What was Kitchen West?
Every resort renovation needs a restaurant that proves the renovation happened. When Destination Hotels & Resorts bought the aging Scottsdale Resort at McCormick Ranch in 2015 and put $10 million into a summer remodel, the proof was Kitchen West.
It opened in September 2015 on the lobby level, in the space that had been Sangria’s Lounge, and it was built to be everything the property’s old dining had not been. The Scottsdale Resort had opened in 1976 as America’s first purpose-built conference resort, and for forty years its signature room was Palm Court — tuxedoed captains, Caesar salads built tableside, bananas Foster in flame. Kitchen West replaced tuxedos with a demonstration kitchen anchored by wood grills and ovens, put communal tables in the dining room, and wrapped the whole thing in glass walls facing the gardens and the McCormick Ranch fairways.
Executive chef Rick Dupere cooked what the resort called a modern interpretation of Western American food: steaks and chops off the wood fire, seasonal vegetables, locally sourced ingredients, a menu that read “artfully rustic” in the press release and mostly delivered on the plate. Reviewers praised the grilled dishes, the service, and — tellingly — the Thanksgiving and Christmas buffets, which became the room’s signature for McCormick Ranch families who had spent a generation of holidays at Palm Court.
It ran roughly eight years. When the resort’s next owners launched a $40 million top-to-bottom renovation under Hilton’s Curio Collection, Kitchen West closed with the old rooms, and La Fogata Kitchen & Bar opened in its place on February 2, 2024. A solid restaurant, a short era, and a clean example of how resort dining now turns over with every deed transfer.
What a Kitchen West dinner was like
Sit at the fire. The whole design argument was the open kitchen — wood grills and ovens on display, cooks working in view, the smell of mesquite drifting into the lobby. The counter seats facing the line were the best in the house, and regulars claimed them. The dining room proper, with its communal tables and glass walls, was pleasant but generic; the kitchen was the show.
Order from the grill. Dupere’s menu roamed the Western canon — a wood-grilled ribeye or pork chop, a whole fish, vegetables charred hard — with seasonal touches and local sourcing that put it a notch above conference-hotel fare. The safe orders were fine; the char-grilled specials were the reason locals came. Breakfast was hotel-standard done well, and lunch on the patio side, with the golf course beyond the glass, was the underrated meal.
The buffets were the institution. Kitchen West’s Thanksgiving and Christmas spreads drew repeated praise from guests and became a fixture for McCormick Ranch families who had celebrated at Palm Court for decades and needed somewhere to go once the carts stopped rolling. Booking a month ahead was standard; the room filled with three generations, and the wood-fired carving station did the work the tuxedoed captains used to.
Price and logistics. Level-three checks — resort pricing, but a full tier below the Camelback-corridor flagships — with easy self-parking, which the older resorts along Scottsdale Road cannot say. The location, on McCormick Parkway just off Scottsdale Road, put it minutes from the Vig and the rest of the McCormick Ranch dining strip, so locals often did dinner here and drinks elsewhere.
The eight-year restaurant
Kitchen West belongs to a specific chapter in the McCormick Ranch resort’s long life. The property had spent the 2000s and early 2010s as a slightly faded conference hotel — the “Scottsdale Conference Resort” of the 1970s, grown old alongside Palm Court’s clientele. Destination Hotels’ 2015 purchase was the first serious money in years, and Kitchen West was its public face: an open kitchen and wood fire at the moment those were what every hotel operator in America wanted, a chef’s name in the press materials, and glass toward the golf course instead of chandeliers toward the ceiling. It was the McCormick Ranch version of what the Phoenician did with Mowry & Cotton two years later.
What Kitchen West never became was a local destination. That was structural. McCormick Ranch’s residents already had a dining corridor along Scottsdale Road, and a resort restaurant with a generic name and a chef most diners could not place was never going to pull them off it on a Wednesday. It succeeded where hotel restaurants succeed — breakfast, banquets, holidays, and the occasional wood-grilled steak for a couple staying on property — and it did those things well enough that Yelp’s record of it skews genuinely warm.
The end came with the next owners. A renovation announced in 2022 promised rebuilt rooms, redesigned grounds, and new dining, with the resort rebranding as The Scottsdale Resort & Spa under Curio. When the four new venues opened on February 2, 2024 — La Fogata with its Pan-Latin open-flame cooking under launch chef Ken Arneson, The Madam speakeasy, The Social Boardroom, and Barnaby’s Café — Kitchen West was simply not among them. Its reservation pages redirect to La Fogata now, and its Yelp listing carries the word CLOSED.
Honest assessment: Kitchen West was a competent, well-designed resort restaurant that arrived on trend and left when the trend moved. It deserves the page because it marks the hinge between Palm Court’s forty-year era and the current one, and because the holiday buffets gave a neighborhood something it had lost. La Fogata inherits the fire and the fairway glass. Whether it earns the families is the next chapter.