Dink & Dine Pickle Park is preparing to debut this summer in Mesa, and if it’s a smash, the concept’s owners are looking to expand the brand across the Valley and the Western United States.
The concept, which features 13 top-tier pickleball courts — 10 of which are indoors — multiple dining venues, an outdoor park area and a dedicated events space, will take up 72,000 square feet, across two buildings and the covered outdoor space between them, at the Mesa Riverview shopping center in northwest Mesa off the Loop 202 and Dobson Road.
Dink & Dine’s buildout is in the space formerly occupied by the Revelry and before that Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar & Grill and other retail shops. It’s still under construction, but Casey St Pierre, Dink & Dine’s general manager, told the Business Journal it is expected to be completed by mid-July and that the concept should open on July 30, with a bigger grand opening expected for the fall.
Dink & Dine has already started hiring its managers, and St Pierre said it could have up to 130 hourly employees.
Dink & Dine: 3 businesses in 1
St Pierre said the Dink & Dine team considers the concept actually three separate business under one roof. The south building is the primary pickleball facility with eight indoor courts and a restaurant with an exhibition kitchen in the middle called Paddleheads, which will be serving food all day and will include a large bar area and a coffee program by Flagstaff-based Firecreek Coffee Co.
“We’re using local, everything, everybody,” St Pierre said. “Even when we put a mural on the wall, we’re going to be using Mesa artists to do the mural. Any of our vendors, we all wanted that to be local.”
Unlike other pickleball-centric entertainment venues, Dink & Dine will not sell memberships, rather it will have monthly passes, daily passes and pay-per-hour options. While pickleball is supposed to be the main driver to bring people in, the idea isn’t to only bring in existing pickleball enthusiasts, but also find ways to expose more people and grow the game.
The covered outdoor area will be known as the park and it will have three pickleball courts, outdoor cooking, picnic tables, a dog park, a stage, fire pits and outdoor games. The outdoor space was designed to be versatile and could be adapted for a variety of uses, St Pierre said.
The north building will be Dink & Dine’s event space which has two indoor pickleball courts and three banquet rooms that can be adjusted and could host parties from 40 to 140.
“We’re projecting and expecting the corporate and event side to be a really big part of our business,” St Pierre said.
Dink & Dine designed the space so it could be used for smaller events up to corporate events and weddings and almost everything in between.
“We’ve actually designed those courts with removable nets – they’re the only two courts that have removable nets so we can roll out the dance floor and put up a stage for a band,” Kelly Mullarney, a co-founder of Dink & Dine, told the Business Journal.
The Dink & Dine sales team has already prebooked several events from September through January 2026.
The future of Dink & Dine
Dink & Dine’s ownership is based out of Southern California, but the company chose Mesa for a few reasons, one being the available space, but also its location within the Valley — near the 101 and 202 freeways and near tourism destinations like the Sloan Park, where the Chicago Cubs play spring training games.
The ownership group has been open for a while that it has been looking at opening other Dink & Dines across the Western U.S. — California, Washington, Colorado, Idaho and Las Vegas — but Mullarney said the real focus is getting the Mesa location up and operating before getting serious about expansion.
“We got to get this open,” Mullarney said. “We have to be successful. We have to have people love it for whatever the reasons are, and then we can move on to other things.”
Beyond other states, Mullarney said he thinks the Dink & Dine concept could have two or three locations within the Phoenix metro.
By Brandon Brown – Senior Reporter, Phoenix Business Journal
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