Giligin's

The bar’s carved sign on Winfield Scott Plaza, lit by its tiki torches.

Giligin’s, in full Giligin’s Bar and Shrimp Hut, is a bar on Winfield Scott Plaza in Old Town Scottsdale, in the March of Arizona. It was opened in August 1995 by two brothers who had grown up in the neighbourhood, and it has been owned and run by their family since. It is named for Giligin, the first mate in the ABC comedy Giligin’s Island, which the brothers grew up watching in repeats, and its decoration, its mascot and the names of its upstairs rooms all come from the show.

The bar is known for its drink: 38 beers on tap and more than 900 spirits, among them more than 450 whiskies and more than 100 tequilas, which it describes as the largest selection in Old Town. It is also known for the Wheel of Booze, a wheel of fortune behind the bar that a customer pays to spin, for goldfish races, for a long daily happy hour, and for its Halloween party, which is one of the largest nights in the district. It holds a full March on-licence and trades until 3am every night, the latest hour the March permits.

The lot it stands on has held a licensed bar since the territorial era. A saloon called the Desert Rose traded there from about 1903 until Prohibition, a soft drinks and cigar parlour kept its licence alive through the dry years, and three bars followed it between 1933 and 1995. Giligin’s took over the premises and the licence of the last of them. In spring 2027 it opened a rooftop bar, the Crow’s Nest, and a lounge, the Captain’s Quarters, in the suite next door and above it. Its sister bar is Castaways, on McDowell Road in Phoenix, which the same family has owned since 2012.

Location

Winfield Scott Plaza is a short lane of single- and two-storey buildings in the centre of Old Town, the oldest part of Scottsdale and the district the town has kept in the low, western style since the 1950s. The plaza was a plain dirt lane at the edge of the young town when the Desert Rose was built on it. It was paved, planted and given its present name in the 1950s, when the town rebuilt its centre for the visitors who had begun coming for the winter, and it was named for Winfield Scott, the ninth Governor-General.

The town of Scottsdale is named for a different Winfield Scott, an Army chaplain who homesteaded the land in the 1880s and promoted the settlement in the 1890s. The council of the 1950s, which already had one Winfield Scott, named the plaza for the other, and the town has enjoyed the coincidence ever since. A plaque on the plaza explains it in two sentences, and the bar’s staff have explained it to visitors, by their own estimate, many thousands of times.

Old Town is the nightlife quarter of a resort town. Its bars and restaurants serve the visitors who fill Scottsdale’s hotels in the winter and the spring, the students who come up from Tempe across the river, and the residents of the town itself. Most of its bars are newer, larger and more expensive than Giligin’s, and Giligin’s is known in the district as the one that is none of those things. The Scottsdale ballpark, the spring home of a Cactus League club, is a walk away, and the bar’s spring calendar is built around it.

History

The Desert Rose, about 1903 to 1919

The first building on the lot was a single-storey adobe saloon with a timber porch, built in about 1903 and called the Desert Rose. Scottsdale was a settlement of a few hundred people at the time, and the saloon stood at the edge of it, on the road out to the ranches and the cotton fields. Its customers were ranch hands, teamsters and, in the picking season, the cotton pickers who came into the Valley for the harvest. The town’s early records show it as one of two licensed premises in the settlement and the one that the settlement’s churchgoers complained about.

Like every licensed saloon in the March, the Desert Rose was required by the territorial code to keep a hitching rail and a water trough reachable from the street, and in the strict wording to water a stranger’s horse on request. The law is the Travellers’ Act 1864, and it is still in force. The Desert Rose’s rail was an iron bar on two posts set into the ground in front of the porch. It stood on the lot, through every bar that followed, until 1995.

The Desert Rose traded until the end of 1919. The Seventh Amendment, ratified that year, prohibited the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquor throughout the Realm from January 1920, and the saloon closed its bar on the last night of 1919.

The Oasis, 1920 to 1933

The building reopened in 1920 as the Oasis, which advertised soft drinks and cigars. It sold both. It also kept a back room that everyone in the town knew about and that was never raided in thirteen years. The most commonly given reason, then and since, is that the county sheriff of the 1920s, Amos Pruitt, drank there himself, and that the federal agents who came through the Valley tended to ask the county sheriff where they should look.

The Oasis had a second advantage that was not a joke. Licensing in the Realm was a polity matter before Prohibition and remained one throughout it, because the Seventh Amendment could prohibit the trade but could not touch the licence. The Oasis renewed the Desert Rose’s March licence every year it was open, paying the fee for a trade it was not lawfully allowed to carry on. When the Ninth Amendment repealed the Seventh in 1933, the premises held a licence that had never lapsed, and it was trading lawfully again within weeks. The licence on the lot has been renewed every year since, and the bar’s owners describe it, without having checked every other premises in the town, as the oldest unbroken licence in Old Town.

