For fifteen years, the two-story building at 3737 N. Scottsdale Road did one job. RnR Gastropub ran the only patio in Old Town with a second-floor view straight down Scottsdale Road, and it held that spot from before most of the neighborhood's current wave of construction started. The gastropub closed in June 2025. The building sat quiet for a stretch, its patio empty on nights when the rest of the block was full.
That quiet is ending twice this fall, at the same address and the one next to it.
One Address, Two Tenants, One Season
General Admission, a sports gastropub out of Los Angeles, is moving into the old RnR space later this fall. The brand comes from brothers Kamran and Kourosh Pourkazemi, who already run locations in Los Angeles and inside the UnCommons development in Las Vegas. According to reporting from WhatNow, the Scottsdale build-out will keep the sports-viewing format that defines the brand elsewhere: a long bar, booths, and televisions spread through the room, with a menu that in Vegas runs wings, sushi, smashburgers, steak, and seafood. Renderings shared on the company's Instagram show a dark interior built for that dual purpose, food and game day in the same room.
The building itself has its own backstory. It went up in 1967 as a freestanding, two-story structure, and before General Admission signed on, it had been marketed as a single-tenant investment property inside a federal Opportunity Zone, according to Hoodline. That detail matters less for what you'll order there than for what it tells you about the building's next chapter: whoever owns 3737 N. Scottsdale Road is betting on nightlife continuing to be the highest and best use of that patio, not a redevelopment into retail or residential.
Two doors down, on the same short stretch, Evening Entertainment Group opened Holla Brunch Girl on September 26, a 21-and-over rooftop DJ brunch concept. That's yesterday, as of this writing. The two openings land on the same block in the same season, one built around night games and one built around daytime music and mimosas, and together they turn a corner that used to run one shift into a corner that now runs two.
The Same Script, Two Blocks Over
Zoom out past that one corner and the pattern holds across the rest of Old Town's core. Several of this year's most talked-about openings are landing inside buildings that used to hold something else entirely, and most of them are choosing upper floors over ground level.
- Above All Else took the second floor of the space that used to be STK, at 7134 E. Stetson Drive. Above All Hospitality CEO Austin Walter has said the concept is built around rooftop views and modern American plates, aimed at diners looking for a room worth photographing.
- Drake's is moving into the former Buca di Beppo space at Scottsdale Road and First Street, its fourth U.S. location after Dallas, Houston, and West Hollywood. The build includes red leather booths, Art Deco chandeliers, and a valet-only entrance, an old-Hollywood chophouse dropped into a building that used to serve family-style Italian.
- Ari & Lloyd is opening inside a former cabinetry showroom, another example of Old Town filling new concepts into shells that were never built as restaurants in the first place.
- 40 LOVE is already open, a restaurant and lounge developed by Sean Mulholland and Avery Johnson Jr. in partnership with Niall Horan and DeAndre Hopkins.
- DEPWAH, a French-Vietnamese concept with a rooftop lounge and an espresso bar built around Vietnamese coffee and matcha, is slated to join the same stretch later this year.
- BOA Steakhouse is set to open at Scottsdale Waterfront under Innovative Dining Group, the same group that ran Sushi Roku at the W Scottsdale for fifteen years before stepping back. Executive Chef Brendan Collins, whose résumé includes Michelin-starred kitchens in London, will lead the kitchen, and the menu includes a partnership with the Four Sixes Ranch in Texas.
- Cielito opened in February atop the new AC Hotel Scottsdale Old Town, a rooftop restaurant and bar developed by the design consultancy TWG under chef and creative director Shon Foster, according to Scottsdale.com.
Line up the addresses and the pattern is hard to miss: Stetson Drive, First Street, Third Avenue, and the Waterfront all sit within a few minutes of each other. Four of the seven concepts above are on second floors or rooftops. None of them are ground-floor storefronts built from scratch. Every one of them is a new use dropped into a building that already had four walls and a different job.
Why This Is Happening at Once
A single new restaurant opening in Old Town isn't news. A cluster of them opening the same year, in buildings that used to hold a steakhouse chain, a family-Italian chain, and a cabinetry showroom, and doing it mostly on upper floors, is a different story. It says something about what property owners along Scottsdale Road and its cross streets have decided the neighborhood is worth now: not more square footage, but better square footage, priced for a rooftop view and staffed for a later crowd.
It also compresses the map. Old Town has always had plenty of restaurants, but they used to be spread wide enough that most nights out meant a short drive between stops. With Above All Else, Drake's, and Ari & Lloyd landing within easy walking distance of each other, and General Admission and Holla Brunch Girl doing the same one block over, a resident living near Scottsdale Road can now plan an entire evening, or a full day into evening, without moving a car.
What It Looks Like From Your Front Door
If you live within that stretch, the practical shift is less about any single menu and more about scheduling. A brand-new concept with a valet-only entrance is going to be its most crowded and least relaxed in its first two or three weeks. If a quieter first visit matters more to you than being there on night one, a Tuesday or Wednesday a month or two in tends to show a restaurant closer to its real rhythm.
The day-into-night shift matters too. Holla Brunch Girl gives the same corner that used to go dark until dinner service a reason to be busy at noon on a Saturday. Cielito's rooftop at the AC Hotel does something similar earlier in the evening, before the later crowd arrives elsewhere. For anyone who lives close enough to walk, that's a real change in what a Saturday can look like without leaving the neighborhood at all.
Old Town keeps rewriting its own blocks faster than most neighborhoods its size, and the buildings changing hands this season are as telling as the menus inside them. If you want the read on what's landing on your specific street before it shows up in a headline, that's exactly the kind of local detail Phoenix Living tracks for people who live in and around Old Town Scottsdale.
