What is Hecho Libre?
Hecho Libre is the restaurant that announced the Kimpton Miralina before the resort itself opened. It began serving in early December 2025 in the lobby of what was still, on paper, the Scottsdale Plaza Resort at 7200 N Scottsdale Road, the 40-acre garden property on the Paradise Valley side of Scottsdale Road across from McCormick Ranch, a month before the rebuilt resort debuted as IHG’s first Kimpton in the market on January 5, 2026.
The chef is Wes Avila, the Los Angeles cook known for Guerrilla Tacos and Ka’teen; he is a two-time James Beard finalist with Michelin recognition, and Hecho Libre is his first restaurant in Arizona. The operator is sbe, Sam Nazarian’s hospitality company, and the resort’s executive chef Stephen Jones, a Beard finalist himself, walked Avila through the Sonoran Desert’s purveyors: Ramona Farms in Sacaton, Blue Sky Organics in Litchfield Park, Cielito Rosa Bakery for the pastries. The name means “made free.” Avila told the Phoenix Business Journal it is “about freedom in cooking, honoring tradition while creating your own path,” married to “the spirit of the desert.”
The food is Baja coast meets Sonoran Desert: yellowtail aguachile, an avocado vampiro taco, halibut veracruzana, carnitas, and pescado a las brasas, a whole fish grilled over open flame, with esquites, sweet potato taquitos, hand-pressed tortillas and house salsas to share. The bar pours small-batch agave, Mexican wines from Baja California and Querétaro, Arizona beer and two house cocktails, the mezcal Fairy Duster and the rum Wes Colada. A morning counter, Cafe Libre, does breakfast burritos, conchas and a horchata cold-foam latte.
The room, by Saguez & Dash, is terracotta, woven texture and cactus green under a ceiling piece called The Loom by an Oaxacan textile artist, with glass doors to a garden patio and a tiled private dining room. It serves three meals a day and is for resort guests at breakfast and for the Paradise Valley and McCormick Ranch dinner crowd that has not had a serious restaurant on this corner since Remington’s closed in 2017. Our verdict: the most ambitious Mexican kitchen on a Scottsdale resort right now, with a dinner menu worth the drive and a breakfast that is just a hotel’s.
Ordering at Hecho Libre
Go at dinner. By the most recent listing we found, from August 2026, breakfast runs 7 to 11, lunch 11 to 2 and dinner 5 to 10 daily; the opening release in December 2025 had dinner ending at 9, so confirm the close with the resort at (480) 948-5000. The reviews sort cleanly by meal. Dinner guests on OpenTable and Tripadvisor praise “creative and extremely flavorful” food, the halibut veracruzana, the tacos and the steaks; the breakfast and brunch guests complain about price and, in one case, dirty tables. Avila’s cooking is on the evening menu. The morning is the Kimpton’s.
Order to share. The menu is built for the table. Start with the yellowtail aguachile and the grilled corn esquites, add the sweet potato taquitos and a plate of hand-pressed tortillas with the house salsas, then split the pescado a las brasas, the whole fish from the open flame, or the halibut veracruzana. The tacos are the known quantity: OpenTable listed tacos perrones and Baja-style tacos at $20 and carnitas and pollo ranchero tacos at $17, and the perrones and the chiles veneno are the dishes diners name most. One warning from the reviews: the menu on the table has not always matched the one online, and the tacos were pulled for a stretch in spring 2026, so ask before you plan around them. Budget $31 to $50 a person by OpenTable’s bracket, more with the fish.
Drink the agave list. The bar’s program is small-batch Mexican producers, and the two signature cocktails are the Fairy Duster (mezcal, guava, sage, lime, rose water) and the Wes Colada (white rum, elderflower, coconut milk, pineapple, lime, strawberry, mint). The wine list is Mexican, from Baja California and Querétaro, which almost no other Scottsdale room offers by the glass, and the taps are Arizona breweries. Seasonal aguas frescas cover the non-drinkers. Our best Mexican restaurants in Scottsdale list has the context.
Mornings and music. Cafe Libre is the cheap way in: a chorizo-and-potato, ham-and-egg or steak ranchero breakfast burrito, a concha or pumpkin empanada from Cielito Rosa, and Wes’s horchata cold-foam latte, a cafe de olla or a stone-ground Oaxacan chocolate latte. Live music plays on the patio Fridays from 6 to 8, and those are the nights to reserve. The resort’s pool bar, Cima, is the other place to drink on the property.
Getting there. The resort entrance is on the west side of Scottsdale Road north of McDonald Drive, with a free surface lot; the restaurant is off the lobby. From Old Town it is ten minutes up Scottsdale Road, from McCormick Ranch you can nearly walk, and the Camelback Inn crowd on Lincoln Drive is five minutes west.
The restaurant that came with the rebrand
For almost fifty years the corner belonged to the Scottsdale Plaza Resort, opened in 1976 as a family-run, Spanish-Mediterranean garden property with five pools and, from 1987, a supper club called Remington’s that served prime rib and live jazz five nights a week until it closed in May 2017. After that the Plaza had no signature restaurant at all, which was part of the problem: a 400-room independent on 40 acres with no reason for anyone who was not sleeping there to drive in. Institutional investors led by Trinity Investments and Partners Group bought it in 2024 and chose Kimpton as the flag for a renovation first reported at $42 million and, by July 2026, at $70 million.
Kimpton’s method everywhere is a chef with a name. For Miralina the owners went to sbe, which has run restaurants inside hotels since Sam Nazarian founded it in 2002 and whose portfolio runs past 150 of them, and sbe brought Wes Avila, the Los Angeles chef known for Guerrilla Tacos and Ka’teen, with two Beard nominations and a Michelin mention and no Arizona restaurant to his name. The press release on December 9, 2025 called the restaurant a preview; the Phoenix Business Journal reported it open on December 16, three weeks before the resort’s own debut. Restaurant first, hotel second is the 2020s resort playbook, and it worked: the opening coverage was about Avila, not the room count.
The concept had precedent on the road. Scottsdale’s resorts have cooked Mexican food for decades, from the Camelback Inn’s Navajo Room to the Fairmont’s La Hacienda, mostly as Sonoran comfort for winter visitors. Hecho Libre’s framing is Baja: coastal, citrus-and-chile, built around fish on the grill and aguachile, with the desert supplying the corn, beans and produce. Whether that transplants is the open question of the restaurant’s first year. The early reviews say the food does, with the halibut and the tacos perrones earning the praise, and that the service and the breakfast have not yet, which is the usual shape of a resort opening.
In July 2026 sbe announced Katsuya, its modern Japanese brand, for The Enclave, a hotel-within-a-hotel in the final phase of Miralina’s build-out, and the trade press noted that the property would become one of the only Paradise Valley or Scottsdale resorts with two chef-driven destination restaurants. Hecho Libre’s job shifted in that sentence from signature restaurant to one of a pair.
What the record does not say: the seat count, prices beyond what OpenTable showed, how often Avila is in the kitchen rather than Jones’s team, and whether the ambition survives a resort’s need to feed 400 rooms breakfast. No Valley critic had reviewed it by October 2026; the press we found is business coverage, a newsletter comparison and diner reviews.
Honest assessment: Hecho Libre is the best reason to eat on this corner since Remington’s, and the gap between the two tells you how far resort dining has moved. Go for dinner, order the fish and the aguachile, drink the Baja wine, and judge it as a chef’s restaurant that happens to serve a hotel breakfast rather than the other way around. If the kitchen holds its opening standard once Katsuya opens next door, Miralina will have the strongest two-restaurant lineup on Scottsdale Road north of Camelback.