Monday, August 31, 2026

The Top 100 Things to Do Near Francine







  1. The DJ here plays real saxophone solos during your Motown number and rosins up an actual fiddle when someone calls "The Devil Went Down to Georgia." This folksy Scottsdale bar and grill runs karaoke every night of the week, which already puts it in rare company in the Valley. The live accompaniment means no one has to endure a slide that reads "Instrumental Break, 16 Bars" while the singer reconsiders their choices.






  2. Shelves of wine bottles line every wall of this small, happily unpretentious wine bar tucked into a strip mall on Indian School. The vibe is couch-and-conversation, the kind of place where you sit down next to strangers and somehow end up closing it down with them. The food menu runs to pimento cheese and Moroccan spiced meatballs, which is a perfectly reasonable way to soak up a second pour. Phoenix New Times named it one of the top 100 bars in the city.












  3. The cocktail list pulls from the shelves around you, which tells you exactly what kind of place this is: part upscale liquor store, part proper bar, and committed to being both at once. Depending on which Phoenix-area location you land in, the extras might include a golf simulator, pinball, a pizzeria, or a cigar lounge. The drinks run from spritzes to stirred classics, and the bottles for sale are genuinely worth browsing.





  4. The Praying Monk formation on the southeast face is the shot everyone posts, but the ridge routes above Echo Canyon are where the real character shows. Camelback is a hiking and climbing destination right in the middle of the Valley, accessible enough that you can squeeze it into a morning, challenging enough that you'll feel it the next day. The rock gets called "choss" by the purists, which just means more routes for everyone else.





  5. A cutlery shop for people who find Shun a little pedestrian, Phoenix Knife House stocks premium Japanese brands serious enough that you may not recognize the names until you're already pulling out your wallet. Beyond the blades, you'll find sharpening stones, knife rolls, and chef jackets, and the staff will talk you through all of it without making you feel like a tourist. Bring a dull knife for sharpening and leave with something embarrassingly sharp.




  6. The front door looks like it belongs to a golf pro shop, but step through it and you're heading downstairs into a candlelit, white-tablecloth seafood restaurant that has been around forever. The menu pulls from coasts plural, Boston to New Zealand, with lobster, scallops, and a bucket of Blue Hill Bay mussels in drawn butter that earns its own sentence. Subterranean and unapologetically old-school in the best Scottsdale way.


  7. A private nonprofit zoo spread across 125 acres, where you can pet a stingray, feed a giraffe, and ride a camel before anyone in your group agrees on what to see next. Five trails loop through over 1,300 animals, and the Red Barn Petting Zoo handles the younger crowd's demands nicely. Bikes and roller blades are welcome, which says a lot about how far you'll walk. Zoo Lights draws a faithful crowd every holiday season.


























  8. Frank Lloyd Wright designed this 3,000-seat performing arts auditorium for Baghdad before it ended up on a college campus in Tempe, which tells you something about its scale and ambition. The circular hall sits on the ASU campus flanked by pedestrian bridges and hosts touring Broadway shows, opera, symphony, and lectures. It's a proper night-out venue, the kind where you dress up a little and feel like the evening has stakes.



  9. A neighborhood dive bar that fully commits to the bit: vintage furniture with backstories, a cigarette machine, free arcade games, and a jukebox that always has Marty Robbins on deck. The drinks are cold, the Old Style is colder, and the backyard patio with lawn games fills up with the kind of crowd that looks like they've been regulars for years, even if they just discovered it last week.







  10. Yucca Tap Room is an old-school dive bar and live music venue where cheap drinks and a no-fuss atmosphere have kept generations of Tempe regulars coming back. The punk shows are a fixture, and moshers in Halloween costumes remain a perfectly normal Tuesday-in-October situation. Half the space now belongs to Electric Bat Arcade, a pinball room that on some nights draws a bigger crowd than the bar itself.





  11. The floor bar sits right next to the stage so you never have to choose between a drink and the show. This mid-size live music venue on Mill Avenue holds around a thousand people, which is somehow both big enough to book national touring acts and intimate enough that there isn't a bad spot in the house. A Perfect Circle, Social Distortion, and the Black Keys have all played here, and local showcases keep the calendar full between the headliners.








  12. A wood-clad 600-seat auditorium anchors this performing and visual arts center on the edge of Tempe Town Lake, with a black box studio theater, a gallery that spills into the lobby, and an outdoor amphitheater for when Arizona evenings cooperate. The Tempe Symphony Orchestra, Childsplay, and several other resident companies call it home, so there's almost always something on. Public art installations are scattered throughout, in case you arrive early and need somewhere to look thoughtful.


  13. The floor doesn't fill until after midnight, which tells you everything about the kind of night Karamba is built for. It's a Latino gay nightclub where dancers in little more than underwear work elevated platforms while the DJs do the heavy lifting, threading reggaeton into club classics into top 40 without a seam. The pours are generous enough that an Uber home counts as planning ahead, not an afterthought. Phoenix New Times named it the best after-hours dance spot in town.



  14. Karaoke spills out of this LGBTQ+ bar at Park Central before you even reach the door. Inside, Kobalt runs on the pleasant fiction that everyone already knows each other, with drag shows, RuPaul's watch parties, and trivia filling the calendar alongside the sing-alongs. Show tunes, '80s ballads, and early-aughts pop keep the room generous and loud. Cocktails hover around eleven dollars, which makes it easy to stay for one more song, then another.









  15. A mile-and-a-half paved path cutting through the Phoenix Mountain Preserve, Dreamy Draw is where the city comes to jog, bike, and pretend the heat is fine. Boulders break up the trail for anyone who needs a dignified excuse to stop, and drinking fountains appear often enough that you won't have to choose between cardio and survival. It opens at five in the morning, which makes it a genuinely good place to catch the sunrise before the desert decides to cook you.






  16. A live music club on Indian School Road that's been the Valley's home for blues, jazz, and roots acts for as long as anyone can remember. Owner Bob Corritore, a serious figure in the blues world, has put Pinetop Perkins and Sanford Clark on that stage. Local and touring rock acts fill the gaps. The bartenders are half the reason to stay, apparently able to match any set with a story.







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