What is Ella on the Park?
When the owners of the old Saguaro hotel set out to give its 2026 reopening a signature restaurant, the advice they kept hearing was obvious: build a Southwestern room. They went the other way. “In a way, we dropped the ‘West’ and went South,” Hotel Solaya’s food and beverage director, Megan Ferreira, told DiningOut. Ella on the Park, which opened in April 2026, is a modern American restaurant built around Southern smokehouse cooking, in a city where green chile is the house style.
The direction comes from executive chef Brian Paskvan, whose years cooking in Texas and New Orleans show up all over the menu. Meats in the From the Smoker section spend a full day over oak. The pork belly is braised and glazed with Steen’s Louisiana cane syrup. The ham program pulls country hams from small producers in Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina, and the kitchen says it is the only one in Arizona serving Bill-E’s Bacon from Fairhope, Alabama.
The room is the other draw. Ella seats about 150 between the dining room and a patio that looks across the Civic Center lawn, with a 360-degree bar for about 30 in the middle. The hotel pitches it as a neighborhood dinner spot rather than an occasion restaurant, priced so people come back.
Inside the same building, Common Ground Bistro in the lobby does the rest of the day: coffee, breakfast and light bites, American bistro-style. It is not a separate destination, but it is the easiest coffee stop on the north side of the Civic Center.
What to order and when to go
Start with the hams. Hog Heaven is a rotating board of Southern country hams served with pickles, red-eye gravy aioli and benne seed crackers. It is the dish that shows what the kitchen is doing, and it is built to share.
Then the pork belly or the smoker. The Steen’s braised pork belly, with pickled mustard seeds and a cornbread purée, uses Iowa pork from Beeler’s. The From the Smoker plates are the Texas side of the menu. Shrimp and grits with Gulf shrimp and andouille is the New Orleans side.
Drink at the round bar. The 360-degree bar is the room’s centerpiece. Order the Saints & Sinners, which mixes Herbsaint, the New Orleans anise liqueur, with blanco tequila, lime, honey and cucumber. The bar is also where walk-ins land when the book is full.
Time it for sunset. The patio looks across the Civic Center lawn, far enough from the Old Town bar blocks to be quiet. The team singles out the hour around sunset, and from October through April that is the table to book. In summer, eat inside.
Know the rest of the hotel. For breakfast or a coffee, use Common Ground Bistro in the lobby. The pool deck has its own bar and grill. If you are staying, our Hotel Solaya guide covers the rooms. Weekend brunch at Ella was announced for October 2026, so confirm it has started before you plan around it.
Walk to it. Ella is a few minutes from almost everything south of Indian School Road: the Main Street galleries, AZ88 and Pinyon on the Civic Center, and the Old Adobe Mission on Brown Avenue. On big Civic Center event nights and Giants spring training weekends in March, book early.
The newest restaurant in a building that keeps changing them
Ella is at least the fourth headline restaurant in this building in twenty years. The hotel opened in 1975 as a Doubletree and went through several chain flags before it was gutted in 2004 and relaunched as The James. In January 2007 it became the Mondrian Scottsdale, with Asia de Cuba as the restaurant and a South Beach attitude. When the Mondrian failed and the hotel became the Theodore in 2010, an Italian room replaced it. In 2011 the hotel was repainted in desert-wildflower colors as The Saguaro, and Jose Garces’ Distrito and Old Town Whiskey moved in downstairs.
Each version tried to match the hotel’s mood. Asia de Cuba was a nightclub-adjacent scene; Distrito was bright, loud and Mexico City-inspired, to match the paint. Ella comes with the 2026 renovation that turned the building into Hotel Solaya, part of Hyatt’s JdV brand, managed by Dallas-based Dreamscape Hospitality. The interiors went Modern Mexican; the restaurant went Southern. Like the earlier versions, it bets on the location, with the patio facing the park instead of a parking lot.
That location has its own history. The Civic Center was built in the late 1960s on land that had been a Mexican-American barrio, a story told in our note on the barrio under the Civic Center. The lawns Ella faces were rebuilt in a renovation completed in 2023. For nearly fifty years they held the Scottsdale Arts Festival, which ended after 2019; today they host concerts and city events on the new 360-degree stage, and the restaurant is one of the few places to eat with a view of them.
The honest assessment: Ella is new, a hotel restaurant, and still settling in, and the Southern menu will puzzle anyone who came to Scottsdale for green chile. But the cooking has a clear point of view, the ham program is unlike anything else in Old Town, and the patio is a good place to watch the Civic Center at dusk. It is the best reason in years to walk into this building if you are not staying in it.