What it’s actually like
Sixth Avenue east of Scottsdale Road is where Old Town’s bar scene thins into parking lots and side doors, and it is where Fox Cigar Bar has kept a walk-in humidor and a long back bar since 2015. Call it a shop with a lounge or a lounge with a shop; the honest description is that the retail is the humidor and the reason you stay is everything poured after you pick a stick.
The humidor is the real thing: a walk-in room, climate held, with shelves of premium cigars across the major houses and price points, and staff who will steer a beginner to a mild robusto as readily as they will find a regular’s favorite box. Buy, cut, light and take a seat. The lounge side is dim, leathery and unhurried, with a bar that runs to more than four hundred spirits, two hundred of them whiskies, bourbons and scotches — one of the deeper brown-liquor lists in a town that takes its bourbon seriously.
It is part of a small Arizona group of Fox Cigar Bars, which shows in the polish and the depth of the list, and it sits deliberately apart from the loudest blocks. The Entertainment District is a hundred yards away; inside, nobody is dancing on anything. The crowd runs from golf trips to couples on the way to or from dinner on Stetson Drive to regulars who have a chair they consider theirs. Smoking indoors is the whole premise, so know that going in.
What to buy
A cigar from the walk-in. The point of the place. Tell the staff how long you want to sit and how much smoke you want, and let them pull three options at three prices.
A pour to match. Two hundred-plus whiskies, bourbons and scotches on the shelf, so this is the room to try the bottle you have read about rather than the one you always order.
A box for the trip home. Premium cigars travel better than most Old Town souvenirs, and a box from the humidor is a gift for someone who will remember where it came from.
Accessories. Cutters, lighters and cases, the things you always mean to replace and never do.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The address is on Sixth Avenue east of Scottsdale Road, at the southern edge of the Entertainment District and a short walk from the canal. After dark the district’s lots charge event prices and fill fast; the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard is a ten-minute walk south, and the Old Town on foot note maps the route. Ride-share to the door is the sensible move for a night that involves a bar with four hundred spirits, and the Old Town guide covers the district around it.
Check hours before you go; it is an evening and late-night room by nature, and it is at its best on a weeknight, when the district around it is quiet and the bartender has time to talk about the whisky wall. Weekend nights are loud and full. January through April, with the golf tournament, the car auctions and the winter residents all in town, is when the lounge is busiest; in summer the air conditioning and the humidor are a fine reason to be indoors at nine in the evening.
Eat while you’re there
Stetson Drive is two minutes away. Barrio Queen is the Mexican room for dinner before a cigar and Marcellino Ristorante is the Italian one for a longer evening; both sit on the block where Cowboy Ciao, the closed Stetson landmark, once set the tone. Maple & Ash at the Waterfront a few blocks west is the big-night steakhouse. Southbridge and the Scottsdale Waterfront are the canal-side blocks to walk between courses.
How it got here
Old Town’s Entertainment District is a creature of the 2000s and 2010s, the two decades in which the blocks between Fifth Avenue and Camelback Road, east of Scottsdale Road, turned from a fading strip of shops and motels into the densest run of bars and clubs in Arizona. The Scottsdale Waterfront rose on the canal in the 2000s where the old Camelback Mall strip had stood; Southbridge followed across the water; and Stetson Drive, Indian Plaza and Saddlebag Trail filled with the rooms that give the district its reputation.
Fox Cigar Bar opened on Sixth Avenue in 2015, at the district’s edge, with a different pitch. Where the bars around it sold volume, it sold a walk-in humidor and a spirits list four hundred deep — a lounge built for sitting still in a neighborhood built for moving on. It was part of a small Arizona group of Fox Cigar Bars, so it arrived with a formula already worked out: premium cigars as the retail, brown liquor as the draw, leather and low light as the setting. The combination filled a gap Old Town had not quite noticed it had. The district was full of places to drink and short on places to spend two quiet hours doing it.
A decade on, it is one of the longer-lived rooms in a district where bars open, rename and close on the usual cycle, and it has done it by being the opposite of its neighbors. The humidor is the shop; the lounge is the reason; and the fact that it sits a hundred yards from the loudest blocks in Arizona and feels nothing like them is the whole business plan. The whisky wall, two hundred bottles deep, gives it a second identity as one of Old Town’s serious brown-liquor bars, which brings in a crowd that would never have walked into a cigar shop.
For the rest of the district — the Waterfront, Southbridge, the canal walk to Fifth Avenue — the Old Town guide is the map. Fox is the place on it to end the night sitting down.