For fifteen years, the two-story building at 3737 N. Scottsdale Road did one thing. RnR Gastropub filled its street-facing patio with pint glasses and March Madness brackets, its exposed brick and burnt orange booths becoming as familiar to Old Town regulars as the patio itself, which real estate listings describe as the only two-story dining patio overlooking Scottsdale Road. Then, on a Sunday in June 2025, it went dark.
What's moving into that building this fall isn't a surprise exactly. General Admission, a Los Angeles-based sports gastropub, has confirmed plans to open there, bringing the long bar, the wall of televisions, the whole format back to where it lived for a decade and a half. What's easy to miss is who isn't moving in. Evening Entertainment Group, the company that built RnR and ran it for fifteen years, chose not to reopen a sports bar anywhere in Old Town. Instead, on September 26, it opened something built for Saturday mornings, three blocks away.
What Closed, And Why It Mattered
RnR wasn't a pop-up. It opened in Old Town in 2010 and spent fifteen years as a fixture of Scottsdale Road, the kind of place where a birthday group and a couple watching a Suns game could both find a seat. The building itself has history apart from the tenant: a freestanding, two-story structure built in 1967, with a gross leasable area between 4,000 and 6,000 square feet. Before General Admission signed on, the property was marketed as a $5 million single-tenant investment sitting inside a federal Opportunity Zone, the kind of listing that treats a restaurant's foot traffic as an asset class rather than a neighborhood habit.
RnR didn't close in isolation. The same weekend, Phoenix New Times reported that STK Steakhouse had finalized its own exit from its two-story home at Southbridge on the Waterfront, less than a mile away. Two of the largest, most recognizable restaurant footprints in Scottsdale's entertainment district sat empty at the same time. For a neighborhood that had grown used to a steady churn of openings, that was a different kind of news.
An Out-Of-Town Brand Claims The Building
General Admission isn't a Scottsdale company. Founded by brothers Kamran and Kourosh Pourkazemi, the brand debuted in Hollywood Hills in December 2019 and has since expanded to a flagship inside the $400 million UnCommons development in Las Vegas, a 4,650-square-foot space with 180 seats, a 1,900-square-foot patio, a 40-foot bar and more than 30 televisions. Scottsdale will be its third city. The announcement came the way a lot of restaurant news does now, through Instagram, and as of this writing the company hasn't released an exact opening date or a Scottsdale-specific menu. Its Las Vegas menu runs wings, sushi, smashburgers, steak and seafood, which gives a rough sense of what's coming.
What matters for the building at 3737 N. Scottsdale Road isn't the menu. It's that the format survives, just under new ownership. The sports bar model that anchored that corner for fifteen years didn't disappear when RnR did. It got picked up by a company that had never operated in Arizona before.
The Operator That Left Didn't Rebuild, It Redirected
Evening Entertainment Group had every reason to simply relocate RnR a few blocks over and keep running the same playbook. It's the group behind Bottled Blonde, The Backyard and other high-energy concepts across Arizona, Texas and Tennessee, and sports bars are squarely its territory. Instead, its next Old Town opening looks nothing like the one it gave up.
Holla Brunch Girl opened this past Saturday at 7320 E. Indian Plaza, above Casa Amigos Tacos + Tequila. It's a 21-and-over rooftop running Saturdays only, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., built around a singalong format rather than a screen-and-scoreboard one. Local DJs C-los and Jon Amaral, both familiar names in Scottsdale's nightlife circuit, work the daytime slot instead of the late-night one. The menu leans into the bit: Chicken & Waffles, a Watermelon Feta Handheld, an Açai Bowl, a "Girl Brunch" tower built for sharing, Signature Mimosa Towers, Frozé and an espresso martini soft serve.
"You come for the food and cocktails, but stay because you're having too much fun to leave."
That's how the group describes the concept, and it's a useful contrast to RnR's old pitch of pints and game-day sightlines. The company gave up its sports bar footprint entirely and used the capital instead on a format built around one morning a week rather than seven nights.
It Wasn't The Only Address The Group Let Go
RnR wasn't an isolated retreat either. The same reporting that covered its closure noted that Evening Entertainment Group had also closed Chauncey Social in north Scottsdale on April 1, 2025, two months earlier. Read together, the pattern isn't a company pulling back from Scottsdale. It's a company narrowing which formats it wants to keep running here, and where. A sports bar and a suburban social lounge both closed within a single quarter, while a rooftop brunch concept opened in their place a year and a half later. That's a reallocation, not a retreat.
STK Made The Same Kind Of Move, One Block At A Time
The RnR story isn't the only version of this playing out in the same few blocks. STK Steakhouse, which closed its original Waterfront location the same weekend as RnR, didn't leave Old Town either. Both STK and RA Sushi are owned by The ONE Group Hospitality, and when RA Sushi's space came open at the southeast corner of Scottsdale Road and First Street, STK moved in. The conversion took about eight weeks and roughly $1 million, and the restaurant began welcoming guests again in November 2025, a few blocks from where it had spent the previous four years.
STK didn't stop there. The company has since opened a second Valley location in downtown Phoenix, on Washington and Second Street near the city's sports arenas, a 500-seat build with a private dining room that includes a mini bowling alley. For a national operator, a legacy address in Old Town isn't sentimental. It's inventory, closed, converted or expanded based on what the numbers say, not how long the sign has been up.
What A Walk Down Scottsdale Road Looks Like Right Now
If you live within a few blocks of Scottsdale Road and First Street, you've likely already noticed the texture of this without having the full picture. The building at 3737 N. Scottsdale Road is still dark, waiting on a fall opening date that General Admission hasn't confirmed yet. A few blocks over, Saturday mornings now come with a DJ set and a line for espresso martini soft serve at Holla Brunch Girl. And around the corner from where STK used to be, the same steakhouse is serving the same menu under a different roof, with a wraparound bar and shark-tooth accents that weren't there before.
None of this required a single storefront to sit empty for long. Old Town's entertainment district isn't losing tenants, it's reshuffling them, sometimes to companies from three states away, sometimes to the same operator building something entirely different a few doors down. Watching for the next name on a building's window is a genuinely useful way to read what's changing on your own block this fall.
If you've been following what's opening and closing around your own street and want to talk through what it might mean for your home's value or your plans down the road, Kapanicas Group pays attention to this kind of shift as part of watching the Scottsdale neighborhoods we work in every day. Reach out anytime you want to talk it through.
