What was The Lodge?
The Lodge was a joke that Old Town got, and then kept ordering for six years.
It opened in late November 2008 at 4422 N 75th St, in the middle of Old Town’s nightlife blocks, in an A-frame building that had been a First Watch breakfast restaurant. Chef Aaron May, who also owned Over Easy and was still running Sol y Sombra and Autostrada at DC Ranch, was one of its owners, with partner Quinn Goldsberry. The same month, American Junkie opened down the street, from the owners of Dirty Pretty and the Pussycat Lounge. The two openings captured the district’s mood in late 2008: one more scene bar, and one bar pretending not to be.
The Lodge was the one pretending. It billed itself as a “quaint, Midwestern dive bar” in the heart of what New Times called Scottsdale’s plastic-fantastic nightlife mecca, and it dressed the part: a taxidermied coyote over the fireplace, antler chandeliers hanging from the high A-frame ceiling, a bar made of logs and a family of carved wooden Sasquatch statues by the door. The menu was bar comfort food: soft pretzels, fried cheese curds, bratwurst, meatloaf on a bun.
In 2009 the kitchen added the Sasquatch Burger, an Angus patty with bacon, cheese and fried onions served between two whole grilled cheese sandwiches, with a steak knife stabbed through it. A New Times blog post about it drew tens of thousands of hits, and the burger became the bar’s calling card for the rest of its run.
It closed on Sunday, November 16, 2014, seven months after its land sold to a condominium developer, and moved to Tempe the next summer. The address is now the Envy Condominiums. Our verdict: The Lodge was the most self-aware bar in the Entertainment District, and the Sasquatch was the most famous burger in Scottsdale for most of its run.
What the menu and the cabin were
The Sasquatch was the reason to go. New Times’ Michele Laudig, reviewing The Lodge in September 2009, counted 1,995 calories of meat, cheese and grease and wrote that it took full-contact eating and two hands to attempt a bite. A year later another New Times writer split one with a friend for a Battle of the Dishes against Roaring Fork’s Big Ass Burger, reported that the dining room hushed when it arrived, and called the contest a toss-up.
The rest was pub grub, some of it good. Laudig’s favorites were the white cheddar cheese curds in a light, salty batter, potato skins with bacon and sour cream dip, a corn chowder, a jalapeño-spiked spicy cottage cheese, a rich Sloppy Joe of ground sirloin, and a hot, crispy Cuban. The fries came sweet potato, shoestring or waffle-cut. The wings and the soft pretzels were average, the Philly needed more meat, and the tuna melt was, in her words, as bad as the lamest diner version she had ever had. The vegetarian option, a roasted portobello with goat cheese, held its own.
The beer improved, slowly. In 2009 the draft list was the bar’s weak point: Coors Light, and Sierra Nevada as the most exciting tap. By the time New Times wrote its later listing, there was a honey brown house ale and about 15 other beers, plus a cocktail list the critic liked from the start.
The game room. The later listing described a man-cave game room with overstuffed leather couches draped with animal pelts, pool tables, dartboards and taxidermied deer heads. On weekend nights, it said, the music got louder, the crowd got prettier and the place looked more like a trendy ski lodge.
The crowd. Dressed-down scenesters and plenty of college-age men, in Laudig’s 2009 account, with an employee in a camo trucker’s cap and waitresses in low-cut T-shirts. It was loud, friendly and built for a group. If you miss the format, the ski-lodge theme lives on upstairs at Old Town Ski Lodge above Wasted Grain, and our guide to Scottsdale dive bars covers the real thing.
The cabin that left Scottsdale on purpose
The Lodge arrived at an awkward moment and thrived anyway. It opened at the end of 2008, as the recession was hitting the Old Town club economy, and within a year May had shut both of his upscale DC Ranch restaurants. The bar on 75th Street was the part of his business that worked, and it worked because it cost little to run and made fun of the district it sat in. New Times wrote in 2009 that any place calling itself a Midwestern dive in Scottsdale’s nightlife core could not possibly take itself too seriously, and that was the business plan.
It also became a small chain. By 2015, New Times noted, there were Lodges in Tucson and in Colorado, and the Sasquatch traveled with them. In Old Town, May and his partners kept expanding around it: Mabel’s on Main, then Praying Monk on First Street, which closed in October 2013.
The end came through real estate. In April 2014, Real Estate Business reported that the 0.72-acre development site at 4422 N 75th St had sold for $4 million to Deco Communities, which planned a 90-unit luxury condominium called Envy. The Lodge stayed open through the summer and closed on Sunday, November 16, 2014, with a final weekend of live music from Psychobilly Rodeo and James Otto, a DJ, a beer garden and a barbecue. Goldsberry told New Times the same week that the partners had bought Shotgun Betty’s at 7330 E Stetson Drive, which became Goodwood Tavern, and that The Lodge itself would reopen elsewhere.
It reopened in Tempe in August 2015, in the old Sail Inn at 26 S Farmer Ave, with partners Dylan Vicha and linebacker Jared Allen. “It was very much a conscious decision to not put a Lodge in Scottsdale,” May told New Times. The Tempe cabin ran ten years and closed in early 2025. The Envy building, listed as completed in 2015, now stands at the Scottsdale address, at the edge of the Entertainment District, built by a developer whose partner told the press in 2014 that downtown Scottsdale had seen no new condo construction since 2008.
Honest assessment: The Lodge was never about cooking, and it did not pretend to be. It was a well-run theme bar with one brilliant menu item, and it outlasted both of the upscale restaurants May was running when it opened. Nothing in the record suggests business failed; the land under it sold, which is the most Old Town ending a bar can have.