What is The Phoenician Tavern?
The Phoenician Tavern is the one restaurant at The Phoenician that does not ask you to dress. It sits upstairs in the Golf Clubhouse at 6000 E Camelback Road, with its own entrance and free parking off Camelback below the resort’s main drive, and it held its grand opening on Saturday, March 9, 2019, as the last piece of the resort’s three-year, $118 million renovation.
The resort announced it in January 2019, and the pitch was unusually candid for a Luxury Collection hotel. “The Phoenician is so formal,” director of food and beverage Lisa Mercer told Phoenix New Times; the Tavern would open the property to “a different audience that doesn’t want to be so buttoned up.” That audience was local. The room replaced Relish Burger Bistro, the resort’s Kobe-burger spot from 2010 to 2018, with something closer to a neighborhood pub: 170 seats in the dining room and bar, an 80-seat private dining room, roll-up garage doors onto a patio over the course, booths facing a bank of flatscreens, and a beer program built on 12 draft handles of Arizona and regional craft beer with nearly 50 Arizona cans and bottles in the cooler. Chef de cuisine Michael Press wrote the opening menus, about 30 items that Mercer summarized as “what Mom would make, only better.”
Seven years on, that is still what it is. The menu runs from pull-apart pretzels and Nashville hot chicken bites through a patty melt, a triple-bacon burger, ale-battered Icelandic cod and a 14-ounce split-bone ribeye, with beignets and hot apple pie to finish and milkshakes, adult or otherwise, from the bar. On Friday and Saturday nights from 8 to 10 a pair of dueling pianists takes requests, which makes it the only room on the property where anyone sings.
It is for golfers coming off the Phoenician Golf Club, for Arcadia and Camelback neighbors who want the resort’s view without its prices, and for hotel guests who have had enough of the lobby. Our verdict: a genuinely relaxed resort pub with a better beer list than the address suggests, worth the drive for the pianos and the patio, less so for the kitchen alone.
How to use The Phoenician Tavern
Timing. By the resort’s own page, lunch runs Monday through Friday 11 to 4 and starts at 10 on weekends; dinner is 4 to 8 every night. The bar stays open past the kitchen at the end of the week, until 10 on Friday and Saturday, and that is when the dueling pianos play, 8 to 10. If you want the show, book a table for 7 and eat first; the kitchen closes at 8 and the musicians fill the room fast. If you want quiet and the golf-course view, come for a weekday lunch, when the patio is mostly golfers and the roll-up doors are open from November through April. Directory listings disagree about the days (Experience Scottsdale has it closed Monday and Tuesday), so check the resort site before a Monday visit.
Order the pub food, not the entrées. The things the Tavern does well are the ones it was built for. The pull-apart pretzels with cheddar mustard and a spicy ale dip, the “Nashville Hot” fried chicken bites ($17 by In Business magazine’s February 2025 count), the patty melt with Swiss, Thousand Island and ale-braised onions, the Smokehouse Burger and the ale-battered Icelandic cod with salt-and-vinegar fries are all solid. The Kobe beef sliders ($27) and the 14-ounce split-bone ribeye are where the resort pricing shows. Experience Scottsdale puts the average entrée between $21 and $30, which is fair for the burgers and sandwiches and high for a steak you can get better a few hundred yards away at J&G Steakhouse. Finish with the warm beignets or the hot apple pie, or one of the house milkshakes, which come with or without alcohol.
Drink Arizona. The draft list is the reason to be here instead of at the lobby’s Thirsty Camel. Twelve handles rotate through local and regional breweries, and the cooler holds close to fifty Arizona cans and bottles; the resort partners with the breweries directly, and Mercer said at the opening that showing off the state’s beer scene was “a big deal.” There is a full bar as well, with a blueberry Manhattan and a blood orange martini on the opening list, and a happy hour whose details change by season. Our breweries and beer guide covers what to look for on the handles.
Getting there. Do not drive up to the resort’s main entrance. The Golf Clubhouse has its own lot off Camelback Road with free parking next to the restaurant, and the Tavern is up the stairs. Reservations are through OpenTable or (480) 423-2445; they are not required but help on piano nights and during the Phoenix Open and spring training, when the whole property fills.
The pub the renovation left for last
The Phoenician was built in 1988 by Charles Keating as a monument to excess, and for most of its first three decades its restaurants matched: Mary Elaine’s in jackets, Windows on the Green, Il Terrazzo. Casual dining at the resort meant the pool. When Host Hotels & Resorts bought the property for roughly $400 million in 2015, it began a renovation that ran from 2016 to 2019 and cost about $118 million, remaking the rooms, the pools, the spa and, in 2017, the ground-floor Italian room as Mowry & Cotton. The golf course was consolidated from 27 holes to 18, redesigned by Scottsdale architect Phil Smith, and reopened in the fall of 2018.
The clubhouse restaurant was the final phase. Relish Burger Bistro had occupied the second floor since 2010, a Kobe-burger room with a large tequila list; AZCentral’s Dominic Armato reported in June 2018 that it and J&G Steakhouse would close for renovation, J&G to reopen in September and the burger spot to return in 2019 as something new. In January 2019 the resort told New Times what: a tavern, “even more inviting and not so formal,” aimed at residents as much as guests. Troon, which manages the course, set the grand opening for March 9, 2019, and listed the hours as 11 to 9 daily.
The strategy was not unique to the Phoenician. Through the 2010s Scottsdale’s resorts dismantled their formal rooms and built casual ones that locals might use: the Four Seasons turned Crescent Moon into Proof in 2012, and the Hyatt at Gainey Ranch had already made the Golden Swan’s lakeside room a Southwestern bistro. What the Phoenician added was beer. A Luxury Collection resort with a dozen Arizona taps and a cooler of local cans was a small thing in 2019, but it signaled a hotel that had stopped pretending its neighbors did not exist.
The press has mostly left it alone since. New Times covered the announcement, In Business ran a lunch review in 2025, and the directory listings disagree about the hours, which change by season and by what the resort’s own site says this week. We found no record of a chef change since Press, nor of who runs the kitchen now; the resort’s pages do not say.
Honest assessment: The Phoenician Tavern is a good resort pub and not a destination restaurant. The beer list is real, the patio is one of the better golf-course views on the Camelback Corridor, and the dueling pianos on weekends give the Phoenician the one thing it never had, a room where people are loud on purpose. The food is competent and priced like the address. Go for a weekend night with the pianos or a weekday lunch on the patio; book J&G if you want the resort to cook for you.