakfast Club had already proved at 4400 N Scottsdale Rd that a single-daypart concept could thrive at Old Town’s crossroads, and Stax was the logical dinner-side complement: same landlord, same crowd, different clock. That pairing gave Stax a floor stand-alone burger bars lacked, and explains how a concept critics found dated by 2012 was still serving sliders in 2017.
What finally ended it was the neighborhood changing around it during the 2010s. Old Town’s burger business split in two directions, neither of which Stax occupied. One went big and loud: Rehab Burger Therapy turned the creative burger into a beach party, and Cold Beers & Cheeseburgers turned it into a sports bar. The other went chef-driven and gastropub, with Citizen Public House proving Old Town would pay real money for a serious burger in a serious room. Stax, a lounge with an ostrich option, fell between those poles as the novelty wore off. The website went dark, the doors got their notes, and by January 2018 the closure was one line in a Valley roundup of restaurant deaths.
Honest assessment: Stax was a fad restaurant that beat its fad by nearly a decade, which is a genuine accomplishment, and the format was more original than the execution. Nobody mourns the beef; plenty still mention the tots, the wild boar and the one time they ordered the ostrich, which in a neighborhood this forgetful is a respectable afterlife.