What is the Thirsty Camel?
Most resort lobby bars are a place to wait for your room. The Thirsty Camel is a place people drive to. It is the lounge off the main lobby of The Phoenician, at 6000 E Camelback Rd, the roughly $250 million resort that financier Charles Keating opened in October 1988 at the foot of Camelback Mountain, and the resort itself says it is meant “for both locals and resort guests.”
The bar is agave-focused: a long list of tequilas and mezcals, premium spirits and handcrafted cocktails, with food “rooted in Southwestern flavors,” served daily from 2 p.m. to midnight with the kitchen running to 11. No reservation is needed. The resort frames the concept as a celebration of the Sonoran Desert, which is marketing, but the tequila list is real and the setting does the rest. The lobby sits at the top of the property, and the terrace outside the lounge looks straight down the tiered pools and the golf course to the Valley.
The name goes back to the beginning. Keating’s original build imported Carrara marble for the lobby, etched the ceiling in 24-karat gold and bought eleven Steinway pianos for the hallways, the presidential suites and, by the resort’s own account, the Thirsty Camel lounge. The room has been remodeled since, most recently when the lobby and public areas were redone in 2017 during the three-year, $118 million renovation that stripped the gilt in favor of desert-modern calm. The name and the terrace survived.
Our verdict: the best sunset drink in the Camelback Corridor that does not require a dinner reservation, and the rare five-star resort bar where showing up in golf clothes at 5 p.m. is normal. Our rooftop and sunset patio guide calls it the best rooftop that is not a rooftop, and our list of every bar and club in Scottsdale files it with the resort bars that welcome non-guests.
Sunset on the terrace, tea before it
Time it for the light. The lounge opens at 2 p.m., which is early for a bar and exactly right for this one, because the terrace faces the Valley and the show starts about an hour before sunset. Take the patio over the bar, and if you come on a night when the fire pits are lit, the far rail is the seat. Food runs until 11 and the bar until midnight every day, so it is also the last stop after a J&G or Mowry & Cotton dinner.
Order the agave. The list is built around tequila and mezcal, and the smart order is a sipping tequila neat rather than a long cocktail; the house’s point is the selection, and a glass of something from the top shelf with the view still costs less than the resort fee you are not paying. Pair it with tea. The resort’s afternoon tea, which readers of the Phoenix New Times and the Arizona Republic have voted the Valley’s best, is served off the same lobby Thursday through Sunday, with seatings at 2 and 3 p.m. and a pianist from 2 to 5. It is finger sandwiches, scones with clotted cream and preserves, and pastries, booked through OpenTable or at (480) 423-2649, with gluten-free and vegan menus on 48 hours’ notice. A late tea that becomes a first cocktail is the local move.
Know the other bars. J&G Steakhouse’s lounge opens at 5 with a sunset patio pointed at Camelback; Mowry & Cotton has its own bar; The Phoenician Tavern above the golf clubhouse does local craft beer, TVs and dueling pianos on Friday and Saturday nights from 8 to 10; and the pool bar serves from 11 to 5. The Thirsty Camel is the only one open seven days to midnight, and the only one that is really a bar rather than a restaurant with one.
Getting there. Self-park or valet at the main entrance and walk through the lobby. The resort sits on the Scottsdale side of the Phoenix line, a few minutes from Old Town up Camelback Road. During the WM Phoenix Open and Barrett-Jackson weeks the lobby fills with the resort’s own guests by 5, so come earlier.
Keating’s lobby, grown up
The Thirsty Camel is the part of The Phoenician that most directly inherits Keating’s idea of the place. The financier bought the land at the base of Camelback in 1985, absorbing the grounds of the 1926 Jokake Inn and the postwar Paradise Inn, and built a resort meant to embarrass Europe: Italian marble, crystal, gold leaf, and a lobby whose ceiling was etched in 24-karat gold. The pianos were part of the plan; eleven Steinways went into the hallways, the presidential suites and this lounge. The resort opened in October 1988. Within months Keating’s Lincoln Savings & Loan collapsed in the biggest savings-and-loan failure in the country’s history, and regulators seized his empire.
The bar outlived the scandal, as the resort did. Ownership stabilized, Marriott’s Luxury Collection took the flag, and in 2015 Host Hotels & Resorts paid roughly $400 million for the property and made the decision that defines it today: rather than preserve the 1988 opulence as kitsch, it spent $118 million between 2016 and 2019 on a top-to-bottom renovation, the largest since opening. The public areas, pool complex, main lobby and retail corridor were remodeled in 2017; Il Terrazzo became Mowry & Cotton that year; the spa opened in March 2018 and the golf course, consolidated from 27 holes to 18, debuted, and The Phoenician Tavern opened above its clubhouse in March 2019. The Thirsty Camel came through it with its name, its terrace and a more desert-modern room.
The agave focus is the newer idea. Keating’s lobby bar was a piano lounge in the grand-hotel sense; the current menu, built on tequila and mezcal and Southwestern food, belongs to the 2020s, when Scottsdale’s resort bars stopped pretending to be in Europe and started selling the desert they sit in. Its advantage over the bars on the Paradise Valley side, jade bar at Sanctuary and Hearth ‘61 at Mountain Shadows, is the view’s direction: they look at Camelback; it looks from it.
Honest assessment: this is a hotel bar, with hotel-bar prices and a crowd that is half conference badge on a weeknight. But it is open to anyone, it needs no reservation, and at sunset the terrace is one of the three or four best places to hold a glass in the city. For a first drink with a visitor who has never seen the Valley from above, there is no better choice at this end of Camelback Road.