What is The Vig McDowell Mountain?
Every Vig is a neighborhood hangout by design; this one was built to look like the neighborhood. The Vig McDowell Mountain opened at 11 a.m. on Monday, June 5, 2017, in a stand-alone building at 10199 E Bell Road, on the southwest corner of Bell Road and Thompson Peak Parkway, and its owners said out loud what they were copying. “We both love the simplicity of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West’s iconic structure,” partner Tucker Woodbury said at the opening, and the open floor plan was, in the company’s words, heavily inspired by Wright’s timeless design.
The result is a Usonian-style room of more than 13,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor space, with the McDowells in view from nearly every seat and Taliesin West itself a few miles south on the same slope. It was the fifth Vig from Phoenix-based Genuine Concepts, after Arcadia in 2006, Uptown, Fillmore and The Vig McCormick Ranch in 2014. The brand’s tagline is genuine hospitality since 2006, and it now counts seven Valley rooms with Paradise Valley listed as coming; our guide to the Arcadia original covers where it all started.
What it does is what every Vig does: lunch, happy hour, dinner and weekend brunch, cocktails all day, a patio built for lingering. What makes this one different is who it was built for. The site is across Bell from the trailheads of the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, so the building includes lockers and an outdoor restroom for hikers and cyclists to clean up before they sit down, and the house drink, The Bitty, a rum and Coke, has sent fifty cents a pour to the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy since opening day.
Our verdict: the best-looking tavern in North Scottsdale, and the right bar for a neighborhood that spends its mornings on a mountain.
Trail, patio, sunset
Hours worth knowing. Monday through Friday 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., with brunch Saturday and Sunday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. At opening in 2017 it ran to 1 a.m. on Friday and Saturday; the 10 p.m. close seven nights is the current schedule and tells you what this room is, a dinner-and-sunset tavern rather than a late bar.
Do the trail first. The Gateway Loop trailhead and the rest of the preserve’s McDowell Mountain Ranch access points are minutes away, and the lockers and outdoor restroom were put in the plans for exactly this sequence: hike, rinse, patio. Patio yoga was one of the opening community events. Read our Gateway Loop protocols before you go up, then come here after.
Order the Bitty at sunset. The McDowells face the room, and the hour before dark is when the building earns its design. The Bitty is the house rum and Coke with the fifty-cent donation; the rest of the list is the Vig’s all-day cocktails, with a happy hour menu posted on the website. Food is the brand’s tavern menu, which changes by season and location; the McDowell Mountain all-day menu is posted as a PDF on the site, so check it rather than trusting memory.
Brunch strategy. Weekend brunch opens with the doors at 10 and ends at 2; the patio fills by late morning in the cool months. OpenTable takes reservations, and the bar and patio take walk-ins. It is a family room by day, with strollers and dogs on the patio, and a neighborhood date room by night.
Calendar and logistics. The WM Phoenix Open at TPC Scottsdale is a few miles west on Bell, and the tavern is a sane place to eat during tournament week when the Hayden Road corridor is not; our survival guide has the traffic logic. There is a dedicated lot, which is the advantage of a stand-alone building. From the Scottsdale Marriott at McDowell Mountains it is a short rideshare.
The fifth Vig and the Wright idea
Genuine Concepts started The Vig in 2006 in Arcadia with a single stated aim, the ultimate neighborhood hangout, and spent a decade refining the patio-and-lawn formula in central Phoenix before crossing into Scottsdale at McCormick Ranch in 2014. McDowell Mountain, three years later, was a stand-alone building on a corner lot rather than a storefront, and the company treated it as a statement. “The end result is an astonishing property and we can’t wait to show it off,” Woodbury said, and he credited the site, with its views and its trailhead traffic, for making it “an easy decision to build our 5th Vig here.”
The design choice was more than marketing. Scottsdale’s relationship with Wright is the subject of our guide to Frank Lloyd Wright and desert architecture; the short version is that the city has spent eighty years borrowing his vocabulary, from the Spire on the boulevard that carries his name to the Bell Road and Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard intersection a mile west of this tavern. A bar that admits the borrowing, and does it with low rooflines, an indoor-outdoor plan and the mountain as the back wall, is more honest than most of what the 2010s built up here.
It also filled a real gap. McDowell Mountain Ranch is a master-planned community with a park, a golf course and, until 2017, almost no bar; its residents drove to the Airpark or to Kierland. The Vig gave the neighborhood a room, the preserve’s hikers a finish line, and the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy a small, steady stream of Bitty money. The brand kept growing after it, to North Central, Park West and Dana Park, and a Paradise Valley room is next.
Honest assessment: the food is good tavern food and not the reason to come; the room and the view are, and they are better than anything else in the 2020s north Scottsdale tavern crop. It closes early by Old Town standards and would not pretend otherwise. On our list of every bar and club in Scottsdale, it is the north’s best patio that is not on a resort.