What is Tallyho Cocktail Lounge?
You will not find it from the road. Tallyho Cocktail Lounge sits at 8479 E McDonald Drive, in the Park Scottsdale shopping center on the southeast corner of Hayden Road and McDonald Drive, “tucked in a small strip mall behind a Walgreens,” as Phoenix New Times put it. The sign, when you do find it, is missing its red T and has been since at least 2008, so at night it reads “allyho!” The paper’s columnist suspected that was on purpose. We suspect nobody has gotten around to it. Both are true of the whole bar.
Inside is the most old-fashioned room in Central Scottsdale: a huge, super-long oval bar of solid wood with brass rails down the left, three high-back retro leather booths on the right, faux-wood walls hung with Old English coats of arms, low sconces and chandeliers, a pool table in the back by the restrooms, darts, a jukebox and a sign over the door that says “occupancy 87.” It is cash only, with an ATM inside, and the drinks are cheap and short: the 2008 column priced a Bombay Sapphire martini at $6.50 and noted that martinis came in three-ounce glasses, which is the correct size for a bar you can walk to from an apartment.
Nobody has published who opened it or when. The bar’s own website was returning errors in October 2026, and the only press is that one “Booze Pigs” column, which called it one of the few great dives in upscale Scottsdale and praised a bartender named Sharon, in a tuxedo top and red cummerbund, for remembering the writer from the year before, when his group had been cut off and asked to leave. That is the review. The honest verdict is that Tallyho is a neighborhood bar for people who live within a mile of it, it has no interest in anyone else, and that is exactly why it belongs on our dive bar list.
Cash, mornings and the long bar
Bring money. The bar takes cash and nothing else. There is an ATM inside, with a fee, and there is a Walgreens in front with another. Decide before you walk in how long you are staying, because the drinks are cheap enough that a twenty goes a long way and the bartender will not be running a tab on your card.
Go early. Listings show the doors opening at 10 a.m. on Mondays and 9 a.m. Tuesday through Friday, with a 2 a.m. close, which puts Tallyho in the same morning-bar fraternity as the Roadrunner Lounge and The Well a few miles south. The 2008 visit was a Tuesday at 5 p.m. with eight people in the room, mostly drinking shots, beers and short cocktails. That remains the typical scene: a weekday happy hour of regulars who know the stools, and a slightly larger, slightly louder version on Friday and Saturday nights. Weekend hours vary; call first.
Order a martini or a shot. The house can do a proper martini, which is rarer than it sounds in a dive; the 2008 column also ran through a double Jägermeister with a water back, a Jameson shot and a 100-proof Rumple Minze, and noted with approval that the bar had real ginger ale on tap. There is no kitchen. The strip has food, the late-night list has more, and Carlsbad Tavern on Hayden runs its kitchen late Thursday through Saturday.
Play. The pool table is in the back, the dartboards are in use most nights, and the jukebox is the kind regulars have opinions about. The room is small; the “occupancy 87” sign over the door drew a joke from the New Times writer, who guessed the real number was closer to 8.7. On a busy night you will be shoulder to shoulder at the oval bar, which is the point of an oval bar. Parking is the Walgreens lot; walk around to the back of the building. Rideshare drivers will need the Walgreens address, because the bar does not show up from McDonald Drive.
A dive with no written history
Most Scottsdale bars with a decor this specific have a founding story to go with it, and Tallyho does not, or at least not one anybody has written down. The name, the coats of arms and the English hunting-cry theme belong to the mid-century fashion for faux-British cocktail lounges that put “Tally-Ho” on signs across suburban America, and the strip center it sits in is from the decades when McCormick Ranch was being built just north of McDonald. That is circumstantial, and we will not pretend otherwise. What we can document is that by 2007 a Phoenix New Times columnist was a repeat customer, that in June 2008 the paper called it one of the few true dives in upscale Scottsdale, and that in the eighteen years since, the bar has not changed its sign or its payment policy.
The neighborhood around it changed completely. The Hayden Road corridor between McDonald and Indian Bend was, in the 2000s, strip centers and apartment complexes; since the 2010s it has filled in with new rental blocks, and the McCormick Ranch lakeside rooms a mile north went through their own cycle of closures and reopenings. Tallyho’s customers are the people who live in those blocks and the people who lived in the older ones, and the bar’s cash-only rule works as a filter: it keeps out the walk-in crowd that would not know what to do with a three-ounce martini anyway.
Its place in Scottsdale’s bar history is as the dive in the middle of the map, between Indian School Road and Shea on the Hayden side of the city. The Coach House and Pattie’s hold the title in Old Town, TT Roadhouse and the Roadrunner in the south, Ernie’s Inn at Scottsdale and Shea. Tallyho is the one in the middle, in the part of town that otherwise has only chain patios and resort lobbies, and the list of every bar and club in Scottsdale shows how alone it is there.
Honest assessment: Tallyho is not a destination and it would be insulted to be called one. It is a small, dark, cash-only room with a beautiful bar, a bartender who will remember you and a jukebox that will not. Nobody has written its history because nobody who drinks there thinks it needs one. We have told you where the door is. The rest is between you and whoever is behind the bar.