Arizona recently welcomed its first Buc-ee’s in Goodyear, but even a supersized travel center cannot compete with a pizza organ, rescue parrots and a steakhouse that cuts off customers’ neckties.
These five restaurants embrace Arizona’s theatrical side.
Organ Stop Pizza in Mesa
At Organ Stop Pizza, the musical instrument is considerably larger than the kitchen.
The Mesa restaurant houses what it describes as the world’s largest theater pipe organ. The enormous Wurlitzer rises above the dining room on an 8,000-pound rotating hydraulic elevator.
Its console contains more than 1,000 keys, buttons and switches connected to pipes, xylophones, gongs, cymbals and other instruments. Light shows, disco balls and dancing marionette cats accompany nightly performances.
The restaurant seats approximately 700 people and serves pizza, pasta and ice cream.
Dinner can feel like attending a concert inside an oversized mechanical music box.
The Perch Brewery in Chandler
The Perch combines craft beer, pub food and an exotic-bird sanctuary.
Rescue parrots, macaws, cockatoos and other birds live throughout the restaurant’s outdoor spaces. Many arrived after previous owners could no longer care for them.
The brewery emphasizes that it does not breed, buy or sell the birds. Instead, they receive permanent homes while customers learn about the responsibilities of keeping exotic animals.
Visitors can eat in the courtyard, listen to live music or head to the rooftop bar while the birds squawk below.
Most breweries rely on trivia or televisions for entertainment. The Perch has feathered residents with considerably stronger personalities.
Rustler’s Rooste in Phoenix
Rustler’s Rooste offers customers two ways to reach its dining room: stairs or a large indoor tin slide.
The mountaintop steakhouse embraces nearly every Old West restaurant gimmick imaginable. It has a live longhorn steer outside, country music, dancing, an indoor waterfall and panoramic views of Phoenix.
The menu can include rattlesnake when available, alongside steaks, ribs, chicken and more familiar options.
The slide supposedly began as an escape route from bounty hunters when the building was a small cabin. Whatever the historical truth, adults sliding into a steakhouse dining room remains a wonderfully ridiculous sight.
Big Nose Kate’s Saloon in Tombstone
Big Nose Kate’s occupies the site of Tombstone’s former Grand Hotel and takes its name from Mary Katherine Horony, the companion of Doc Holliday.
Customers can pose with cowboys and saloon girls, listen to live country music and eat burgers inside an elaborately preserved version of a Western saloon.
The basement contains an old tunnel leading toward former mine shafts. Local legends claim a maintenance worker known as “the Swamper” secretly extracted silver there—and may still haunt the building.
Tombstone already resembles a movie set. Big Nose Kate’s takes that atmosphere one step further by combining a restaurant, historical attraction, costume opportunity and possible ghost story.
Pinnacle Peak Steakhouse in Tucson
Pinnacle Peak has one important rule: no neckties.
Anyone who ignores the warning risks having the tie ceremonially cut off. The severed tie is then hung from the restaurant’s rafters with thousands of earlier victims.
The locally owned steakhouse has enforced the policy since opening in 1962. The tradition is intended to discourage formality and preserve the restaurant’s relaxed Old West atmosphere.
Pinnacle Peak cooks steaks, chicken and ribs over mesquite wood, but many first-time visitors are more interested in the ceiling.
Wearing a cheap tie may be the easiest way to turn dinner into a public performance—and leave part of an outfit permanently attached to an Arizona landmark.
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