What is Straight Up?
Hotel Adeline is a 1960s motor lodge redone for the pool-party set, which makes it an odd address for a whiskey bar. That is the joke. Off the lobby stands a vintage telephone booth. Step in, lift the receiver, give the password, and the back wall opens onto Straight Up, a low-lit room with a serious back bar, a short cocktail list and a small patio.
Whiskey is the point. The bar builds flights to order: three ages of the same whiskey, three countries or regions, or three tequilas and mezcals. The back bar runs to Weller, Stagg, Macallan and Japanese whisky, and the local pour is Del Bac, the Tucson single malt dried over mesquite smoke, which tastes like a campfire in a good way. The hotel calls Straight Up a “not-so-secret speakeasy,” and it is right: the front desk hands out the password.
It opens nightly at 7 p.m., and it is a short walk from Fashion Square and the north edge of Old Town.
The booth, the flights, the bites
Get the password. Ask the front desk. Guests usually hear it at check-in; locals ask on the way past. Then step into the booth, pick up the receiver and say it. The wall swings open.
Go early. The bar opens daily at 7 p.m. The room is small, so arrive before 9 if you want a seat at the bar, where the flights get built and explained. There are indoor seats and a patio for talkers.
Build a flight. Pricing is market rate and depends on the pours, so tell the bartender what you like and a budget. The three formats on the September 2026 menu:
- Vertical Flight: three whiskeys of different ages.
- Take a Tour: three whiskeys from different regions or countries.
- Taste of Agave: three tequilas or mezcals.
Two-ounce pours give a sense of the range: Del Bac Arizona Single Malt $19.50, Del Bac Frontera $28, Eagle Rare $23.50, Booker’s $36, Weller Antique 107 $40, Stagg $40, Hibiki Harmony $40, Macallan Rare Cask $130.
Or order a cocktail. The list runs $15 to $18: the Yellow Cocktail (Ford’s gin, Suze, yellow Chartreuse) and the Smoke Show (mezcal, Cynar, green Chartreuse) are the serious ones, and Del’s Daiquiri ($15) uses Del Bac’s Old Pueblo whiskey with chili liqueur and lime. If you cannot decide, ask for Dealer’s Choice: tell the bartender about yourself and trust the process.
Eat a little. Speakeasy bites run until 10 p.m.: lamb sliders ($19), shrimp cocktail ($21), chicken empanadas ($16), a hummus plate ($18), and three desserts at $14. For dinner, eat at Selfmade, the hotel restaurant, or across Scottsdale Road first.
Make it a crawl. Straight Up is the natural first stop on our speakeasy night: one flight here at 7, then north to The Goose or Tell Your Friends, and back down to The Beverly on Main, whose kitchen is open until 1:30.
A whiskey bar in a pool-party hotel
Hotel Adeline’s own history explains the bar’s sense of humor. The building went up in the 1960s as a motor hotel on the stretch of Scottsdale Road where the postwar tourist trade stopped for the night, and it spent years as the Days Hotel, a budget room on the road to the resorts. A renovation of about $12 to $13 million turned it into Hotel Adeline in January 2018, built around a pool deck and a weekend party called Liquid Sunshine, and in 2021 it became the first Arizona property in Marriott’s Tribute Portfolio. A hotel whose brand is sunshine and DJs needed a room for the opposite mood, and the phone booth is it.
Straight Up also belongs to Scottsdale’s speakeasy wave. Between 2023 and 2025 the city opened most of its hidden bars, almost every one tucked inside something bigger: a resort conference wing at The Madam, a wine bar at The Peacock, a steakhouse basement at Tell Your Friends. Straight Up is the hotel-lobby version, and the only one built around whiskey rather than cocktails. Its schedule has grown with the trend: early in its run it opened Thursday through Saturday; now it opens every night.
The Del Bac pour is the local thread. Del Bac comes from Tucson’s Hamilton Distillers, which dries its malted barley over mesquite smoke the way Scotland uses peat. An Arizona single malt in an Arizona motor lodge is the kind of detail that makes a hotel bar feel like it belongs somewhere.
Old Town’s speakeasy history is longer than its current roster. Second Story Liquor Bar hid up a stairwell on Scottsdale Road for a decade until 2024, and Kazimierz hid behind an alley door on Stetson Drive. Straight Up carries that tradition on a few blocks north.
Honest assessment: this is a hotel bar with a good trick, and the password is not much of a secret. But the whiskey list is deeper than the setting suggests, the flights are a genuinely good way to learn what you like, and a phone booth is a better door than most.