What is Velvet Taco?
Velvet Taco is a Dallas taco chain that doesn’t much care whether its tacos are Mexican. The brand calls itself “a temple to the liberated taco,” and the menu backs that up: a spicy tikka chicken taco, Nashville hot tofu, fried paneer, a chicken & waffle taco, a bacon smash burger taco and a French dip sit alongside the more familiar quesa birria, slow-roasted brisket and Mexi-Cali shrimp. The kitchen slow-roasts its own chicken and corn and makes the rest from scratch, and the sides (elote, queso blanco, a red curry coconut queso, brisket nachos) are built to share.
The Old Town store opened on November 4, 2024, the first Velvet Taco in Arizona. It sits at 4166 N Scottsdale Rd in the building that for a decade held Second Story Liquor Bar, the hidden-staircase cocktail room that closed in May 2024. The new tenant is a much louder neighbor: bright color, exterior neon, wood and irreverent wall murals, 88 seats inside and a 20-seat patio on Scottsdale Road.
The format is fast-casual, order at the counter or on the app, and prices stay low by Old Town standards. Two things set it apart from the district’s other taco counters. One is the WTF, the Weekly Taco Feature, a new taco every week. The other is the clock: on Friday and Saturday the kitchen stays open until 3 a.m., which makes it one of the few places in the entertainment district where you can get real food after the bars close.
How to order, and when to go
Start with the tikka. The spicy tikka chicken taco is the brand’s best-known order and a fair test of what the kitchen is trying to do. From there, pick one heavy (brisket, birria, or the smash burger taco) and one wildcard (tofu, paneer, cauliflower), and get elote for the table. Tacos are sold individually, so a group can try most of the board.
Check the WTF first. The Weekly Taco Feature changes every week; the week this page was checked it was a chipotle pork popper. It’s often the most interesting thing on the menu, and it won’t be there next time.
Don’t skip the cake. The red velvet cake is the dessert, and the only one. The bar side is short and to the point: frozen margaritas, the house “Kick Ass” margarita, a blackberry-thyme version, and local beer.
Late night is the point. Sunday through Thursday the store closes at 10 p.m., but on Friday and Saturday it runs until 3 a.m., and that’s when the Scottsdale Road sidewalk fills with people coming from Bourbon & Bones’ block, the Cold Beers & Cheeseburgers patio and the clubs on Stetson Drive. Order on the app before you walk over and you skip the line. Our late-night food guide covers the other options, and the Old Town nightlife guide covers the bars around it.
Parking. Scottsdale Road itself is no place to look for a space. The free public garages off the Fifth Avenue side and the Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard are a few minutes’ walk; on a weekend night, a rideshare drop on Scottsdale Road is easier still. The Old Town on foot note maps the walk.
From speakeasy to taco temple
The address has a longer bar history than its current tenant suggests. Second Story Liquor Bar opened upstairs at 4166 N Scottsdale Rd in 2013, when Old Town’s nightlife was mostly clubs and cover charges, and spent about ten years as one of the district’s serious cocktail rooms. Owner Tommy Plato closed it on May 4, 2024. He didn’t close for lack of business: he took a lease deal from Velvet Taco and put his crew into The Ends, his Anthony Bourdain-inspired restaurant on Stetson Drive, which opened weeks later. When What Now Phoenix reported the deal that May, the brand’s nearest store was in Lubbock, Texas.
The brand itself dates to 2011, when Dallas-based Front Burner Restaurants opened the first Velvet Taco on Henderson Avenue near Central Expressway. The pitch was that a taco didn’t have to be Tex-Mex and could be made with fine-dining care, and the late-night hours were part of the plan from the start. The original Henderson store closed in January 2023, by which point the chain had spread across Texas and into other states. When the Scottsdale store opened, CEO Clay Dover said it was “the first of many more to come” in the Phoenix area.
The swap from Second Story to Velvet Taco says a lot about how Old Town’s stretch of Scottsdale Road between Indian School and Camelback changed in the 2020s. The 2010s filled the block with locally owned, high-volume concepts: Bourbon & Bones, Cold Beers & Cheeseburgers, Farm & Craft, Diego Pops, The Montauk. National brands have since found the same foot traffic worth paying for, and a late-night taco counter fits a strip where the bachelorette parties and the bar crowd walk past every weekend.
What’s lost is a quiet room up a staircase. What’s gained is a cheap meal at 2 a.m. on a street that badly needed one. For the old Second Story regulars, the cocktails are at The Ends now; for everyone leaving the bars, the tacos are here.