What is Three Beans Cafe?
Three Beans Cafe is a coffeehouse that answers one question, how good can an espresso martini be, and it does so in a 40-seat vintage room at 7150 E 5th Avenue, Suite 100, a few doors off Scottsdale Road in the Fifth Avenue shops. It opened on Wednesday, December 11, 2024, in the space that had been Scapegoat Beer and Wine, a bottle bar that dated its own start to 2016.
The owners are Eric Ferrone and Ed Oakes, who have worked together for more than twenty years and climbed the whole ladder of the bar trade together: barbacks, then bartenders, then security and management, then operating partners in other restaurant groups. The cafe was their first place of their own and took about two and a half years to plan. Oakes, a craftsman and handyman, designed and largely built the interior himself: mid-century chairs, soft light, a looped black-and-white film on one wall, and a single television that plays old movies and music so that, in the owners’ words, conversation rather than screens is the point.
The menu is narrow on purpose. There are six espresso martini variations, one of them rotating on customer feedback, plus a Mochisado of chocolate and reposado tequila, a gin espresso martini, an Old Fashion Espresso and an Aperol Spritz Espresso, every one built on a fresh-pulled shot rather than the cold brew concentrate Ferrone criticizes in other bars. It is, the owners insist, not a full-service bar: no vodka sodas, mojitos or margaritas. By day it is a coffeehouse, with espresso drinks (all available decaf), a growing non-alcoholic list, and croissants and pastries from JL Patisserie, Jenna Leurquin’s James Beard-nominated French bakery.
It is for the Fifth Avenue visitor who wants a drink without the Entertainment District, the remote worker at 10 a.m., and anyone who thinks the espresso martini deserves to be made properly. Our verdict: the best espresso martini in downtown Scottsdale, in a room small enough to make it feel like a secret.
How to drink at Three Beans
Order the Three Beans martini first. It is vanilla-flavored vodka and Borghetti coffee liqueur shaken over fresh espresso, and New Times’ listing calls it soft and smooth, the drink that shows what a fresh shot does to the formula. From there the board goes darker: the Old Fashion Espresso is more bitter and boozier, the Mochisado puts chocolate with reposado tequila for the tequila drinkers, and the gin version and the Aperol Spritz Espresso are the lighter detours. Six variations run at any time, one of them rotating; customers on review sites mention a salted caramel espresso martini and a Thin Mint. Prices for individual drinks are not published; the happy-hour figures below give the scale.
Eat from the case. The pastries are from JL Patisserie, the French bakery Jenna Leurquin runs in Phoenix and Scottsdale, nominated for a James Beard Award. The almond croissant and the banana bread are the ones regulars name, and the case thins out by mid-afternoon. There is no kitchen beyond that; this is a cafe, not a restaurant.
Use the happy hour. By Arizona Foothills Magazine’s June 2025 report, Monday through Friday from 3 to 6 p.m. the Three Beans martini drops to $10, every other cocktail is $3 off and coffees are $2 off; Tini Tuesdays make martinis $13 all day. Those were summer specials when printed and may have changed, so check the cafe’s Instagram, which serves as its website. See our happy hour guide for how that compares with the rest of the district.
Timing. The cafe opened at 3 p.m. daily in December 2024 with a stated goal of 10 a.m., and it got there in 2025. The current listings give 10 a.m. to midnight Monday through Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 1 a.m. Thursday, 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. Friday and Saturday and 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. Sunday, with the late closes depending on the crowd. The room is 40 seats and fills on weekend evenings, when Arizona Foothills reported occasional waits; weekday afternoons are open. For the late end, see our late-night guide.
Getting there. Suite 100 is on the Scottsdale Road end of Fifth Avenue, a block from the Sugar Bowl and a short walk from Jeni’s at Marshall Way. Street parking on Fifth is free and turns over; the city garages are two blocks east. For daytime coffee without the cocktails, Fourtillfour on First Avenue and Cartel are the neighbors, and our guide to the best coffee shops in Scottsdale ranks the field.
The coffee bar that Old Town’s bartenders built for themselves
Three Beans is what happens when two career bar operators open the place they always wanted to drink in. Ferrone and Oakes spent two decades running other people’s rooms, the last stretch as operating partners in restaurant groups the press does not name, and when they went out on their own in late 2024 they did not open a bar. They opened a cafe with a cocktail list of one idea, and said so in the first interview: no vodka sodas, no margaritas. Ferrone told New Times that their years in the trade and the advice of peers gave them a safety net; the small room and the narrow menu were the other half of the insurance.
The idea was sound for the address. Fifth Avenue has been a shopping street since the 1950s and has never had much of a bar life; the drinking moved east to the Entertainment District in the 2000s, and the Fifth Avenue blocks kept the galleries, the boutiques and the daytime cafes. A 40-seat room that serves espresso at 10 and espresso martinis at midnight fits the street in a way a full bar would not, and the hand-built vintage look reads as a neighborhood place rather than a concept.
The espresso martini was also the right drink at the right time. It came back in the early 2020s as the one cocktail every bar in Scottsdale had to pour, and most poured it badly, with cold brew concentrate and bottled syrup. Ferrone’s insistence on a fresh shot is the whole pitch, and the name is the garnish: three beans on the foam, health, wealth and happiness in the Italian telling, or past, present and future in his own. Arizona Foothills Magazine, writing in June 2025, called the room friendly and intimate and noted it filled at peak hours; New Times, in January, had called it the new kid on the block.
What the record does not say is almost everything about the business. There is no website, only an Instagram account, so prices, the full drink list and the current hours come from listings and two magazine pieces, and the owners’ previous employers are unnamed. A cafe that opened at 3 p.m. and now opens at 10 is a cafe that found its daytime crowd, which is the one fact the record is clear on.
Honest assessment: Three Beans is a small, specific, well-made idea, and it will please anyone who likes the drink it is built on. It is not a restaurant, not a late bar in the Stetson Drive sense and not a coffee roaster; it is a 40-seat room with a good espresso machine and a bartender’s palate, and in a district that runs on volume that is a relief. Go on a weekday afternoon with one martini and a croissant, and you will see why its owners spent two and a half years on it.