What is The Peacock at DC Ranch?
Most speakeasies make you earn the door. Tom Kaufman went the other way. Behind The Living Room, his wine café on Market Street at DC Ranch, he turned a former dance studio into The Peacock, and he left the entrance findable: walk to the back of the wine bar and look for the bookcase with the peacock. There is no password. The bar’s own description is “the best hidden secret in DC Ranch,” delivered without a wink.
Through the bookcase it is over the top on purpose. About 40 seats, leather sofas, peacock-feather wallpaper, shelves of old books and a few taxidermied animals watching you drink. The cocktail list changes with the seasons, the wine comes from The Living Room’s cellar out front, and the kitchen is the wine café’s, so the evening can run from a drink to a full dinner without moving.
It is open Thursday through Saturday from 5 p.m., and Thursday is the night: a saxophone and piano duo plays and the room fills with DC Ranch neighbors. It is one of the best Thursdays in north Scottsdale.
How to do The Peacock
Find it. Park on Market Street, walk into The Living Room at the south corner (20751 N Pima Rd), and go to the back. The bookcase with the peacock is the door. If you cannot find it, ask; nobody here is pretending.
Pick the night. Thursday for the sax and piano duo, and book it at (480) 404-7465, because the room is small and the neighborhood knows. Friday and Saturday are easier at 5 or 6 and busier after dinner. The Peacock is closed Sunday through Wednesday; on those nights The Living Room out front has the wine wall and, often, live music on the patio.
What to drink. The house signature is the TFK Smoked Old Fashioned, which carries Kaufman’s initials. The seasonal lists are where the bar shows off: the summer 2025 menu, rolled out by executive chef Chris George, ran to dill-infused gin in a Fly Guy Negroni and drinks built on coconut milk and house cold foam. Kaufman is a trained sommelier, so the wine is not an afterthought; ask for something from The Living Room’s list by the glass.
What to eat. The kitchen is shared with The Living Room, whose menu is deliberately broad: sushi, flatbreads, steaks and shareable plates. The Peacock describes its own food as upscale versions of classic flavors. It works as the whole evening rather than a stop.
Make a night of it on Market Street. Kaufman’s other rooms are steps away: Elvira’s and Tomu-San Sushi, which he added in November 2025. Or come up from the city: in our speakeasy guide, The Peacock, Tell Your Friends and The Goose make a north-side crawl, and our live music guide pairs it with the Thursday ArtWalk.
The restaurateur who made Market Street a night out
The Peacock makes more sense once you know who built it. Tom Kaufman came to Arizona from Grand Blanc, Michigan, in 1973 to study marketing at Arizona State, worked as a sommelier at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, and holds an advanced sommelier certificate from the Court of Master Sommeliers. Over three decades he has opened more than 20 restaurants in the Valley, beginning with Rancho Pinot and including Restaurant Hapa, Humble Pie, Rock Lobster and Sea & Smoke. Pavle Milic and Charleen Badman, who went on to open FnB, both worked for him. He lives in DC Ranch and, by his own account, rides a Vespa to work.
Market Street needed someone like that. The village center opened in 2003 with a master plan’s idea of a downtown and a suburb’s problem: nightlife. Armitage Wine Lounge gave the south corner a bar in 2004; Kaufman turned the same corner into The Living Room, with a self-serve wine wall and music on the patio, and then kept going. Elvira’s, The Peacock and, in 2025, Tomu-San Sushi have made him the street’s most invested restaurateur. His company now goes by Kaufman Hospitality.
The Peacock opened in early 2023, near the start of Scottsdale’s speakeasy wave. In the three years since, the city has added rooms behind phone booths (Straight Up), behind bookshelves with passwords (The Madam), and down two flights of stairs with a dress code (Tell Your Friends). Kaufman’s argument, that a hidden bar should be fun to find rather than hard to enter, has aged well among them.
Honest assessment: the décor is a lot, the room is small, and the crowd skews toward people who live within two miles. But the drinks come from a sommelier’s house, the food is a real kitchen’s, and a sax and piano in a feathered room on a Thursday is exactly the kind of evening north Scottsdale is supposed to be bad at.