What was the Sun Dial Coffee Shop?
Every hotel of the jet age needed a coffee shop, and most of them were forgettable. The Sun Dial was not, for one simple reason: it stayed open until 2 a.m. in a town that otherwise went to bed.
It arrived with the Executive House Arizonian, which opened on Scottsdale Road just north of Camelback in the fall of 1961 — a $3 million, 210-room hotel arranged in five wings around a central patio, designed by Barrie H. Groen of Edco Architectural and built by H & J Construction. The property was pitched at the same convention-and-vacation trade the Safari Hotel and Hotel Valley Ho had been courting since 1956, and it came fully armed: two pools, a sun deck, a nine-hole putting green, the glass-walled La Roca cocktail lounge overlooking a rock garden and waterfall, and the Fountain Room, a proper dining room that offered dancing along with dinner.
The Sun Dial was the casual layer under all that — the room for breakfast before a meeting, a sandwich after the pool, and above all the plate at one in the morning after the lounges closed. Locals used it as much as guests did, which is the highest compliment a hotel coffee shop can earn. Its most famous hour came when Efrem Zimbalist Jr., star of The F.B.I., stayed at the hotel while shooting an episode at Scottsdale Airport; women crowded the coffee shop’s windows to watch him practice on the putting green outside.
The hotel became the Sunburst, then the Caleo, then FireSky, and since 2017 The Scott Resort & Spa. The Sun Dial’s name did not survive the first rebrand, and no one wrote down its last night.
What a 2 a.m. coffee shop meant in 1961
The clock was the product. In the Scottsdale of the early 1960s, downtown dining ran on resort hours: the French Quarter and the Fifth Avenue supper rooms seated dinner, the Safari’s lounges ran their headliners, and then the street went dark. The Sun Dial’s 2 a.m. close made it the natural last stop — where lounge crowds, hotel staff off shift, musicians, and the town’s night owls ended up over eggs and coffee. It was the closest thing Scottsdale Road had to an all-night diner.
The setting was pure jet age. The Executive House was a five-wing, patio-centered modern hotel, and the coffee shop sat where a guest walking in from the pools or the putting green would pass its windows. The putting green mattered more than it sounds: it turned the Sun Dial into a viewing gallery, which is how a room full of coffee drinkers ended up watching a television G-man work on his short game.
The menu was coffee-shop canon. Period sources describe the Sun Dial by function rather than by dish — casual dining, open late — and the honest reading is that it served what every good hotel coffee shop served: breakfast all day, sandwiches, plate specials, pie, bottomless coffee. The Fountain Room handled the occasion dinner and the dancing; La Roca handled the cocktails. The Sun Dial handled the hours nobody else wanted.
The price was right. Cheaper than the Fountain Room and faster than room service, it was the kind of place — in a town whose family rooms were still the Sugar Bowl and the drugstore lunch counter — you could take a date after the show without a jacket or a reservation.
The hotel that kept changing its name
The Executive House Arizonian was the third act of Scottsdale Road’s great hotel decade. The Safari opened in November 1956 with modernist swagger and a celebrity lounge circuit; the Valley Ho opened the same season with the midcentury architecture that would eventually make it a landmark; and five years later the Executive House filled the gap north of Camelback with a bigger, more convention-minded version of the same idea. Its food program — a coffee shop, a supper club with dancing, a showpiece lounge — was the standard 1961 template, and the Sun Dial was its most democratic piece.
The hotel’s later life is a case study in how Scottsdale Road reinvented itself. As the Sunburst it became a fixture of the strip’s 1970s convention and lounge culture. The early 2000s brought the boutique era — the Caleo, then Kimpton’s FireSky with its lagoon pools and fire pits — and in 2017 Classic Hotels & Resorts relaunched the property as The Scott, whose Bauhaus-meets-Havana lobby became one of the most photographed rooms in town. Through every rebrand the dining changed with it; today’s The Canal Club sits, in spirit if not in floor plan, where the Sun Dial once poured coffee at one in the morning.
The Sun Dial itself left almost no paper trail beyond its opening-season description and the Zimbalist anecdote — a shame, because it is the only one of the Executive House’s three original rooms that locals actually adopted. The Fountain Room and La Roca were for guests. The 2 a.m. counter was for Scottsdale.
Honest assessment: the Sun Dial was a competent coffee shop with a great closing time and one very good celebrity story. Its significance is what it tells you about the town — that in 1961 a modern hotel could become a local institution simply by staying open after everyone else had locked up, and that Scottsdale Road’s nightlife was built as much on eggs at 1 a.m. as on cocktails at 8.