What was The Mint Ultra Lounge?
The Mint was the club at the Camelback end of Old Town’s circuit, at 7373 E Camelback Rd on the corner of Saddlebag Trail, and the strangest thing about it is that nobody can say with confidence when it died.
What is certain is the middle. It was open by August 2012, when AZ Big Media listed it among the district’s bars, and that fall it threw a pink-cocktail breast-cancer benefit and billed itself as “the premier restaurant and ultra-lounge” in Old Town. On December 31, 2012 it sold $40 tickets to a red-carpet party called The Premier at The Mint. In 2013 Phoenix New Times’ Best of Phoenix gave it an award that doubled as a description, Best Place to Find a One-Night Stand: an Old Town ultra-lounge with a libertine vibe, a crowded weekend patio, 12 signature cocktails, dancers on the furniture, darkened nooks and curtain-covered cabanas. In 2014 AZ Big Media’s readers voted it runner-up for Best Nightclub behind Maya, and in December of that year New Times named it as one of Evening Entertainment Group’s venues, the Corieri company that also ran Livewire and HiFi.
Then the record splits. In its December 2019 story on the merger of the Yari family’s Spellbound Entertainment and Riot Hospitality, ABC15 wrote that “The Mint nightclub” was “also closed,” and the Yaris’ Scottsdale Collection master plan proposed a hotel or housing for the parcel. Yet reviews of The Mint kept arriving through 2024, and on December 12, 2024, when Riot Hospitality announced Shiv Supper Club for the 13,869-square-foot space, it said Shiv would replace The Mint Ultra Lounge. Shiv opened on May 14, 2025.
Our reading: The Mint closed or went dark around 2020, came back in some form, and was finally gone by the end of 2024. We have found no published source that reconciles the two accounts, so we are telling you both.
The pickup bar at the top of the district
Where it sat mattered. Camelback Road is the northern edge of the Entertainment District, and The Mint was the club you hit first coming from Fashion Square or last on the walk back from Saddlebag Trail. It shared a parcel with the office buildings that the Yaris would later target for redevelopment, which is why its fate got tangled up with a master plan.
The room was built for weekends. Every description from its working years says the same thing: busy Friday and Saturday, a patio that filled before the inside did, bottle service in the cabanas, and a crowd that came to meet people rather than to hear a particular DJ. The dozen house cocktails were the drinks list; the dancers on the furniture were the floor show. A phone number for table reservations ran through a promoter on the big nights, and New Year’s Eve was ticketed at the door.
The events were part of the identity. The October 2012 Pretty in Pink party had an emcee, a DJ, a live auction of a signed Channing Frye basketball and a Jared Dudley jersey, and a dollar from every pink cocktail to Susan G. Komen. The Premier on New Year’s Eve ran 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. with a red carpet. This was the promotional style of the 2010s club, borrowed from Las Vegas and applied to a corner lot.
What it cost and who went is only recoverable in outline: bottle-service pricing, a cover on weekends, a dress code at the door, and a crowd skewing to the Scottsdale twenties. If you want the current version of that night, the Old Town nightlife guide covers Maya, Casa Amigos and the clubs that inherited the trade; for the quieter end of the same district there is Kazimierz a short walk away.
A club on land that was worth more than the club
The Mint’s story is really about the parcel. Through the 2010s the Yari brothers’ Stockdale Capital assembled more than 30 acres of the district, including the land under the W, Maya and the Camelback and Saddlebag corner. The Mint operated on that corner, and whoever ran the room at any given moment, and the record puts Evening Entertainment Group there in 2014, was a tenant on ground the landlord had bigger plans for.
Those plans surfaced in 2019 and 2020. The Spellbound and Riot merger in December 2019 created a single company, Culinary Culture, controlling most of the district’s clubs; ABC15’s report listed two casualties, Dakota and The Mint, both described as closed. In May 2020 the Scottsdale Collection plan proposed redeveloping three areas, with the Mint site slated for a hotel, restaurants, retail or residences. The timing, in the first months of the pandemic, makes a dark Mint easy to believe, and a quiet reopening when the plan stalled just as easy.
What actually happened to the corner was smaller than the master plan. Dakota’s lot got its hotel, The REMI., in 2025. The Mint’s building did not come down. Instead Riot Hospitality Group, now the operating company of the merged empire, gutted it and reopened it on May 14, 2025 as Shiv, a 13,869-square-foot supper club with charcoal-fired steaks, caviar service, nightly live performances and a late-night Dessert Room, launched in the same summer as the remodeled Maya and the Kill Club. The boosters called it Old Town’s luxury era, and the old pickup lounge became its most expensive dining room.
Honest assessment: The Mint was never the district’s best club, and its one award was a joke at its expense, but it held the Camelback corner for more than a decade in a business where five years is a career. Its murky ending is a reminder that in this district the press releases come from landlords, and a club can be “closed” in a planning document while the lights are still on. For the rest of the 2020s turnover, see our list of every bar and club in Scottsdale.