For most of McCormick Ranch's history, the lake was something you looked at, not something you walked to for dinner. The community has had the water, the golf, the bike paths threading past all eleven lakes, and none of it. If you wanted a proper night out, you got in the car and drove to Old Town or Kierland. That changed on the same stretch of Hayden Road and McCormick Parkway over the course of this fall, when three separate projects, run by three unrelated groups on three different timelines, all landed on the same missing piece: a place to eat that actually faces the water.
Three Timelines, One Fall
A chef who has lived in the neighborhood for 17 years is opening a 12-seat counter this November in an empty storefront. An Arcadia restaurant with a James Beard nomination took over a shuttered Tex-Mex space on September 18 and nearly tripled its footprint, with a patio on the lake. And on September 24, a Scottsdale developer broke ground on a $70 million reconstruction of a 1978 office building, with the first of several restaurants targeting a November 2027 opening, as reported by KTAR.
Line those three dates up and you get a neighborhood filling in a gap from three directions at once, on foot of each other, without any of the three groups coordinating.
The Chef Who Already Lived Here
Matt Carter has spent more than two decades building restaurants with his business partner Brian Raab, including Zinc Bistro, The Mission and Fat Ox. The two took a ten-year break from opening anything new. That break ends in November with Dash, an all-day counter at 9619 North Hayden Road built around the idea of dashing in and dashing out. Coffee and pastries in the morning, sandwiches and Roman-style pizza through the day, Portuguese-style charcoal chicken at night, soft serve for dessert, and a curiosity on the menu labeled mushroom cola.
The dining room holds 12 seats. Another 40 fit on the patio, plus curbside pickup and a small attached market. Carter has lived in McCormick Ranch for 17 years and has driven past this exact storefront on Hayden Road more times than he can count, as detailed in Phoenix New Times. As reported by Phoenix Bites, Carter said he built Dash because he was "wishing our community had a real neighborhood joint."
That is the small, quiet version of what's happening here. The other two are bigger.
What Just Opened On the Lake
According to Phoenix New Times, Vecina spent seven years building a following out of a single small dining room in Arcadia, earning a James Beard nomination for Best New Restaurant in 2020 and a spot on Phoenix New Times' ongoing Top 50 list. On September 18, chef James Fox and his wife Raenee opened a second location at 8300 North Hayden Road, in the space Z'Tejas vacated when it closed all its Arizona locations in June 2025. The new dining room is close to three times the size of the original, with room for a mezzanine, private dining, a larger kitchen that finally allows for catering, and a patio that looks straight out over the water.
The menu travels intact: the karaage, chicken marinated in a carne asada blend and finished with aji amarillo sauce and citrus gastrique, and the Faroe Island salmon tacos with yuzu kosho aioli and Cara Cara orange. Fox told Phoenix New Times, "it kind of feels like Arcadia." Dinner service started immediately. Lunch and brunch are coming once the kitchen settles in, according to reporting from Phoenix New Times.
Vecina did not build for McCormick Ranch specifically. It found an empty building on the right corner and grew into it. The next project did the opposite, and built the corner on purpose.
What's Coming Next Door
The building at 7501 East McCormick Parkway has anchored this corner of the lake since 1978, most recently as Forever Corporate Plaza, home to Forever Living Products for nearly 30 years. Diversified Partners closed a $25.5 million acquisition of the site in late May and broke ground on September 24, kicking off a $70 million redevelopment called The Lakefront at Scottsdale.
At the groundbreaking, the developer confirmed three of the concepts moving into the new restaurant and retail space:
- La La Land Kind Cafe, a coffee and matcha shop already operating at Kierland Commons and in Phoenix
- V Modern Italian
- SUSHISAMBA, a Japanese-Brazilian-Peruvian concept opening its first Arizona location here
A fourth lease, Frost Gelato, was signed earlier and confirmed by KTAR, with a fifth concept still to be announced once it clears building permits. Three of the restaurant spaces will carry patios between 3,000 and 4,000 square feet, facing the lake directly. Diversified Partners is also moving its own Scottsdale headquarters into the building, and Forever Living Products is staying put as a tenant through the transition.
Construction is running in two phases. The first, now underway, converts roughly 60,000 square feet of office space into restaurant, retail, and Diversified's own offices. The developer is targeting a November 1, 2027 opening for the first restaurants, with a second phase covering the remaining retail and office space starting in early 2027.
Sherri Mayhew lives across the street from the site and has watched the building sit as a corporate office for years. At the groundbreaking, she put the change in context:
"So exciting to just walk across the street and have coffee"
That's the whole shift in one sentence, as captured by ABC15.
Why This Isn't Just Three Restaurants
McCormick Ranch was built with more than 25 miles of walking and biking paths threading between its lakes, two 18-hole golf courses, and thousands of rooftops within a short ride of the water. What it hasn't had is a reason to use those paths to get to dinner. A community built around greenbelts and shoreline access spent decades sending its residents elsewhere for a night out, because the restaurant space along the water stayed thin even as everything around it filled in.
What changed this fall is that three projects are taking shape on different timelines. Carter's Dash is taking shape in a storefront he drove past every week for a decade. A Tex-Mex chain's closure left a space on the corner where Vecina opened its new location. Diversified Partners is redeveloping the 48-year-old lakefront office building.
The three projects are moving forward on separate timelines. Taken together, they mark a significant shift for the neighborhood: more ways to reach the water for a meal, whether on foot or by bike.
For a resident, the practical version of this is simple. As of this fall, you can walk or bike from home to a James Beard nominated kitchen on Hayden Road. Within a year, a small neighborhood counter opens two blocks away. Within two, a redeveloped lakefront brings four or five more concepts to the water's edge, on patios built to face it. The drive to Old Town for a decent dinner is turning into an option instead of a requirement.
If you've been watching the lakefront change and you're curious how it connects to what's happening with home values or turnover in the surrounding subdivisions, that's a conversation Denise O'Connell has with McCormick Ranch neighbors regularly. Let's Connect.
