What is The Grapevine?
Every bar district needs one room where nobody is too cool. In Old Town Scottsdale it is The Grapevine, a two-story bar and restaurant at 4013 N Brown Ave that has been feeding the neighborhood since 1971 and, in its current life, runs karaoke every day of the week.
Phoenix New Times has named it the Valley’s Best Karaoke twice, in 2023 and again in 2025, and its writers describe the place better than a menu could: fearless singers, the people who scream “woooo!” for them, a crowd that cheers every number like it is the finale. Are all the singers good? New Times answered that one for us: no. Does anyone care? Also no.
Experience Scottsdale’s take adds the detail that matters to first-timers. The Grapevine has its local celebrities, regulars with their own bar stools and karaoke hosts the crowd knows by name, but the bartender’s line is that this is where most locals sing for the first time. The welcome is the point.
The building is pure old Old Town: slatted wood walls, Formica-topped tables, a kitchen that opens at 11 a.m. with lahvosh, salads and sandwiches, and a bar that stays open until 2 a.m. on weekends. It sits a few steps from Old Town Jewels and the Sugar Bowl, on the block of Brown Avenue just south of Indian School Road.
How to do a night at The Grapevine
Know the schedule. Karaoke runs from 5 p.m. to close Monday through Thursday and from 3 p.m. to close Friday through Sunday. Weeknights are for people who want to sing three songs; weekends are for people who want to sing one and scream along to forty. The bar is open until midnight Sunday through Thursday and until 2 a.m. on Friday and Saturday.
Eat first, here. The kitchen opens at 11 a.m. and the lahvosh, the flatbread the house bills as the best in Arizona, is the order to share. A wedge salad, the chicken Parmesan sandwich, broiled salmon, the Shirazi tuna bowl and fish and chips round out a pub menu that does its job. Happy hour runs 4 to 6 p.m. daily.
Get on the list early. The karaoke room is the most crowded part of the bar on weekends, and the hosts keep it moving, but the list fills. Pick your song while you are still sober enough to read the songbook. New Times calls it extensive.
Cheer for everyone. That is the house rule nobody wrote down. The room’s reputation rests on supporting the shaky first-timer as loudly as the regular who has been working on the same ballad for a decade. For the rest of the night, our Old Town nightlife guide covers the district, and Pattie’s First Avenue Lounge is a short walk away for a cheap drink after you lose your voice.
Fifty-five years on the old downtown street
The Grapevine opened in the 1970s, when Old Town was still a working downtown with a Western costume on, and Brown Avenue was its oldest street. The blocks around Brown and Main held the town’s 1920s buildings, the blacksmith shop, the pool hall and the first post office; the Old Adobe Mission stood a few blocks south; and the shops between were the turquoise, saddle and souvenir trade that defined Scottsdale’s “West’s Most Western Town” years.
The Grapevine outlasted most of what was around it in 1971. The big nightlife moved north, to Stetson Drive and Indian Plaza; the restaurants around it turned over. What kept it in place was the thing the newer rooms rarely build: a regular crowd that treats the bar as theirs. Karaoke gave that crowd a nightly reason to come back, and a big two-story room gave newcomers somewhere to stand while they worked up the nerve.
Its two New Times awards came while Scottsdale karaoke was branching into luxe private suites and bottle service. The Grapevine went the other way: one room, one microphone, everybody listening. That is the honest pitch. The food is good bar food, the decor is unchanged, and the singing is frequently bad. It is also, by consensus of the people who have judged the Valley’s karaoke for a living, the best karaoke night in metro Phoenix.