What it is
Tonto Bar & Grill is the dining room of the Rancho Mañana Golf Club, at the quiet end of Cave Creek where Rancho Mañana Boulevard leaves the strip and climbs toward Black Mountain. It stands on the original site of the Rancho Mañana dude ranch, established in the 1940s and said to have been the largest in Arizona, and the ranch is still in the room: old tools on the walls, 1940s photographs of guests on horseback, the low adobe lines of the buildings. The golf course, 18 holes and par 70, occupies the old ranch land, and the restaurant’s patio, roofed in latillas, looks down a fairway to the mountain.
The kitchen cooks Southwestern-influenced American food on a menu that changes often. The constants are a mesquite grill for the steaks, a braised short rib done with coffee and port, buttermilk fried calamari, a fish or two, salads and sandwiches at lunch, and desserts that lean on prickly pear and other desert ingredients. The wine list is more serious than a golf clubhouse has any right to, which makes sense once you know who owns it: the Arizona Hideaway Collection, the Allred family group whose other properties are the Hermosa Inn and Lon’s in Paradise Valley, Tubac Golf Resort and Sedona Golf Resort. This is the Cave Creek outpost of that sensibility, at Cave Creek prices.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Not for the food alone; Scottsdale has better kitchens. For the whole package on a cool-season evening: a day on the Cave Creek strip or the Spur Cross trails, then a patio where the light goes gold on the fairways and pink on Black Mountain, a short rib and a glass of something good, and a check that would not cover the appetizers at a Scottsdale resort. Our sunset patios note ranks the city’s; this is the one to add when you are already up here.
The practical version
Forty minutes from Old Town, left off Cave Creek Road just past Frontier Town. Open daily from about eleven to eight, with a weekday happy hour in the mid-afternoon; reservations online or by phone, and the patio is the table to ask for. Casual dress. Note the early close: sunset dinner, not late dinner.
When to go
Sunset, November through March. Book an hour before the sun goes and take the patio; the latilla roof keeps the glare off, the course below empties of golfers, and Black Mountain does its twenty minutes of color. This is the reason the restaurant exists and the only reservation in Cave Creek worth planning a day around.
Weekday happy hour, from mid-afternoon, is the cheap version: the same patio, a glass of wine and an appetizer, the last foursomes coming up the eighteenth. Lunch is salads, sandwiches and the calamari, and the quietest the room gets.
Summer moves everything indoors until after dark, and the kitchen’s early close means a summer dinner here is a seven o’clock one with the patio still hot; it is a cool-season restaurant.
What to order
The short rib, which is the dish people describe when they describe the place. A mesquite-grilled steak if you want the ranch idea taken literally. The fried calamari to start, whatever fish is on, and the prickly pear dessert, whichever form it takes that season. Ask about the wine; the list rewards it.
With kids, and the neighborhood
Children are fine at lunch and early dinner, and the patio lets them look at the golf course rather than sit still. The restaurant is a short walk from the Hilton Vacation Club villas, which is where most families staying in Cave Creek are, and five minutes from Frontier Town and the strip described in our Cave Creek guide. The golf course is public; our golf without a membership note covers the Scottsdale options and the logic applies here at a lower rate.
The story
Rancho Mañana was one of the dude ranches that defined the Desert Foothills before the golf courses did. Established in the 1940s on the land below Black Mountain, it took in winter guests who wanted to ride, eat around a fire and look at the desert, and by reputation it was the largest operation of its kind in Arizona. Lon Megargee, the cowboy artist whose Paradise Valley home became the Hermosa Inn, is said to have visited often, a connection that makes the current ownership feel less like coincidence. The dude-ranch era faded through the 1960s and 1970s as the Valley’s visitors moved to resorts, and the ranch land became the Rancho Mañana Golf Club, with the clubhouse and restaurant built into the old ranch site and the villa resort that now flies the Hilton flag beside it.
The restaurant that occupies the site has kept the ranch’s artifacts and its proportions, and under the Arizona Hideaway Collection it has become the serious kitchen in a town of saloons. The Allred family, who assembled the collection and whose reputation was made reshaping Telluride, describe their business as breathing new life into historic places, and the pattern holds across their Arizona properties: an old ranch house in Paradise Valley became the Hermosa Inn and Lon’s, a Tubac property with roots in the 1700s became a golf resort, and the Cave Creek dude ranch became this. Tonto Bar & Grill is the least grand of the four and, for a Scottsdale visitor already in Cave Creek, the most useful.
The Scottsdale connection
The connection is Lon’s. The Hermosa Inn, ten minutes from Old Town, is the restored home and studio of Lon Megargee, and its restaurant is one of the best-regarded in the Valley. The same owners run Tonto, the same instinct for an old Western building and a good patio is at work, and the same artist is said to have passed through both. If you have eaten at Lon’s and liked the idea, this is the same idea at the end of a forty-minute drive, with a mountain instead of Camelback and half the check.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road north to the Carefree Highway, west two miles to Cave Creek Road, north about two miles into town, then left on Rancho Mañana Boulevard just past Frontier Town and Big Earl’s; follow it to the golf clubhouse, where the restaurant and its lot are. Forty minutes from Old Town, twenty from the Pinnacle Peak resorts. Walkable from the Hilton villas and from the south end of the strip; a car from everywhere else.