What is La Zozzona?
For decades, Gainey Ranch’s grand resort was famous for its water slides and gondolas but not its dinner. La Zozzona exists to fix that — expensively.
When Hyatt poured $115 million into transforming the 1986-vintage Hyatt Regency Scottsdale into the Grand Hyatt Scottsdale, it rebuilt the food program from the studs, landing on a six-restaurant collection with one clear headliner. For the flagship, the resort partnered with Richard Blais — the Top Chef All-Stars winner and one of food television’s most recognizable chefs — and pointed him at a genre having a national renaissance: Italian-American cooking, the red-sauce canon done with real technique.
The name tells you the attitude. La Zozzona is cheeky Roman slang for a gloriously messy, indulgent character — a warning label and a promise. This is not a restrained Northern Italian tasting room. It’s handmade pastas built for twirling, charcoal-grilled steaks with actual fire on them, and the kind of sauce-forward abundance that ends with bread doing cleanup duty.
Eating there feels like the resort’s whole renovation in one room: familiar bones, dramatically raised ambition. The crowd mixes resort guests in vacation mode with a notable number of locals — the surest sign a hotel restaurant is working — and the energy runs celebratory rather than hushed.
Scottsdale has no shortage of Italian rooms. What it lacked was a chef-branded flagship in the city’s central resort corridor. La Zozzona planted one, and Gainey Ranch is back in the dinner conversation for the first time in a long while.
Eating the Blais version of red sauce
Build dinner backward from the pasta. The handmade pasta program is the menu’s heart and the clearest expression of the concept — Italian-American classics and their modern cousins, made in-house and sauced with intent. The savvy structure is family-style: starters for the table, a shared pasta course in the middle, and the charcoal grill for the finale. Ordering a pasta as your lone entrée is legal but misses the intended rhythm.
The grill is the second act. Charcoal-fired steaks give the room its steakhouse credentials — this is Scottsdale, after all, where any flagship must answer the beef question — and they arrive with the char-and-crust conviction that a $115 million renovation’s kitchen hardware makes possible. Split one after the pasta course and you’ve had the full La Zozzona experience.
Budget accordingly. This is a price-level-four resort flagship; the tab will read like one. The value calculation is the whole evening: arrive before sunset and walk the renovated grounds — the property’s water features and mountain views at golden hour remain one of central Scottsdale’s great free shows — take a pre-dinner drink, then settle in. As a single line item, dinner is expensive. As a night out, it competes.
Reservation strategy: high season (January through April) compresses everything in this city, and a chef-branded resort headliner feels it first — book a couple of weeks ahead for weekends, especially around Phoenix Open week when the whole Valley’s books go dark. Weeknights and the warm months are far gentler, and summer brings the resort-dining pricing softness locals quietly exploit all over Scottsdale.
Gainey Ranch rejoins the conversation
The story underneath La Zozzona is a resort reclaiming relevance. When the Hyatt Regency Scottsdale opened at Gainey Ranch in 1986, it was the leading edge of the city’s great resort boom — a fantasy of canals, gondolas, and a half-acre of pools that defined an era of Scottsdale tourism. Its dining rooms mattered then, too. But as decades passed, the culinary energy migrated: Old Town grew a chef economy, the Waterfront stacked up glamour rooms like Maple & Ash and Nobu, and newer or refreshed resorts — the Phoenician, the Princess with La Hacienda, Mountain Shadows with Hearth ‘61 — kept their restaurants in the local rotation. Gainey Ranch’s grande dame quietly became a place locals didn’t think about at dinnertime.
The 2024 renovation was the counterattack, and hiring Blais was the tell. Scottsdale’s resort scene has learned that a name-brand chef partnership is the fastest way to convert a hotel restaurant from amenity into destination — the model that made Bourbon Steak and J&G-era rooms work a generation earlier. Blais brought television reach and, more usefully, a genuine thesis: Italian-American cooking, long condescended to as checkered-tablecloth nostalgia, treated as a canon worth executing at flagship level. Nationally, that revival was in full swing; La Zozzona gave it a Scottsdale address.
It also filled a geographic hole. Scottsdale’s Italian excellence has historically clustered in Old Town — Marcellino for handmade pasta scholarship, Fat Ox for modern swagger — leaving the central resort corridor thin. Gainey Ranch sits in the middle of the city’s residential wealth, and La Zozzona gives that population a marquee Italian room ten minutes from home.
Honest assessment: it’s young, it’s expensive, and resort flagships live or die on whether locals keep coming after the renovation glow fades. The early signs — full high-season books, locals outnumbering room keys on weekends — suggest this one has legs. The gondolas were never the point. Dinner finally is.