What was Twisted Grove?
Most restaurant closures are little tragedies. Twisted Grove Parlor + Bar got the rarer ending: a renovation of identity, same landlord, same owner, new sign.
The restaurant opened in 2015 at 8220 N Hayden Rd in the McCormick Ranch stretch of Scottsdale, the work of Valley restaurateur Christopher Collins — the operator behind Grassroots Kitchen & Tap and the growing Common Ground Culinary family. It nearly opened under a different name entirely: the debut branding was Twisted Root, until a national trademark on that name surfaced and forced a quick rebrand. The “twisted” survived, and so did the idea it advertised — modern comfort food, American classics given a contemporary spin, in a roomy neighborhood dining room that ran alongside a Phoenix sibling at Uptown Plaza.
For seven years it did the unglamorous, essential work of a neighborhood restaurant: feeding McCormick Ranch’s families, golf leagues, and date nights with food a notch more interesting than the category required — the twisted salad, the brussels sprouts, comfort plates with just enough cheffiness to justify the drive past the chains.
The end came in 2022, and it was a pivot rather than a collapse. Collins — who later said the pandemic had delayed a change he was already contemplating — closed Twisted Grove and reopened the space that July as Collins Bros. Chophouse. The address never went dark. Some of the menu never even left.
What made it work
The formula was calibrated for exactly where it stood. McCormick Ranch is Scottsdale’s great middle — established neighborhoods, lakes and golf, families who eat out often and hate a production — and Twisted Grove was engineered as their default. The room was comfortable and roomy where Old Town rooms are cramped and loud; the price point sat at an approachable level two; and the menu’s “twist” was pitched precisely: familiar enough for the twelve-year-old and the father-in-law, updated enough that the food-curious didn’t feel parked.
The greatest hits earned real loyalty. The twisted salad and the brussels sprouts became the table-stakes orders — the dishes regulars structured meals around, and, tellingly, among the items that survived onto the successor restaurant’s menu when the concept changed. That detail says everything about how neighborhood affection actually works: concepts are disposable, but a salad people ordered two hundred times is infrastructure.
The Collins machine ran it well. Common Ground Culinary’s house style — polished operations, generous portions, service tuned for repeat customers rather than reviews — showed throughout. The group’s flagship Grassroots Kitchen & Tap had proven the model nearby, and Twisted Grove applied it with a lighter, brighter, parlor-and-bar inflection. Weeknights were the restaurant at its truest: half the tables on first-name terms with the staff, the bar holding the after-work crowd, nobody photographing anything.
Its weakness was the flip side of its virtue. A restaurant built to be dependable rarely becomes essential, and Twisted Grove never generated the destination pull that insulates a concept from its owner’s next idea. When Collins saw a stronger use for the room — the Valley’s 2020s steakhouse hunger — there was no cult standing in the way. The neighborhood grieved for about a week, then booked tables at the chophouse.
A concept swap, and what it says about Scottsdale
Twisted Grove’s 2015-to-2022 arc is a clean core sample of how the Valley’s mid-tier dining market evolved — and of how a modern restaurant group actually manages its real estate.
The opening rode the 2010s elevated-comfort-food wave, when “familiar, but better” was the winning pitch across American dining and operators like Christopher Collins built portfolios on it. Collins’s Common Ground Culinary grew into one of the Valley’s most reliable homegrown groups — Grassroots, Wally’s American Gastropub, The Macintosh, Sweet Provisions and more — with Twisted Grove as its Scottsdale-neighborhood expression, planted in the same orbit as the original Grassroots. The Hayden Road corridor through McCormick Ranch was ideal territory: dense with year-round residents, starved for non-chain options, and cheap enough (by Scottsdale standards) to let a level-two concept breathe.
The closing rode the next wave. By the early 2020s, the pandemic had reshuffled dining habits, and the Valley’s appetite had swung hard toward steakhouses — the format that dominated Scottsdale openings of the era. Collins read the room: he later acknowledged COVID had delayed a concept change already in mind, and in July 2022 the space reopened as Collins Bros. Chophouse, a family-named steakhouse pitched at the same neighborhood’s bigger nights. The move mirrored the market with textbook timing, and carrying over a few Twisted Grove favorites was the graceful touch — continuity for the regulars amid the costume change.
There’s a lesson in the contrast with Old Town’s churn. Down in the entertainment district, closures like The Drunk Munk’s end in dark windows and speculation; in neighborhood Scottsdale, a well-run group treats an address as a permanent asset and swaps the concept above it. Twisted Grove “closed” the way a ship gets renamed.
Honest assessment: Twisted Grove was a good, never-great neighborhood restaurant whose most interesting moment was its exit. But the seven years of dependable dinners counted for plenty in the neighborhood that ate them — and its afterlife, as the steakhouse its own salad survived into, is one of the tidier endings in recent Scottsdale restaurant history.