The two-story building on Scottsdale Road at First Street has had exactly one identity for a decade and a half. RnR Gastropub held that corner from 2010 until June 2025, and if you've lived in Old Town any length of time, you probably have a memory attached to its street-facing patio, the kind of spot where a Tuesday happy hour and a Saturday night crowd could occupy the same room without either one feeling out of place.
That patio has been quiet for over a year now. What's coming next tells you something worth knowing about how Old Town's main strip is being rebuilt, one lease at a time.
What Actually Closed
RnR wasn't a small operation and it wasn't new to the block. The gastropub ran for 15 years at 3737 N. Scottsdale Road before closing in June 2025, ending one of the longer continuous tenancies on that stretch of the corridor. The building itself predates the restaurant by decades: a freestanding, two-story structure built in 1967, with 4,000 to 6,000 square feet of leasable space and what commercial listings describe as the only two-story dining patio overlooking Scottsdale Road. Before RnR sat empty, the property was marketed as a $5 million single-tenant investment inside a federal Opportunity Zone, the kind of designation that gives a buyer real tax advantages for holding and improving property in a specific census tract. That detail matters less for what it says about taxes and more for what it says about who was likely to buy the building next: an investor looking for a long-term, income-producing asset, not a local operator buying a building to run one restaurant for the next fifteen years.
Who's Moving In
The answer arrived this month. General Admission, a sports-focused dining and nightlife concept founded by Los Angeles brothers Kamran and Kourosh Pourkazemi, announced plans to open at the RnR address this fall. The brand currently operates locations in Los Angeles and at the UnCommons development in Las Vegas, and its website now lists Scottsdale as a third market alongside those two. Renderings show a dark interior built around a long bar, booths, dining tables, and televisions positioned throughout the room, a layout designed for the specific job of holding a crowd through a full slate of games rather than turning tables quickly.
Scottsdale hasn't seen a General Admission menu yet, but the Las Vegas location gives a preview: wings, sushi, smashburgers, steak, and seafood, alongside a full bar program. It's a broader menu than a typical sports bar, built for a room that wants to work as both a Sunday afternoon destination and a Friday night one.
What's notable isn't the concept itself. Sports-viewing restaurants exist all over the Valley. It's that the corner's new tenant is a two-city brand moving into its third market, arriving into a building that had already been marketed to investors as a long-hold, triple-net asset rather than a space built around one operator's name. The site that anchored a decade and a half of one restaurant's identity is now built to hold whichever national concept signs the next lease.
The Same Week, Three Blocks Up
RnR's replacement isn't the only new nightlife concept landing in Old Town this month. Evening Entertainment Group has planned Holla Brunch Girl, a 21-and-over rooftop DJ brunch venue, also in Old Town Scottsdale, with a launch date of September 26, 2026, according to reporting in In Business Magazine. Like General Admission, it's a production-style concept: DJ-driven, rooftop, built around a specific occasion rather than a neighborhood-standby menu.
Two new nightlife rooms landing in the same corridor in the same month isn't a coincidence so much as a pattern. Old Town's main Scottsdale Road frontage is increasingly the address where operators with multi-market ambitions choose to plant their next location, not where a single owner opens their first and only restaurant.
The House That Didn't Move to the Strip
A few blocks away, a different kind of opening tells the other half of the story. Ponderosa House opened in Old Town this May, and it did not choose a Scottsdale Road storefront. It sits near the intersection of Marshall Way and Indian School Road, inside the building that formerly housed Frank & Lupe's Old Mexico, a longtime Mexican and New Mexican restaurant.
The concept comes from Jacob Finley, the restaurateur behind the longtime Old Town neighbor Karsen's Grill. Finley was already thinking about how to expand Karsen's when the Frank & Lupe's space became available, and by his own account, the location was too good to pass up. Rather than build a new structure or take a frontage lease, Finley split the building into two halves: a cantina up front, decorated with photographs of the Arizona desert and a picture window looking out onto the street, and a dining room in back, built inside a small house originally constructed in 1922. The menu leans into what its own marketing calls Arizona-born food, including a green chile pork ragout, an approach explicitly built around regional identity rather than a repeatable, multi-market format.
Ponderosa House is a genuinely local build: one operator, already established in the neighborhood, converting an existing residential structure rather than signing onto a new-construction commercial shell. It opened off the main strip, in a building with more character than square footage, and it's staffed and run by someone who already had skin in the Old Town restaurant scene before this project existed.
What the Split Tells You
Put the three openings next to each other and a pattern shows up that a single restaurant announcement wouldn't reveal. On Scottsdale Road itself, at 3737 and at whatever rooftop Holla Brunch Girl occupies, the tenants signing new leases are multi-market operators building repeatable concepts. A few blocks off that main frontage, the new opening is a single local operator converting a century-old house into something specific to Arizona.
That split isn't really about menus. It's about what kind of lease each concept can support. A national brand with locations in two other cities can absorb the kind of rent that comes with the only two-story patio overlooking Scottsdale Road, because it's spreading that overhead across a growing multi-market footprint. A local operator opening his first expansion project is more likely to find room in a smaller, older building a few blocks away, where the real estate itself, not the address, does more of the work.
None of this happened in a vacuum. Arizona Restaurant Week has been running since September 18 and closes out this weekend, and Old Town's own social accounts have spent the stretch spotlighting the neighborhood's established, single-location mainstays: Shiso Sushi, Olive & Ivy, The Herb Box. Those aren't the restaurants opening new locations in other states. They're the ones that have already made their case to stay exactly where they are, which is its own kind of answer to the same question the RnR corner is asking.
If you've walked past 3737 N. Scottsdale Road in the last year and wondered what was coming, now you know: a brand that didn't exist in Arizona a year ago, moving into a building that was built to hold whoever signed next. And if you've wondered where the next Karsen's Grill or Ponderosa House might show up, the answer so far has been a block or two off the strip, inside a building nobody built for a national tenant in the first place.
If you're curious about what a building like the one at 3737 N. Scottsdale Road is actually worth, or what a similar commercial or investment opportunity in Old Town might look like for you, Jessica Lonn is always glad to talk it through.
