What is Tell Your Friends?
Most North Scottsdale nightlife happens at street level under a lot of LED. Tell Your Friends goes underground. It sits two flights beneath The Americano, Scott Conant’s Italian steakhouse on Scottsdale Road, and you reach it through a side door on the north side of the building, where a host waits to walk you down.
The room at the bottom is the most theatrical in town. Fifty-two seats under 16-foot ceilings, crimson velvet drapes, mirrored walls, light installations cascading toward a central stage, disco balls, plush banquettes and a marble-topped bar. The design brief was the Gatsby era; the effect is closer to a Rat Pack supper club in a basement in Manhattan. Live jazz and vocalists play Thursday through Sunday.
It opened on May 23, 2024, from Creation Hospitality, the Americano’s owners, with Clive Collective. Bartender Keifer Gilbert built the cocktail program and Beau MacMillan, the longtime Valley resort chef, wrote the food. It is the room people mean when they say “the Scottsdale speakeasy,” and it books like it.
Getting in, and what to order
Book, and mind the rules. Reservations run through the bar’s website and are strongly encouraged Wednesday through Sunday. Cancel inside 24 hours and the house charges $25 a guest. Slip in and out within five minutes and it counts as a no-show. The house also asks for one purchase per guest.
Dress for it. The code is cocktail attire, enforced: no athletic wear, T-shirts, baseball caps, flip-flops, basketball shorts, big logos or anything too distressed or revealing, summer included.
Pick your night. The bar opens at 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday and is closed Monday and Tuesday. Music runs Thursday and Sunday 7:30 to 10:30 p.m. and Friday and Saturday 7:30 to 11:30 p.m., with a $10 cover after 7:30 on music nights. Wednesday is the quiet night, with no band and no cover. Fridays and Saturdays run to 1 a.m. and get loud near the stage.
What to drink. Signature cocktails are $21 to $24. The Flapper Fizz ($23), now Grey Goose with passionfruit, vanilla, lemon and soda, is the house opener. Call the Paparazzi ($23) is the espresso martini by another name; Katie’s Manhattan ($21) is a rum Manhattan inspired by Bemelmans Bar in New York. Martinis ($25) come with your choice of olives, dirty or with pepperoncini brine, and a caviar bump for $15 more. The Jazz Age Smolder ($36) is smoked at the table. Zero-proof drinks run $10 to $13.
What to eat. Happy hour brings the Adult Happy Meal ($25): TYF burger, shoestring fries and a martini your way, plus $9 meatballs and chicken tenders. The main menu runs to a raw bar (jumbo shrimp cocktail $31, scallop crudo $26, Osetra caviar with chips and onion dip $125), steak frites ($48), Wagyu tortellini ($44) and the TYF burger ($26). A reduced Americano menu is served until 10 p.m. and late-night bites until 10:30.
Plan the night. Dinner upstairs at The Americano, then down the stairs; one regular reports the staff held their table while they finished. For the full run of hidden rooms, see our speakeasy guide and our live music guide.
The basement that made Scottsdale a jazz town again
Scottsdale has had exactly one great hidden music room before. Kazimierz, the candlelit wine cave behind Cowboy Ciao on Stetson Drive, put live jazz behind an unmarked alley door from 2003 until it closed for good. For years after, the city’s live music lived in resort lounges and Old Town bars with cover bands. Tell Your Friends filled the gap with money and a stage.
It came out of a particular moment on this stretch of Scottsdale Road. The Americano opened in 2021 with Scott Conant’s menu and became the north’s power-dinner room; its owners, Creation Hospitality, used the basement to build a second business with a different clock, one that starts when dinner ends. The partners hired Keifer Gilbert, one of the Valley’s most decorated bartenders, for the opening list and Beau MacMillan, the chef who spent years as the face of Sanctuary on Camelback Mountain, for the food; Ashley Cibor, from the Phoenix tiki bar UnderTow, came on as beverage director. In 2026 MacMillan’s role grew to cover the restaurant upstairs too.
The lounge arrived at the top of a wave. Scottsdale opened most of its speakeasies between 2023 and 2025, and Tell Your Friends is the maximalist one. The Madam is a password and eight seats; The Goose is a pizza kitchen’s cocktail room; The Peacock is a neighborhood wine bar’s back parlor. This is a nightclub dressed as a speakeasy, with a dress code, a cover and a cancellation policy.
The menu has moved since 2024. The opening list had fire-roasted oysters and Korean fried chicken; the 2026 menu leans to a raw bar, steak frites and a happy-hour burger. The Flapper Fizz has kept its name and changed its recipe. The room, the stage and the stairs have not changed.
Honest assessment: it is expensive, it is loud near the band, and the rules read as fussy until you see how fast 52 seats fill on a Friday. Book a Thursday or a Sunday, sit where you can see the stage, and it is the best night out north of the 101.