What is Mesa Centrale?
Mesa Centrale is the all-day restaurant of the Grand Hyatt Scottsdale Resort at 7500 E Doubletree Ranch Road, the lakeside landmark of Gainey Ranch that spent nearly four decades as the Hyatt Regency Scottsdale. It opened in the fall of 2024 as one of four new concepts unveiled when the resort finished a $115 million renovation and became Arizona’s first Grand Hyatt, announced on November 6, 2024, and it is the breakfast, lunch and dinner room in a dining program conceived by Richard Blais, the Top Chef All-Stars winner the resort hired to invent six restaurants and bars from scratch.
Hyatt’s own phrase for it is “an iconic American grill of the Southwest.” In practice that means a breakfast buffet and a menu of blue corn pancakes and huevos rancheros in the morning, sandwiches and wood-fired pizzas through the afternoon, and grilled plates at night, served from 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day inside a glass-walled room and on a patio with fire pits facing the McDowells across the resort’s water. The dress code is casual. Phoenix New Times described it on November 20, 2024, the day La Zozzona opened, as “an all-day Southwestern grill that offers breakfast, lunch and dinner,” already serving while the signature rooms were still rolling out.
The room has a lineage. This end of the resort opened in 1986 with the Golden Swan, the Hyatt’s fine-dining flagship beside the lake, and from about 2009 the space was SWB, A Southwest Bistro, a three-meal Southwestern room that fed guests for fifteen years without ever getting a review. Mesa Centrale inherited SWB’s job and its view when the renovation closed it.
It is a hotel restaurant in the plainest sense, built for the 496 rooms upstairs, the conference badges in the 24,000-square-foot Arizona Ballroom and the families coming off the 2.5-acre water playground, and the Valley press has treated it that way, covering Blais’s La Zozzona and Tiki Taka and leaving the grill to the travel bloggers. Our verdict: a good resort breakfast with one of the best patios in Gainey Ranch, and the least interesting of the six Blais concepts after dark.
How to use Mesa Centrale
Come for breakfast. The meal the restaurant was built around is the one it does best. The Points Guy’s February 2026 review ate it on the patio by a fire pit on a cold morning and came away with the right order: the blue corn pancakes ($24) and the huevos rancheros ($26), with strong coffee and lattes. The buffet is the alternative, and listings call it epic, but the resort publishes no standing price we could find and the holiday versions tell you the scale: the 2026 Easter brunch was listed at $170 for adults and $55 for children, and Mother’s Day ran $55 to $170 a head. Order from the menu unless you are feeding a team.
Lunch and dinner are the grill. By OpenTable’s schedule, breakfast runs 6:30 to 11, lunch 11 to 5 and dinner 5 to 10, and the afternoon and evening menu is American grill with a Southwest accent: sandwiches, wood-fired pizzas and grilled proteins, with a kids’ menu. Experience Scottsdale puts average entrées at $21 to $30. Reviews split the way hotel-grill reviews do: excellent service and mountain views on one side, food that “lacked flavor and depth” on the other, and one diner’s complaint that there are too many better restaurants nearby at resort prices. We agree with the complaint at dinner. The resort’s two chef-driven rooms, La Zozzona for pastas and charcoal-grilled steaks and Tiki Taka for sushi and tapas, are a short walk and worth the difference.
Timing. High season is January through April, when the patio is full by 8 a.m. on weekends and the fire pits are lit; book on OpenTable or join its walk-in waitlist. In summer the resort has put its restaurants on a reduced schedule, with lunch and dinner not served every day through August, so check before driving over for a July dinner. Holiday brunches sell out and are reservation-only.
Getting there. The resort is on Doubletree Ranch Road just east of Scottsdale Road, with self-parking in the garage and valet at the entrance. Mesa Centrale is through the lobby toward the water, past the Grand Vista Lounge, where happy hour runs 3 to 5 and live music starts at 6 most nights. The gondolas on the canals and the Gainey Ranch Golf Club fairways are the view from the patio, and for a wider list of morning options see our guide to the best brunch in Scottsdale.
The three-meal room that keeps changing its name
Gainey Ranch’s resort has had one lakeside restaurant and three names for it. The Golden Swan opened with the Hyatt Regency in 1986, a serious dining room in the years when every Scottsdale resort had one and the water gardens outside, with their fountains and Venetian gondolas, were the most photographed hotel landscape in the Valley. Around 2009 the Hyatt replaced it with SWB, A Southwest Bistro, a warm-wood three-meal room with corn-and-poblano soup, green mole and tequila dinners, which is what resort dining had become in the 2000s: still regional, no longer formal. SWB fed guests for fifteen years and closed, unmourned by the press, when the renovation began in 2023. Its Italian sibling, Alto Ristorante e Bar, went the same way.
The renovation was the biggest in the property’s history. Hyatt spent $115 million (one 2026 review puts the final figure at $124 million) to make Gainey Ranch its first Grand Hyatt in Arizona, redoing all 496 rooms, the ten pools and the three-story waterslide, Spa Avania, and the ballroom, which reopened in January 2025 at 24,000 square feet, three times its old size. For the food it hired Richard Blais, whose consulting group Trail Blais had done resort restaurants in Carlsbad and Orlando, and gave him six concepts: La Zozzona, the Italian-American chophouse; Tiki Taka, the Japan-meets-Spain tapas bar; the Grand Vista Lounge in the lobby; Sandbar and H2Oasis by the pools; and Mesa Centrale, the all-day Southwestern grill. The reopening was announced on November 6, 2024, and New Times reported two weeks later that five of the six were serving.
Mesa Centrale got the least attention of the six, which is the fate of every hotel’s three-meal room. Lodging and hospitality trade press named it in one line each, the travel writers who stayed over praised its breakfast and its patio, and the diner reviews have been mixed, with service and views winning and the dinner plates losing. No Valley critic has reviewed it on its own, and Hyatt’s pages do not name a chef de cuisine, so the record of who actually runs the kitchen under Blais’s concept is blank.
What it represents is clearer. The 2020s resort formula in Scottsdale is a celebrity name over a signature room, a second concept for the Instagram crowd, and a competent all-day grill underneath them both to do the volume; the Grand Hyatt executed it as cleanly as anyone. Mesa Centrale is the volume. It also owns the view that the Golden Swan was built for, and on a winter morning by a fire pit with the McDowells pink across the water, that is still the best seat in Gainey Ranch.
Honest assessment: eat breakfast here and dinner elsewhere on the property. Mesa Centrale is a well-run resort grill with a great patio, honest menu prices for a Grand Hyatt and buffet prices that are not, and it is not the restaurant that will make anyone drive to Gainey Ranch. Blais’s name is on the door; his cooking is next door at La Zozzona.