What is Faro & Brag?
Faro & Brag is the all-day restaurant of the Westin Kierland Resort & Spa, at 6902 E Greenway Parkway, in the 735-room resort across the street from Kierland Commons. The Westin unveiled it in February 2024 as a full renovation of the room that had been Nellie Cashman’s Monday Club Cafe since the resort opened in 2002, and it serves breakfast, lunch and dinner every day under executive chef Chris Masco.
The name is two card games from the saloons of the Old West: Faro, a French gambling game of the 17th century that spread through the Southwest, and Brag, an 18th-century British three-card ancestor of poker. The theme carries into the bar, where whiskey flights are called prials, Brag’s word for three of a kind. Masco, a Culinary Institute of America graduate, had been the resort’s executive chef for nearly 12 years when the room opened, after the Westin Copley Place in Boston, the Westin Diplomat in Florida, Sundance Resorts and the Hyatt Regency Atlanta.
The cooking is modern American with Southwestern accents and a stated emphasis on seasonal, local ingredients and “well-being,” the resort’s word. The signatures at opening were a Desert Springs barramundi with za’atar quinoa and tomato confit at lunch, and at dinner a paella for two with lobster tail, prawns, scallops, mussels and chorizo in a sherry-saffron broth, a tamarind-braised pork shank, and a meat board for two called the Tablas, with wagyu striploin, lamb loin and scallops. Breakfast is a buffet with an omelet station, which guests on OpenTable were still praising in the fall of 2026, and there is weekend brunch and a program of monthly wine dinners. Mike Tueros, the resort’s food and beverage director, called it “a space designed to elevate your senses and satisfy your cravings.”
Who it is for is first the hotel’s guests, who need a breakfast at 6:30 a.m. and a dinner they can walk to, and second the Kierland neighborhood, which the resort has courted with wine dinners and brunch. In 2026 the Westin is in the middle of a multi-phase renovation that has closed its Rim restaurant and Scotch Library until fall; Faro & Brag has stayed open through it. Our verdict: a well-made hotel restaurant with a serious bar and a better breakfast than anything across the street, and the right place for one meal of a Westin stay rather than three.
Using Faro & Brag
Hours. Breakfast and lunch run daily from 6:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., dinner from 5 to 9 p.m., per the resort’s dining page in October 2026; Experience Scottsdale’s listing shows the morning service ending at 11, so the lunch window is the one to confirm by phone. Reserve on OpenTable from the resort’s site or call (480) 624-1000. Weekend brunch, and particularly the Sunday sitting, is the meal that fills.
What it costs. The prices the Scottsdale Progress printed in April 2024 are the only published set: a malted waffle with berries and Vermont maple syrup $18, three-bean and feta soup $12, the barramundi $39, forest mushroom pappardelle ragù $29, the paella for two $80, and the Faro & Brag Tablas for two $145. Experience Scottsdale’s $10 to $20 average entrée fits breakfast and lunch, not dinner.
Order the paella or the shank. Those two were the dishes the resort led with, and the paella, built for two, is the one that justifies a resort dinner. At lunch the barramundi and an ahi tuna salad that diners mention are the lighter picks. At breakfast take the buffet if you want the omelet station and the waffle if you do not.
Drink the Brag side of the menu. Nearly a dozen signature cocktails: the Train to Uno (Herradura Silver, elderflower, lemon, vanilla) $18, the Puesta del Sol (Del Maguey Vida mezcal, triple sec, mango, cassis, lime) $18, Popo’s Brag, and the Black Manhattan made with Widow Jane Lucky Thirteen, Averna and plum bitters at $35. The whiskey prials are flights of two or three pours at $20 to $50, named Catching the Rye, It’s a Kentucky Thing and The Perfect Finish, drawing on WhistlePig PiggyBack 6 Year, Michter’s single barrel rye, Kentucky Owl Confiscated, Widow Jane Decadence and Rare Perfection 14 Year. With the Scotch Library shut for its expansion to nearly 450 bottles, this is the resort’s whiskey bar for now.
Where to sit. The rebuilt room has indoor and patio seating; take the patio from October to April.
Getting there. Park at the resort, or walk over from the Commons; the resort’s own guide on this site recommends eating across the street half the time, and the walk is a few minutes. For the rest of the property, Brittlebush at the Kierland Golf Club clubhouse does lunch Wednesday through Sunday, and Antidote is the outdoor bar with the big patio.
From Nellie Cashman’s to the card table
The Westin Kierland opened in 2002 as the centerpiece of the Herberger family’s Kierland master plan, with a Scottish streak (a bagpiper at sunset, a Scotch library) and two restaurants that defined it: Deseo, the Nuevo Latino ceviche room shaped by Douglas Rodriguez, and Nellie Cashman’s, the three-meal café named for Tombstone’s “Angel of the Mining Camp” that served Southwest-inspired American cooking and Arizona-raised beef for more than two decades. Deseo closed around 2020. Nellie’s lasted until the turn of 2024, when Marriott’s wave of renovations reached the resort and the café was gutted and reopened under a new name with a new story.
The new story is cards, lighter than Nellie Cashman’s Tombstone history and a good fit for a resort that already sells its guests a kilted piper. The chef did not change: Chris Masco had run the Westin’s kitchens for over a decade, and the opening menu reads as his cooking in a new frame, the barramundi and za’atar quinoa, the tamarind pork shank, a paella the resort photographed for every press release. The resort’s web addresses, as the Nellie’s guide on this site notes, carried the old name for a time afterward.
What followed was a resort rebuilding itself around the new room. AZ Big Media called Faro & Brag the property’s primary dining destination in May 2025, with Brittlebush for casual fare, the Scotch Library and the new outdoor bar Antidote beside it. In April 2026 general manager Derek Ellis announced “The New Westin Kierland Experience,” a multi-phase renovation: a three-tier lobby lounge bar, a hidden speakeasy, the Scotch Library expanded to nearly 450 bottles in individual lockers, and a new Adventure Pool bar due in fall 2026. Through it the Rim and the Scotch Library closed temporarily; Faro & Brag, the breakfast room, could not.
What the record does not say: an exact opening date (the press ran February 19 to 24, 2024, and the Progress called it “newly opened” on April 1), a seat count, the cost of the rebuild, or any critic’s review. The coverage is press-release journalism and diner ratings, which on OpenTable sit around 4.4 with notes about renovation confusion.
Honest assessment: Faro & Brag is better than most Valley resort three-meal rooms and not a destination. Its bar program, the prials and the $35 Manhattan, is the most interesting thing about it, and the paella is a good dinner for two who do not want to leave the property. But Kierland Commons is across the street, with Postino at a fraction of the price and North Italia for pasta. Breakfast here, one dinner for the paella, and the rest of the stay in the Kierland and Quarter district of the 2020s, which has more good restaurants within a ten-minute walk than any other resort in the city.