![]() ![]() And unlike in cities like Portland and San Francisco, it’s not in danger of being edged out by downtown expansion. This is Roosevelt Row, where gourmet hot dog stands alternate with donut counters, art galleries, and bizarre souvenir stores.Īlong with rounded pastries and outlandish dream catchers, the area has also become home to Phoenix’s art scene. Just north of downtown Phoenix you’ll find a neighborhood awash in street murals and kitschy little shops. Natural landscape and an arts scene, wrapped up in one And if you’ve got a long layover at Sky Harbor, Walter Station Brewery, stationed in a defunct firehouse, sits across from the airport. ![]() ![]() Helton Brewing offers an expansive patio, ideally suited to live music. At Helio Basin Brewing, chefs use spent grain to make tortillas for the tacos found at the adjoining gastropub. Nobody thinks about Phoenix having great cocktail bars.”ĭrinking in Phoenix, however, is not limited to upscale cocktail havens - breweries have popped up like CVS locations. “The people who decide these things, the cocktail writers, the judges, they all want to go to New York or Miami. “It’s hard to get noticed here,” said owner Ross Simon, a red-headed Scotsman. In spite of its three consecutive placements in Tales of the Cocktail’s Top Ten High Volume Bars, I’ve yet to meet a mixologist outside of Arizona territory who knows much about it. In Phoenix, it hasn’t garnered the national recognition it deserves. “We get people from the Sheraton in town for work who come in and say ‘I had no idea there was this much in downtown Phoenix,’” says Englehorn.īitter and Twisted is the sort of place that might draw a line in New York or LA. In the dozen years since the school moved in, the surrounding smattering of high-rises along Central Avenue have steadily transformed into a real-deal downtown. He’s referring to the 2006 opening of Arizona State’s downtown campus, which brought with it a cohort of college students and young professionals - none of whom leave the bar at 5pm. But in the last five years, there’s been a boom. There are people who still won’t come down here because they remember how, 10 years ago, they rolled up at 5pm and everyone left. “But Arizona State came in and changed downtown. “This used to be a small, small town,” said the native Phoenician, sipping his porter and watching a construction crane swing just beyond the outer fence of his biergarten. ![]() Owner Mat Englehorn barely broke a sweat as he popped open two beers for us. The heat index fell somewhere in the upper 90s, dry and almost pleasant under an awning. On a recent Friday, I sat on the sprawling patio at Angel’s Trumpet Alehouse in downtown Phoenix. One of the biggest cities in America still rocks a small-town vibe And you’ll find an excitable cadre of locals who have worked hard to drag their hometown squarely onto America’s A-list. You’ll find mountains ripe for hiking, just opposite rivers, ideal for floating lazily along, cold beer in hand. Venture past your connecting gate at Sky Harbor and you’ll find a full-fledged downtown, complete with big-name restaurants, live music venues, a protected arts district, and one of the best cocktail bars in the world. But the place has come a long way in a short time. “If you’re not into that, though, it sucks.”Īs with plenty of America’s most-maligned cities, the majority of knocks against Phoenix come from folks who blacklisted the place after a long weekend in 2009, or during a poorly orchestrated spring break trip. “Phoenix is great if you like dry, hot dust, and chains,” a local friend once told me. For most folks, Phoenix boils down to one thing: an endless mass of desert sprawl and 110-degree shadeless pavement. Maybe you’d venture into Scottsdale once for tacos, but you wouldn’t actually bother to explore America’s fifth-largest city, at all. You’d fly in and check into a resort, where you’d presumably spend the next three days sipping 1,000-calorie daiquiris poolside, along with a cohort of divorcees on Eat, Pray, Love-esque journeys. ![]()
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