What is La Hacienda?
In 1987, when a new resort called the Scottsdale Princess opened on the desert north of town, it made an unusual bet for the era: that its signature restaurant should be Mexican — not continental, not a steakhouse, but upscale Mexican cooking treated with full fine-dining seriousness. Nearly four decades later, La Hacienda is still making that argument, and still mostly winning it.
The room is the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess’s original restaurant and its longest-running, a hacienda-styled dining room that spent the 1990s building a national reputation as one of the finest Mexican restaurants in the country. Its modern chapter belongs to Richard Sandoval, the international chef-restaurateur who reimagined the menu under his “Old Ways, New Hands” philosophy — traditional Mexican technique, modern execution, resort-grade ingredients. Alongside the food runs a tequila program deep enough to qualify as a library, with guided flights that regulars treat as the true first course.
The resort says the room has been voted Arizona’s number-one Mexican restaurant, and while every resort says something, this claim has decades of critical consensus behind it. La Hacienda occupies a category with few peers anywhere: Mexican cuisine given the budget, cellar, and service usually reserved for French rooms and steakhouses.
Eating there feels appropriately ceremonial — firelight, an open kitchen’s rhythm, tequila arriving with provenance attached. It’s not the Mexican food you grab; it’s the Mexican food you book.
Doing La Hacienda right
Start with agave, guided. The tequila list is the state of the art in Arizona — blancos through extra añejos, plus rarities — and the staff pour guided flights with real fluency. Ordering a house margarita here is legal but slightly tragic, like visiting a great cellar and asking for the house red. Tell them what you drink and let them build you a progression.
Order into the concept. The “Old Ways, New Hands” framing means the menu’s center of gravity is modern-Mexican: familiar foundations — moles, masa, wood fire, coastal ceviches — executed with fine-dining technique and plating. The regulars’ move is to skip anything you could get at your neighborhood spot and chase the dishes only this kitchen’s budget makes possible. Ask the servers what the kitchen is proudest of that season; the answer changes and is reliably correct.
Choose your setting by season. Winter belongs to the patio and firepits, when desert evenings turn the hacienda theming from decor into atmosphere. Summer belongs to the dining room’s cool interior. Either way, ask for sightlines — to the open kitchen inside, to the fire outside.
Timing and logistics: reservations are close to mandatory in the January-through-April season, and genuinely mandatory during WM Phoenix Open week, when TPC Scottsdale next door pours its crowds into the resort nightly. Holiday weeks — especially the Christmas at the Princess season — book far out. Summer brings locals’ deals worth watching for.
Budget honestly: this is price-level-three trending four once the tequila conversation gets interesting. It’s a special-occasion room; treat the bill as part of the occasion.
Four decades of elevating the argument
La Hacienda’s historical significance is easy to miss now that upscale Mexican is everywhere: it made the case early, and from an unlikely pulpit. In 1987, Mexican food in Scottsdale meant beloved family houses like Los Olivos — cherished, casual, cheap. A luxury resort staking its flagship room on Mexican cuisine asserted something different: that this cooking deserved the same treatment as French. Through the 1990s, as the Princess rose into the city’s resort elite, La Hacienda collected the national rankings that made the point unignorable.
The Sandoval era modernized the argument. Handing the room to Richard Sandoval — a Mexico City-born chef with a global restaurant empire built on modern-Mexican cooking — connected La Hacienda to the broader movement that saw Mexican cuisine claim its place in fine dining worldwide. His “Old Ways, New Hands” reimagining kept the room from calcifying into nostalgia, and the deepened tequila program tracked (and helped drive) the Valley’s agave obsession. Sandoval’s presence at the Princess grew from there: Toro, his pan-Latin room at the TPC clubhouse, extends the partnership across the property, alongside Bourbon Steak and the everyday Ironwood American Kitchen in one of Arizona’s deepest resort lineups.
The influence runs downhill into the city. Scottsdale’s current wealth of elevated Mexican and pan-Latin rooms — from Old Town’s modern cantinas to chef-driven spots like Los Sombreros earning their own acclaim — operates in a market La Hacienda spent decades teaching to pay real money for Mexican cooking. Somebody had to convince Scottsdale first. This room did.
Honest assessment: you can eat more soulful Mexican food in the Valley for a third of the price, and purists sometimes bristle at resort polish applied to this cuisine. Both things can be true while this remains one of the country’s great upscale Mexican rooms — nearly forty years of proof that “special occasion” and “Mexican” belong in the same sentence, with a tequila list that closes the case.