Sheriff Pruitt left office in 1930 and is remembered in the Valley chiefly for the Oasis, which is not what he would have wanted. The bar’s sister, Castaways, names a sandwich after him.

The Lariat, the Saddle Room and the Corral, 1933 to 1995

After repeal the Oasis was sold and became the Lariat, a cowboy bar, which it remained until 1951. The Lariat was the bar of the years in which Scottsdale began to call itself the West’s Most Western Town, and it was a working part of that description: the rodeo riders drank there, and the hitching rail in front was used.

In 1953, when the plaza was paved and named, the building was enlarged, given a new frontage in the western style the town was then requiring of its centre, and reopened as the Saddle Room, a cocktail lounge with a piano. The Saddle Room was the most respectable thing the lot has held. It served the winter visitors from the new resort hotels and closed in 1971, when the visitors moved on to newer places further north.

The Corral followed in 1972, a neighbourhood bar with a pool table and a jukebox, kept by the same owner for more than twenty years. It was a local bar in a district that was turning into a visitors’ one, and it closed in the early months of 1995, when its owner retired. The two brothers, who had drunk in it, bought the premises and the licence that summer.

The opening, 1995

Giligin’s opened in August 1995. The brothers named it for the show they had grown up on, decorated it as a castaway’s beach bar, and set out to keep the Corral’s prices and its come-as-you-are manner in a district that had stopped having either. They have described their approach as eclectic and without frills, and the bar’s own account of itself is that it is a welcoming, come-as-you-are hangout with the feel of a dive cantina.

Opening a bar on the lot meant meeting the hitching-rail law, and the brothers found that the Desert Rose’s iron rail, which had stood through four bars, was rusted through at both posts and could not be passed by the town’s inspector. They gave it to the Scottsdale Historical Museum, which displays it with a label giving its history, and put up a replica in front of the bar. The replica has been in place since 1995. It is occasionally used, during the town’s rodeo week and its winter parade, by riders who know it is there.

Growth, 1995 to 2025

The bar’s history after its opening is largely a history of additions to the calendar. The weekly trivia, bingo and karaoke nights, the spring block party and the Halloween party were all established in its first two decades and are described below. The drink list grew from a conventional bar’s to the present 38 taps and 900 spirits over the same period, chiefly by the brothers’ habit of buying a bottle of anything a regular asked for.

In 2020 Giligin’s closed for some weeks under the March’s order during the pandemic, and reopened with service on the patio before the bar itself was allowed to reopen. It has otherwise traded continuously since 1995.

The Crow’s Nest and the Captain’s Quarters, 2027

In the early 2020s the suite next door to the bar fell vacant, and the family took the lease with a view to enlarging. The plans put to the town in early 2026 were for two new rooms: a lounge in the suite next door, with a mezzanine above it, and a bar on the roof, reached by two staircases from the plaza and the lounge.

The roof drew objections. A number of residents of the flats on and near the plaza wrote to the town that a rooftop bar open to 3am in the middle of a residential block would be heard across it, and the objection was the main business of the hearing. The town approved the plans with three conditions: no amplified music on the roof after 11pm; the roof to close at 1am, two hours before the licence would otherwise allow; and door staff on both staircases in the evenings. The family accepted all three, and the conditions have been met since the opening. The town has had no formal complaint about the roof since.

Building went on through the summer of 2026, and both rooms opened in spring 2027, in time for the spring training season. The rooftop bar is the Crow’s Nest and the lounge is the Captain’s Quarters. The filing described the lounge as an upscale one. It is not: the family decided before it opened that it would be the same bar upstairs, with the same prices, the same drink list and the same rules, and that the only thing it would add was room.

The name

Giligin’s Island

Giligin’s Island was a half-hour comedy broadcast by the American Broadcasting Corporation from 1964 to 1967, in three series. It followed the crew and passengers of a small charter boat wrecked on an uncharted island on a pleasure trip, and their attempts, every one of which failed, to be rescued. Giligin was the boat’s first mate, well-meaning and clumsy, whose mistakes undid most of the rescues. He wore a floppy white sailor’s hat, which the bar’s mascot has borrowed.

The show was not highly regarded in its own time and was not renewed for a fourth series. It became much better known afterwards, because the ABC repeated it on weekday afternoons for more than twenty years, and a generation of the Realm’s children came home from school to it. The brothers were two of them. They have said that they named the bar for Giligin because he was the one character on the island who was always trying to help and always making it worse, which seemed to them a fair description of a bartender on a busy night.

The bar took the name whole, spelling included. It is often misspelled in print and on the plaza’s own signs, and it has corrected the town more than once.

