What is The Well Bar?
Scottsdale Road runs north through fourteen miles of increasingly expensive bars. The Well Bar is near the bottom of it, at 2623 N Scottsdale Road between Thomas and Oak, in a building that began life as a Pizza Hut, and it carries, in Phoenix New Times’ words, “none of the pretension of the cocktail parlors and clubs” farther up the same road.
It opened in 2006, after the old Pizza Hut had housed several businesses that did not last. The owner, John Marston, grew up in Eugene, went to the University of Oregon, and moved to Scottsdale to get out of the rain. He opened the bar, as he told Cronkite News, next to “Sun Devil country,” and made it the Valley’s Oregon Ducks bar from day one. Green-and-white banners, a photo shrine to the 2011 BCS Championship season and a table painted with a big yellow O are the permanent decor. On a normal Oregon game day the bar holds 100 to 120 Ducks fans; Marston calls it “the Autzen in the desert,” after the stadium in Eugene, and a regular called it “a mini-Autzen Stadium in the desert.” “More people know about us in Oregon than they do in Arizona,” Marston said in 2015. That is still roughly true.
The rest of the week it is a neighborhood dive in the plainest sense: open 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. every day including holidays, a daily Power Hour from 10 to 11 in the morning, happy hour from 4 to 6, a pool table in the middle of the floor, darts, a wall of flatscreens, and a sunny, dog-friendly patio set right against the traffic on Scottsdale Road, misted in summer and warmed by fireplaces in winter. New Times’ verdict was “a well-loved south Scottsdale dive.” Ours is that it is the most useful bar in South Scottsdale: open when you need it, cheap when you are broke, and loud in exactly one color on Saturdays.
Game days, Power Hour and the patio
Fall Saturdays belong to Oregon. If the Ducks are playing, the bar fills an hour before kickoff, every screen carries the game and the crowd sings along to things you will not recognize. Visiting Oregon fans who fly in for games against ASU or Arizona make it a stop; the 2015 pregame for the ASU game started at the bar at 2 p.m. and moved to a tailgate in Tempe at 4:30. If you are a neutral, come for the atmosphere and sit on the patio. If you are an ASU fan, you know where Mill Avenue is.
Use the morning. The 6 a.m. open serves the same constituency as the Coach House and the Roadrunner Lounge: bartenders off the Old Town shift, golfers, night-shift nurses, and people on East Coast time. Power Hour, 10 to 11 a.m., is the daily special that rewards them, and it is the quietest, cheapest hour to shoot pool. Happy hour proper is 4 to 6 p.m.; the happy hour guide has the neighbors.
The patio is the asset. It faces Scottsdale Road, which New Times calls “roaring,” and it is: you will hear the traffic. You will also get misters from May to October, fireplaces and heaters from November to March, bar games, big TVs and a dog-friendly policy. Inside, the music is loud (the paper’s reviewer had to shout over a live Phish jam), the bathrooms are, in its words, “janky,” and the bartender is “no-nonsense.” These are features.
Food and parking. The kitchen is limited to bar food, and the bar allows outside food, so a to-go order from Thomas Road is standard practice during long games. The late-night list has what is open after the kitchens close. There is a lot in front and street parking on Oak; rideshare pickup is easy because the whole building is visible from the road. The annual golf tournament, the anniversary party and the Halloween costume night are the house holidays, and the bar is open on every real one.
A Pizza Hut, a Duck and twenty years on Scottsdale Road
The building explains the bar. At 2623 N Scottsdale Road a Pizza Hut closed and a run of tenants tried and failed in its shell, and then in 2006 a Eugene transplant opened a bar in one and, as a long-time regular put it, “it stuck.” A chain restaurant’s one big room turned out to be a good shape for a dive: a bar along one side, a pool table in the middle, screens on every wall.
The Ducks identity was the opening-day idea, not a later marketing move, and it made The Well something rare in Arizona: a college bar for a school 1,300 miles away, planted a few miles from ASU. The timing helped. Oregon football’s rise under Chip Kelly, culminating in the 2011 BCS Championship game, gave a new bar a new fan base at exactly the moment the fans needed somewhere to watch, and the Cronkite News profile in 2015 found a room of 100-plus Ducks on a normal Saturday with a shrine to that season on the wall. The bar has kept the identity through the program’s ups and downs and through Oregon’s move to the Big Ten, which only increased the number of Saturday games worth watching.
Its place in Scottsdale’s bar history is as part of the South Scottsdale dive row, the rooms south of Indian School that did not chase the entertainment district’s money: TT Roadhouse off 68th Street, the Roadrunner on Hayden, Carlsbad Tavern, and this one on the road itself. Our dive bar guide treats them as a set, and the full list of every bar and club in Scottsdale shows how few of their kind remain between McDowell and Shea.
Honest assessment: The Well is not a destination unless you own a Ducks hat, and it does not want to be. It is a locally owned neighborhood bar with absurd hours, a good patio, a cheap morning special and a crowd that has been coming since 2006. In a city that keeps opening bars designed to look like this one, the original on Scottsdale Road is still open at six in the morning, and the yellow O is still on the table.