What was Sugar Daddy’s?
Sugar Daddy’s was the bar the Dos Gringos empire built when it ran out of ideas about beaches and tried New Orleans instead.
It opened in 2002 at 3102 N Scottsdale Road, a mile and a half south of the Old Town bar district, in the stretch of South Scottsdale where the strip centers start. The corporation behind it was Joe’s Apartment, Inc., which did business as Sugar Daddy’s and whose president and sole owner was Brian Roehrich, the man who had mortgaged his house to open Dos Gringos on Craftsman Court in 1996. The concept, in Phoenix New Times’ later phrase, was Old Town Scottsdale meets Bourbon Street: a French Quarter look with an artsy edge, which the paper described on the way out, less generously, as demons-and-brimstone-meets-New Orleans.
For seven years it was the hip-hop room on Scottsdale Road. Radio station Power 98.3 ran its Sexy Saturdays and Sucka-Free Sundays from the bar, and on December 29, 2006, Scottsdale police arrested Mike Tyson on DUI and cocaine charges after he left it. The bar’s last years were rough: AZCentral reported a run of stabbings in 2008, the founder pleaded guilty to skimming its cover charges, and the man who bought it in 2007 was sued by a mystery novelist who said he had used her money to do it.
It closed in May 2009, in the recession that also took SIX Lounge, Barcelona and Mickey’s Hangover. An Oregano’s stands on the site. The honest verdict is that Sugar Daddy’s was a good idea run by the wrong people, and that the idea, a themed party bar south of the district, has not been tried since.
A night at the French Quarter on Scottsdale Road
The format was the radio. What made Sugar Daddy’s different from the Old Town rooms was the music. The Entertainment District in the mid-2000s was house and bottle service; Sugar Daddy’s was the Valley’s hip-hop station broadcasting its weekend nights from the floor. That drew a crowd from all over the Valley rather than from the resorts, which is why a mile of Scottsdale Road did not matter. When Power 98.3 moved Sexy Saturdays and Sucka-Free Sundays out early in 2009, the crowd went with them, and the bar was gone within months.
The cover charge was the point. Roehrich’s plea agreement is the most detailed financial record any Scottsdale bar has ever left behind. It states that Joe’s Apartment, the Sugar Daddy’s corporation, left $375,486 of cover-charge revenue off its 2002 return, $403,588 off 2003, $385,393 off 2004 and $337,220 off 2005, cash collected at the door and kept apart from the books. Add in Dos Gringos and Trailer Park in Tempe and prosecutors put the diverted income near $2 million. A bar that is clearing close to $400,000 a year at the door, off the books, is a very busy bar.
The location is the lesson. 3102 N Scottsdale Road is just south of Osborn, in the stretch of strip centers and dealerships that runs down toward Papago Plaza and McDowell Road. Nobody walks there from Old Town. Sugar Daddy’s worked as a destination because the radio made it one; without a hook that strong, that stretch of Scottsdale Road has not supported a nightclub since, and the address became a pizza bistro.
The worst nights made the papers. The Tyson arrest in 2006 gave the bar a national mention, and the 2008 reports of numerous stabbings gave it the reputation that follows a club into its last year. By the time New Times ran its obituary in May 2009, it was reading the closure as the usual downturn in business, and the headline was no surprise to anyone who had been watching the 2000s bar boom unwind.
The Dos Gringos empire and how it ended
Sugar Daddy’s belongs to the second act of the Dos Gringos story. Roehrich opened the Craftsman Court cantina in 1996, then spun off Tempe, Chandler and Mesa locations and a string of theme bars: Joe’s Apartment and Trailer Park in Tempe, Sugar Daddy’s in Scottsdale. By 2002 he was running the kind of operation that could afford a French Quarter build-out on Scottsdale Road, and by 2005, according to the government, a good share of the money paying for it was cash that never saw a tax return.
The unwinding took four years. Roehrich sold Sugar Daddy’s in 2007 to Scottsdale attorney Mark Briggs; the sale later produced a lawsuit from mystery novelist Sylvia Nobel, who alleged Briggs had taken $582,000 from her to buy the bar from the Dos Gringos chain, an allegation still in court when the bar closed. In December 2008 Roehrich pleaded guilty before a federal magistrate to four counts of income-tax evasion for 2003, with sentencing set for March 2, 2009, and he received two years in prison; the IRS Criminal Investigation Division had built the case. In 2009 the Dos Gringos company itself was sold. Sugar Daddy’s, now owned by Briggs and losing its radio nights, locked the gates in May.
What came after was nothing like it. The address went to Oregano’s, the Valley pizza chain, which is still there. The bar’s successor in spirit, a themed party room south of the district playing something other than house, never arrived, and the South Scottsdale side of Scottsdale Road settled back into restaurants and dealerships. Readers of New Times’ 2023 retrospective on lost Scottsdale clubs still listed it among the rooms they missed, which says something about how few places like it there were.
Honest assessment: Sugar Daddy’s was a loud, well-attended, badly run bar whose history is mostly court records, and that is exactly why it is worth a guide. It shows what the 2000s Scottsdale club economy ran on, cash at the door and a radio station’s loyalty, and how fast that economy collapsed in 2009. It sits in the lost column of every bar and club in Scottsdale next to SIX and Barcelona, the same year, the same reasons, a mile and a half apart.