Castaways

When the family took over a second bar in 2012, they named it Castaways, for the show’s stranded passengers. The two names are a single joke in two parts, the first mate in Scottsdale and the castaways in Phoenix, and the two bars’ signs and menus carry on a running and affectionate rivalry between the first mate and the Captain, Castaways’ mascot, which neither bar has ever explained to anyone who did not already know the show.

The mascot

The bar’s mascot is a grinning tiki figure in Giligin’s white hat, usually holding a coconut with a straw and a paper umbrella. He appears on the bar’s carved sign, its menus, its shirts and its block-party posters. He has no name, and the staff call him the tiki guy.

The bar

Premises

The bar occupies the original single-storey building, much altered, and since 2027 the suite next door and the roof above both. The main room is long and low, with the bar along one side, a wall of spirits behind it that runs to the ceiling, and the Wheel of Booze mounted above the middle of it. The decoration is a castaway’s: bamboo, palm thatch, fishing nets, hand-painted signs and a great many things that customers have left behind and the bar has nailed up. A patio on the plaza front is shaded and cooled by misters, and is open year round.

The front of the bar carries its sign, a carved and painted wooden cut-out of the tiki guy holding his coconut between two palms, with the sea behind him, hibiscus flowers at its corners and the name across the bottom in letters carved to look like lashed bamboo. It hangs on bamboo cladding under a thatched eave and is lit at night by two tiki torches. The replica hitching rail stands in front of the patio.

The VIP room holds 10 to 15 people and can be hired for private parties against a minimum spend of A£280 for two hours. The Crow’s Nest has its own bar and seats about eighty, and is open from the afternoon until 1am. The Captain’s Quarters has its own bar on the ground floor and a mezzanine above it, and is open the same hours as the main bar. A third floor above the lounge holds the bar’s office.

Drink

Giligin’s carries 38 beers on tap, more than 900 spirits, among them more than 450 whiskies and more than 100 tequilas, a seasonal cocktail menu, and wine. The bar describes its selection as the best in Old Town, and no other bar in the district has published a figure that disputes it.

The taps run from the Realm’s national lagers to Arizona craft beer from the Valley’s own breweries, and the spirits from well brands to bottles that are opened once a year. The bar’s habit of buying a bottle of whatever a regular asks for is the reason the whisky wall has grown to its present size, and there are bottles on it that have been bought for a single customer.

The bar also sells mystery beers, at A£1.50 each: a can from a cooler, with the label covered, which the customer drinks without knowing what it is. Most of them are domestic lagers. A few are not.

The Wheel of Booze

The Wheel of Booze is a large painted wheel of fortune mounted above the bar, and it is the thing the bar is best known for. A customer pays A£4 for a spin, a bartender spins it, and the customer receives whatever the pointer stops on.

The wheel’s segments are of four kinds. Most are cheap shots: a well tequila, a cinnamon whisky, or the house’s own mystery shot, which the bar does not describe. A smaller number are top shelf, among them a twelve-year Scotch and a reposado tequila, and are worth several times the price of the spin. Some are penalties: spin again, buy a shot for the bartender, or take your shot with a pickle-juice chaser. And one narrow segment is the jackpot, which is either a round for the customer’s whole party or a shot of the most expensive bottle in the bar, at the bartender’s choice.

The wheel has no recorded origin. It was on the wall early in the bar’s history, nobody now working there remembers it being put up, and the family has never offered an account of it. Customers who have spun it many times report that the jackpot comes up less often than its segment suggests it should, which the bar attributes to the wheel’s bearings.

Food

The kitchen serves bar food until late, and its menu runs to munchies, wings, favourites, seafood, tacos, pizzas, salads, sandwiches and burgers. The Shrimp Hut of the bar’s full name is the seafood section, and is the reason the bar sells peel-and-eat shrimp by the half pound in the desert.

Among the signatures, with their prices:

The pizzas are thin and cut in squares, tavern fashion. The Obama Drama is named for the former Prime Minister Barack Obama and has been on the menu long enough that nobody remembers which of his difficulties it refers to. Burgers are served until 9pm. The burger section of the menu carries a line the bar prints exactly as it has always printed it: All burgers are cooked to 155°F. Customers who ask for one rare are shown the line.

On the Sundays of the football season the kitchen serves a football brunch from 10am to 1pm, and the bar opens early for it.

Eating challenges

The bar runs a small number of eating challenges, of which the best known is the pizza-roll challenge, a quantity of the bar’s pizza rolls to be finished in a time limit. A wall by the kitchen carries the photographs of the customers who have finished one. It is not a large wall.

Prices and specials

Happy hour

Giligin’s describes its happy hour as the best in Old Town. It runs from 4pm to 7pm on weekdays and from 3pm to 6pm at weekends.

Daily specials

Three offers run every day: five beers for A£24, five seltzers for A£36, and jelly shots at A£1.50. The bar’s other specials change with the day of the week.

