What is La Fogata?
La Fogata Kitchen & Bar is the signature restaurant of The Scottsdale Resort & Spa at McCormick Ranch, the hacienda-style property at 7700 E McCormick Parkway that opened in 1976 as America’s first purpose-built conference resort. It took over the room that had been Kitchen West and opened in January 2024, the last piece of a $40 million renovation that Driftwood Capital began after buying the 16-acre resort for $113 million in February 2022 and moving it into Hilton’s Curio Collection.
The name means the bonfire. The resort chose it, by Phoenix Home & Garden’s account, for the open-fire cooking of launch chef Ken Arneson, Driftwood Hospitality’s area executive chef, and for the dozen-plus fire pits the renovation scattered across the grounds. The room is hacienda-inspired, with an open kitchen built around a wood-fire grill, a live counter where cooks plate each order, and the glass toward the McCormick Ranch Golf Club fairways and Camelback Mountain that Kitchen West had made the room’s best feature.
The food is billed as Pan-Latin and modern Sonoran with global detours. The opening card ran beef carpaccio at $21, house-made mole meatballs at $12, a Meat and Potatoes plate at $29, Chilean sea bass at $38 and a $17 Soup & Sando that the resort called a tribute to its 1976 menu, built on guajillo chiles, white beans and local produce. It serves all three meals: weekday breakfast and lunch, a Friday-to-Sunday brunch with live music, and dinner nightly until 10, with a bar that runs to midnight. The kitchen now belongs to executive chef Timothy Ralphs, a Scottsdale Culinary Institute graduate who ran La Valencia in La Jolla and the Brown Palace in Denver and holds advanced sommelier credentials.
It is for the resort’s conference and leisure guests first, and for McCormick Ranch families second, the same people who marked holidays at Palm Court for forty years and at Kitchen West for eight. Our verdict: a well-built hotel restaurant with a real grill and a real view, better at brunch and the monthly chef’s dinner than at a Tuesday supper, and the most convincing dining room the resort has had since the tuxedoed captains left.
How to eat at La Fogata
Book the third Thursday. The Chef’s Dinner Series runs on the third Thursday of each month at 7 p.m.: a monthly theme, five courses and five paired drinks for $89 plus tax and gratuity. That is the best value in the building and the one night the kitchen is cooking for a room rather than a hotel, so it is where we would send a first-timer. Reserve through the resort’s event link rather than OpenTable.
Order from the fire. Start with the mole meatballs and the carpaccio, then ask what is on the wood grill. The sea bass and the Meat and Potatoes were the opening headliners; the mesquite-grilled items are the ones that justify the name. OpenTable puts dinner at $31 to $50 a head, which lands a few dollars above Kitchen West’s checks. Guests on Tripadvisor and Yelp praise the service, the cheese bread, the mole dishes and a smoked brisket, and complain that the menu is short and that allergies are handled poorly, so ask before you order.
Brunch is the strong meal. Friday through Sunday the dining room serves brunch from 6:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., and on Saturday and Sunday a live band plays from 9 to 1 (the resort has run the program since May 2025). Listings show a birria eggs Benedict at $24, a short rib Benedict, avocado toast at $21 and steak and eggs at $25; the weekend bar opens at 9 with its own brunch menu until 3. For the city’s other options see our brunch guide.
Timing and the room. Dinner runs 5 to 10 nightly, and live music plays Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 5 to 9, which makes the bar loud and the dining room pleasant. Sit at the live counter if you want the cooking, at the glass if you want the fairway and the mountain at sunset, and on the patio by the fire pits in winter. The Madam, the Prohibition-style speakeasy, is in the same building for afterward, Wednesday through Saturday from 5, and the Social Boardroom next to it has pool, shuffleboard and a golf simulator.
Getting there. The resort is on McCormick Parkway just east of Scottsdale Road, three miles north of Old Town. Self-parking is free, which the resorts on the Camelback corridor cannot say, and the restaurant is through the lobby toward the golf course. The phone is (480) 596-7522.
The third dining room of a fifty-year resort
Every owner of this property has announced itself with a restaurant. The Scottsdale Conference Resort opened in 1976 with Palm Court, tableside Caesars and bananas Foster in flame, and ran it for four decades. Destination Hotels bought the aging property in 2015, spent $10 million, and opened Kitchen West in September of that year: an open wood-fire kitchen behind glass, communal tables, chef Rick Dupere, and the holiday buffets that McCormick Ranch families adopted when Palm Court’s carts stopped rolling. Hilton’s Curio flag came in 2017. Then Driftwood Capital, the Florida firm, bought the resort from a Hong Kong-based Junson Capital entity for $113 million in February 2022 and promised the largest renovation in its history: rooms cut from 326 to 278 by combining casitas into suites, a new spa, a rebuilt pool, and new dining.
La Fogata is that dining. The renovation ran through 2023, with Driftwood refinancing the property for $115 million through MetLife in October as the work was nearly done, and on January 22, 2024 the resort announced four venues at once: La Fogata, The Madam, The Social Boardroom and Barnaby’s Café & Wine Bar. Phoenix Home & Garden was explicit that La Fogata was Kitchen West under a new name, look and taste; Phoenix Magazine listed it among the month’s openings; Driftwood declared the whole $40 million project complete that May. Arneson, who led the launch, told the press that the resort was now a culinary destination for all, the line every resort chef of the 2020s gives.
What the record does not say is when Arneson handed the kitchen to Timothy Ralphs. The resort’s dining page calls Ralphs its new executive chef and credits him with the Easter 2026 brunch; his résumé runs from Le Cordon Bleu Paris through Estancia La Jolla, the Omni San Diego and Loews Coronado to the top jobs at La Valencia and the Brown Palace. The press we found has not reviewed his menu; the guest record is a 4.2 on OpenTable from more than 300 diners and a 4.3 on Tripadvisor, with service drawing both the warmest praise and the sharpest complaints.
Its place in the city is the one Kitchen West held: the resort restaurant of McCormick Ranch, facing the lake-district dining strip along Scottsdale Road rather than competing with it. The neighbors have their own rooms, from The Vig to Piñon Grill across the water at the older inn, and a hotel restaurant with a Spanish name and a hotel menu pulls them in for brunch, holidays and anniversaries, not for a Wednesday. That is the business La Fogata was built for.
Honest assessment: La Fogata is a better restaurant than Kitchen West was, because the grill is now the identity rather than a feature, and a worse one than its press release, because a Pan-Latin menu of five or six mains cannot carry the phrase culinary destination. Go for the chef’s dinner, the weekend brunch, or a winter sunset at the glass with the mole meatballs and a drink from the fire-lit bar, and you will be well fed in the handsomest room on McCormick Parkway. Whether it earns the neighborhood’s holiday tables back from the carts and the buffets is the question the next few Thanksgivings will answer.