The Best Places to Drink and Do in Arcadia

1. Foodist Awards 2023 · Winner: Barter & Shake · Outstanding Hospitality Group
2. Spirited Awards 2024 · Top 4 Finalist · Best U.S. Bar Team
3. Foodist Awards 2023 · Winner · Most Creative Handcrafted Cocktail

The digital windows scroll through passing landscapes while you sit inside a wood-paneled Presidential Pullman car that never moves, which is either the concept or the joke, possibly both. Platform 18 is a reservation-only immersive cocktail bar built around Prohibition-era drinks and Roaring Twenties New York. The Pinnacle Guide awarded it 2 Pins. Book ahead; walk-ins go nowhere fast.

1. Foodist Awards 2023 · Winner: Barter & Shake · Outstanding Hospitality Group
2. Spirited Awards 2024 · Top 4 Finalist · Best U.S. Bar Team
3. Foodist Awards 2025 · Finalist · Outstanding Bar/Nightlife Experience

The whole room is built to look like the cargo hold of a 19th-century ship, portholes and all, which sets the stakes early at this immersive tiki bar on Indian School. The cocktail menu runs from classics to the team's own riffs on the genre, leaning into the full theatrical bit without apologizing for it. Phoenix New Times named it the city's top tiki bar, and the Spirited Awards put the bar team among the top four in the U.S.

1. Foodist Awards 2023 · Winner: Barter & Shake · Outstanding Hospitality Group
2. Spirited Awards 2024 · Top 4 Finalist · Best U.S. Bar Team
3. Foodist Awards 2023 · Winner · Most Creative Handcrafted Cocktail

1. Phoenix New Times The Top 100 Bars in Phoenix

1. Phoenix New Times 10 winning Phoenix sports bars to catch the game

1. Foodist Awards 2023 · Finalist · Most Creative Handcrafted Cocktail

The smell of aging paper hits you before you've found a shelf to browse. Book Gallery is an antiquarian bookshop stacked floor to ceiling with rare volumes, first editions, and signed works, some behind glass. A Harper Lee-signed "To Kill a Mockingbird" and a first printing of "Naked Lunch" give a sense of the range. If the specific thing you're hunting isn't here, the owner can usually track it down.

1. Phoenix New Times 2025 · Best Collectible and Antique Books · Best of Phoenix

Removing a glove with your teeth turns out to be a teachable skill, and Spellbound Burlesque is the troupe doing the teaching. They run nearly monthly shows around Phoenix, with local regulars sharing the bill alongside national headliners, and a standing residency every second Wednesday at Century Grand. The whole enterprise leans body-positive and inclusive, which in practice means the performances are less Vegas showroom and more genuinely weird and fun.

1. Phoenix New Times 2024 · Best Burlesque · Best of Phoenix