Between May and this week, three different chefs who don't know each other made the same bet on the same few blocks of McCormick Ranch. None of them were reacting to a marketing plan or a developer's pitch deck. A fourth, much bigger player broke ground on a $70 million restaurant and retail project six blocks away, and that one won't seat a single diner until sometime next year. If you live here and you're wondering why your dinner options changed twice this year while a construction fence went up down the street, the two things are not actually the same story.
The Empty Z'Tejas Finally Has a New Owner
For over a year, the corner of Hayden Road and Via de Ventura sat with a dark restaurant in it. Z'Tejas, the Mexican chain that had occupied the space, closed all of its Arizona locations in June 2025. On September 18, that corner reopened as Vecina, the second location of chef James Fox and Raenee Fox's Latin-inspired restaurant that built a cult following in Arcadia.
The new space is nearly three times the size of the Arcadia original, with a mezzanine, private dining rooms, and a patio that looks out over the lake instead of a parking lot. Fox brought over the dishes that made the first location a James Beard semifinalist for Best New Restaurant in 2020, including the carne asada-marinated karaage and the Faroe Island salmon tacos, and he's holding off on locking the rest of the menu until he sees what McCormick Ranch actually wants to eat. "It kind of feels like Arcadia," he told the Phoenix New Times. "I think we'll fit in with our neighborhood vibe."
The point isn't that Vecina is good, though by most early accounts it is. The point is that this restaurant exists because a chain restaurant failed and sat empty, and an independent operator with no connection to any master plan decided the location was worth the risk on his own.
A Chef Who's Been Driving Past This Spot for Years
A few blocks north on the same stretch of Hayden Road, chef Matt Carter is opening a restaurant called Dash this fall at 9619 N. Hayden Road. Carter has lived in the McCormick Ranch neighborhood for 17 years. The concept, an all-day menu built around what he calls "dash in, dash out, morning, noon and night," according to reporting from the Phoenix Business Journal, is one he says he's been imagining for a decade.
"I've been dreaming of this concept for 10 years, driving past this exact space several times a week wishing our community had a real neighborhood joint," Carter said.
That's a different kind of restaurant decision than a chain choosing a trade area based on demographic data. This is someone who lives here, noticed a gap, and waited a decade to fill it himself. It's also the second new sit-down restaurant to land on the same road in the same year, which starts to look less like coincidence and more like a corridor.
The Lake's First Newcomer Landed in May
Before either of those, Starfish Scottsdale opened on May 5 at 8390 East Vía de Ventura, close enough to Vecina's corner that the two restaurants are practically neighbors. It marked the first location outside California for Starfish Hospitality Group, a company with 15 years of history on the West Coast and no prior presence in Arizona.
The 5,200-square-foot space, split between indoor seating and a patio, runs a menu of more than 70 shareable plates drawing from Thailand, Korea, Vietnam, China, and Japan, alongside sake, cocktails, and a wine list built for both a celebration dinner and a Tuesday lunch. Co-founder Gretchen McConnell said the goal was for Scottsdale diners to feel the same hospitality the brand built in California, and the location the company chose for that first out-of-state bet wasn't Old Town or the Waterfront. It was a shopping corridor in a 1970s master-planned community that most visitors to Scottsdale never see.
Three restaurants. Three separate ownership groups. Three decisions made without reference to each other, all landing within a few blocks of the same lake between May and this fall.
The $70 Million Project Is Still Just a Demolition Site
Meanwhile, the redevelopment getting the renderings and the headlines is nowhere near ready to feed anyone. Diversified Partners closed a $25.5 million acquisition of the old Forever Corporate Plaza at 7501 E. McCormick Parkway in late May, and the company is now sinking $70 million into converting the 100,000-square-foot office building, which has anchored that stretch of McCormick Ranch since 1978, into what it's calling the Lakefront at Scottsdale. Interior demolition began September 24, three days before this was written, according to a Phoenix Business Journal report carried by KTAR.
Three restaurants were named at the groundbreaking: La La Land Kind Cafe, V Modern Italian, and Sushisamba. The developer told ABC15 it hopes to have the first of them open by November 1 of next year, more than a year from now. A separate project on the same lake corridor, a rebuild of the former Chart House site into a steakhouse from Prime Steak Concepts, is targeting a similar mid-2027 window.
Sherri Mayhew, a McCormick Ranch resident who lives across the street from the site, told ABC15 what she's looking forward to. "It's going to be so exciting to just walk across the street and have coffee, restaurants and then look at the view to Camelback Mountain," she said. That's a real thing to look forward to. It's also more than a year away.
What This Actually Tells You About the Neighborhood
The renderings for the Lakefront project are the version of McCormick Ranch's restaurant story that gets covered as a single big event: one developer, one number, one groundbreaking ceremony. The version that's already changed what you can eat on a Tuesday night is quieter and made up of separate decisions by separate people who each looked at the same lake and the same empty storefronts and decided independently that this was worth betting on.
That distinction matters if you're trying to figure out what's actually open right now versus what's still a rendering. Vecina and Starfish are both open and taking reservations. Dash is coming this fall, from someone who's watched the neighborhood for 17 years rather than modeled it from a spreadsheet. The $70 million project down the street is real, it's funded, and it's going to matter, but not for at least another year, and probably closer to two if the pattern from similar redevelopments holds.
The three independent openings also share something else worth noticing: each one moved into space a previous business left behind. A shuttered chain, a corporate office nobody could get into, a shopping corridor that had been quietly underused for years. McCormick Ranch didn't need a master plan to get better restaurants. It needed operators willing to bet on addresses everyone else had already written off.
If you've lived in McCormick Ranch for a while, you probably don't need convincing that the lake side of the neighborhood was overdue for this. What's worth knowing is that the wait is mostly over on Hayden Road, even though the wait on McCormick Parkway just started.
If you're curious what else is landing in McCormick Ranch before the announcements catch up, Sanctuary Realty Group keeps an eye on what's actually opening its doors in the East Valley, not just what's been announced.
