What was The Skeptical Chymist?
The best-named bar in Scottsdale was an Irish pub in a freeway-corner strip center, and it looked, in Phoenix New Times’ words, “very much like a kind of place you’d find on the Emerald Isle.”
The Skeptical Chymist stood at 15688 N Pima Rd, Suite C6, in the center at the southwest corner of the 101 and Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, on the eastern edge of the Airpark. The name came from The Sceptical Chymist, the 1661 book by Robert Boyle, the Irish-born scientist usually called the father of modern chemistry, and the room was dressed to match: wooden shelves of apothecary bottles and microscopes, hundreds of books that looked like legal texts lining the walls, a projector showing ESPN, Irish music, a clock counting down to St. Patrick’s Day and a sign reading “There’s nothing like a Guinness.” A server told New Times most of it had been shipped from Ireland.
Nobody has published the opening year; the best estimate is around 2006, and it was certainly open by 2008, when Best of Phoenix named it Best Place to Turn Green, Without Envy. What made it a local institution was Tuesday. The Brainstormers Pub Quiz, with strict time limits, European beer specials and a no-phones rule, won Best Pub Quiz in 2013, and New Times described the room on quiz night as having an “academic ambience.” The menu ran from an all-day Irish breakfast, corned beef and cabbage and lamb shepherd’s pie to Mediterranean flatbreads, curries and American bar food, and the happy hour earned an A on a 2012 report card. The same owners ran Fibber Magees in Chandler.
It closed around 2021. The Union Jack British Pub took the room that September and lasted seventeen months, closing on January 29, 2023. Our verdict: for fifteen years the one bar in the Airpark with a point of view, and the hardest pub quiz in the city.
Quiz night, happy hour and the Saturday-morning soccer crowd
Tuesday was the main event. The Irish Pub Quiz ran weekly from at least 2011, hosted by Brainstormers, and it was not a casual affair: timed rounds, difficult brain teasers, no searching on your phone, and a room full of people who had come to win. New Times in 2011 called the atmosphere academic and the brain teasers difficult. The books on the walls were props and also a dare.
Happy hour was daily, 4 to 7. The 2012 report card spelled it out: $2 off wine and beer, which put Guinness at $4 and Four Peaks Kiltlifter at $3.25; $1 off well drinks; appetizers and five Mediterranean-style flatbreads at half price. Sunday beers were $3, Friday Irish Car Bombs $5, Monday burgers $5. Two beers, two appetizers and a flatbread came to about $22 with tax. The date and black pepper flatbread, with marinated onions and a balsamic reduction, was the reviewer’s standout; crispy cod sliders and chicken tenders with chipotle hot sauce filled out the order. Lamb skewers, crab cakes and curry fries were on the same list. The house cocktail was the Chymist Royal: Bushmills, apple liqueur and ginger ale.
Sports came with it. The projector ran ESPN, and over the years the pub became a hangout for Seattle Seahawks fans and European soccer supporters, a crowd The Union Jack inherited on purpose. Seating was self-service at high-tops, tables and booths.
The Union Jack version, from September 2021, moved the center of gravity to breakfast and football of both kinds. A full English breakfast was served all day, with fish and chips, bangers and mash, steak and kidney pie and an Edinburgh and a Cardiff burger behind it. Hours ran from 10 a.m. most days, 6:45 a.m. on Saturdays for early Premier League kickoffs, and until midnight on Friday and Saturday. For what the corridor’s bars do now, see our happy hour guide.
Fifteen years of Irish, seventeen months of British
The Skeptical Chymist opened in the Airpark’s 2000s boom, when the employment center around Scottsdale Airport was filling in with offices and the strip centers along Pima Road and the 101 needed somewhere for those offices to drink. It took the role seriously: not a sports bar with a shamrock, but a themed room built from a 17th-century book, run by people who also owned Fibber Magees on Elliot Road in Chandler. The two Best of Phoenix awards, five years apart, bracket its best decade.
Its closing is the least documented part of its history. The pub was still listed in 2020 spring-training party guides; by August 2021 Mouth by Southwest was announcing The Union Jack for “the former Skeptical Chymist Irish Pub,” with no account of when or why the Chymist had closed. The pandemic year is the obvious suspect, and we have not found a source that confirms it.
The Union Jack’s run is a short lesson in the corner. It announced a soft opening for August 19, 2021 and was open by September 13, pitched at the Seahawks and soccer crowd the Chymist had built. It added a second pub at Dana Park in Mesa by March 2022. Then on January 29, 2023, it posted that it was “temporarily closed for remodel” for about two weeks. The space went up for lease through a restaurant brokerage at once, in the week of the Phoenix Open and the Glendale Super Bowl, when no sports bar in the Valley would voluntarily go dark. Mouth by Southwest counted the run at seventeen months, and the Mesa pub carried on alone.
Honest assessment: the Chymist was a genuinely good pub in a part of the city that has very few, and its quiz was the real thing. Its successor was a reasonable idea that arrived two years too late and left in the middle of the busiest week of the year. The corner by the freeway has not had a pub since. For the city’s surviving rooms of this kind, start with the list of every bar and club in Scottsdale.