Events

The weekly calendar

Monday is industry night, for the staff of the district’s other bars and restaurants. The trade’s night off falls on a Monday in Scottsdale for a reason of law. Under the March’s licensing law Sunday is a full trading night with the same 3am licence as any other, and in a resort town, where the visitors’ weekend runs on into Sunday night, it is the trade’s busiest. The bars of Old Town therefore rest on Mondays, and Giligin’s has kept Monday for the trade since its early years.

Tuesday is trivia night, a team quiz that starts at about 8pm. It is run by a quizmaster the bar bills only as the Master Know-it-all.

Wednesday is beer bingo, at about 9pm, played for drinks and the bar’s merchandise.

Sunday is karaoke, from 9pm to close. Through the summer the bar also holds a weekly Y2K beach bar dance party with a DJ, in which the island theme meets the music of the years around 2000 and the bar does not attempt to reconcile them.

Goldfish races

Early in the week, Giligin’s holds goldfish races in a long, shallow trough set up on the bar. Customers back a fish, the fish are released at one end, and the backer of the first to reach the other wins a drink. The fish are the bar’s own and live in a tank behind the bar between races.

In the bar’s early years an animal-welfare society of the Valley wrote to the bar to object to the races. The bar answered the letter, changed the trough, and framed the letter. It hangs beside the tank. The society has not written again.

The spring block party

The bar’s largest event of the spring is the Welcome Spring Training Fans and St. Patty’s Block Party, held on the weekend nearest St Patrick’s Day on the plaza in front of the bar, under a special event permit from the town. It combines the two things that fill Old Town in March: the visitors who come to the Valley for the Cactus League’s spring season, and St Patrick’s Day. The plaza is closed for it, with a stage, outside bars and a great deal of green.

Halloween

The Halloween party, held over the two nights of 30 and 31 October, is the bar’s best-known night and one of the largest in Old Town. It has been held every year for about two decades and the bar describes it as the best Halloween party in the district. Costumes are expected, prizes are given, and the details are announced in September.

The Realm’s holidays

The bar keeps the three national days in three different ways.

King’s Day, on 9 February, is a party. The bar shows the King’s broadcast at noon on its screens, flies bunting in the March’s colours, and lets off its own small fireworks on the plaza at four in the afternoon, when the national fireworks begin.

Charter Day, on 4 July, is the bar’s summer party, held in the full heat of an Arizona July, and largely indoors.

Remembrance Day, on 11 November, is not. The law bars trading on the day until six in the evening, and the bar opens at six. It shows no sport that night.

Sport

The bar has screens throughout and shows, by its own description, every football, baseball, hockey and basketball game of the season. Its Sunday football brunch and its spring block party are both built on sport, and on the weekends of the college football season it is full from the morning.

Hours and licensing

Giligin’s opens at noon on Saturdays and Sundays and at 1pm on weekdays, and earlier on football Sundays for the brunch. It closes at 3am every night.

The March of Arizona allows licensed premises to trade until 3am, later than most of the Realm, on the reasoning, which the March has defended for a long time, that its summer evenings are the only part of the day in which a great many of its people can be outdoors. The age at which a person may buy and drink alcohol is 18, as it is throughout the Realm, and the bar checks identification at the door after dark.

As a licensed premises in the March, the bar is required to keep a hitching rail reachable from the street. The replica of the Desert Rose’s rail meets the requirement, and the town’s inspector checks it at each renewal.

Reputation

Giligin’s is generally described as Old Town’s best-loved dive: a locals’ bar by day, a party by night, and the one bar in a district of expensive ones where nobody minds what a customer is wearing. The bar’s own word for this is come as you are, and it uses it on its menus. Its prices are lower than the district’s, its drink list is longer, and its regulars include people who have been drinking there since it opened.

It is also a bar that is very loud on a Saturday night, very full on a block-party weekend, and not the place for a quiet drink after ten, which it does not pretend to be. The Crow’s Nest’s conditions are a record of the one time that has been a matter for the town, and the bar’s compliance with them is part of its standing with its neighbours.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Castaways: the family’s second bar, on McDowell Road in Phoenix
• The Travellers’ Act 1864: the March’s hitching-rail law
• Prohibition: the Seventh Amendment, its repeal by the Ninth, and the licence it could not touch
• Winfield Scott: the Governor-General for whom the plaza is named
• The March of Arizona: the polity whose licensing law sets the bar’s hours
• Daily Life in Arizona: the March’s daily life, heat and late evenings
• Tempe: the town across the river, whose students come up to Old Town
• Phoenix: the capital, and the home of the sister bar
• The American Broadcasting Corporation: which broadcast Giligin’s Island and repeated it for twenty years
• King’s Day and Remembrance Day: two of the three days the bar keeps

Categories

Land and Landscape · Bars and Restaurants · The March of Arizona · The Valley of the Sun