What is Piñon Grill?
Piñon Grill is the restaurant of The McCormick Scottsdale, the 125-room hotel at 7401 N Scottsdale Road that opened in the summer of 1975 as the Inn at McCormick Ranch, a year before the famous conference resort across the water. It sits on the shore of Camelback Lake, the man-made lake at the center of McCormick Ranch, with the fairways of McCormick Ranch Golf Club and the McDowell Mountains beyond the terrace rail.
Nobody we found has recorded the year the restaurant opened under this name. What the record does show is that by the early 1990s it was good enough to win a Best of Phoenix award for the best Southwestern food in town, that it then slid, and that Howard Seftel of Phoenix New Times wrote in November 1996 that it had made an astonishing recovery after the return of chef Farn Boggie, the cook from its award-winning years. Seftel put it back in the top rank of Valley Southwestern restaurants, beside Cafe Terra Cotta, Windows on the Green and Vincent Guerithault.
The menu has stayed in that lane. The 1996 kitchen sent out green chile corn bread, grilled Guaymas shrimp with tomatillo salsa, achiote-sauced beef tenderloin and a chocolate taco; Gayot’s later listing names Oaxacan peanut-crusted halibut, Hatch green chile chicken and Sonoran shrimp pasta. Today the hotel calls it a Southwestern-American fusion menu served on the lakeside terrace. It is for hotel guests, for McCormick Ranch neighbors who want a lake view without crossing the city, and for anyone chasing a sunset with a margarita.
The hotel has changed flags more than once, from Clarion to Regal to Millennium, and was closed for six months before its October 2014 relaunch as The McCormick Scottsdale. Piñon Grill came through all of it. Our verdict: the cooking is competent hotel Southwestern rather than a destination, but the terrace on the water at dusk is one of the best seats in Central Scottsdale, and the short hours are the only real obstacle.
How to eat at Piñon Grill
Check the hours first. As of October 2026 the hotel’s page lists Piñon Grill open Wednesday and Thursday from noon to 7 p.m., Friday and Saturday from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Sunday from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., closed Monday and Tuesday. That is a long way from the 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. schedule New Times printed in 1996, and aggregator sites still show older versions, so call (480) 367-2422 before driving over. Breakfast is a weekend thing; dinner ends early.
Order the corn bread and a prickly pear margarita. Seftel’s 1996 review opened with a bowl of green chile corn bread, moist, thick and crusty with a real chile bite, washed down with a sweet, potent prickly pear margarita. That pairing is still the right way to start. The 1996 prices were $6.95 for the chicken and Oaxaca cheese quesadilla, $17.95 for chicken in pasilla chile sauce, $20.95 for the beef tenderloin and $6.95 for the chocolate taco; expect roughly double today, with listings showing a $14 avocado toast at breakfast. Gayot’s dishes, the peanut-crusted halibut, the chipotle-marinated barbecued salmon, the Hatch green chile chicken and the white chocolate banana cream pie, are the best guide to the current card. Ask what is on the grill that night; the kitchen’s reputation was always built on fish and beef off the fire.
Sit outside. The dining room, which Seftel described as a woodsy Southwestern lodge swirling with regional colors, is pleasant, but the terrace is the point. Gayot calls it one of Phoenix’s best places to watch the sunset, and the view takes in palms, the lake, the ducks and the golf course. In winter a 5 p.m. table gets the light; in summer the 7 p.m. close means you eat in daylight, so switch to Sunday breakfast on the water.
Getting there and who is there. The hotel is on the east side of Scottsdale Road just south of McCormick Parkway, about three miles north of Old Town, with a free lot and valet. The crowd is hotel guests, golfers off the two McCormick Ranch courses, and McCormick Ranch residents on an anniversary. Reservations are suggested in season. The hotel’s other food is the Diamondbacks Bar and Grill, a sports lounge with a copper-top communal table added in the 2014 remodel, and the poolside Coyote Cabana Bar; neither replaces a dinner here. For a louder night afterward, The Vig McCormick is a short drive up the road.
The lake restaurant that outlived three hotel flags
The restaurant’s story is the story of the lake. McCormick Ranch was a cattle and Arabian horse ranch until Kaiser-Aetna bought it in 1970 and laid out one of the Valley’s first master-planned communities, with Camelback Lake dug as its centerpiece. The Inn at McCormick Ranch opened on the shore in the summer of 1975, a garden hotel with villas and a small beach, and the Scottsdale Conference Resort followed across the water in 1976. For fifty years the two have faced each other, and Piñon Grill has been the smaller hotel’s answer to the bigger one’s dining rooms, from the tuxedoed Palm Court era through Kitchen West and today’s La Fogata.
The press trail begins in the 1990s. Seftel’s 1996 review is the only full critique we found, and it is unusually candid: a Best of Phoenix years earlier, management letting standards slide, a spring 1996 meal so bad the critic wondered how the perpetrators could look at themselves in the mirror, then the return of Farn Boggie and a November verdict that the kitchen was firing bullets, not blanks. At that point the hotel was the Inn at Regal McCormick Ranch; a dinner menu from about 2000 to 2005, labeled simply Inn at McCormick Ranch, survives in the Johnson & Wales Culinary Arts Museum, and an undated trade listing names Gary Mlinarich as executive chef and Brian Poe as chef de cuisine, with pecan and pistachio dusted ahi and cilantro-marinated tenderloin.
Millennium Hotels took the property through a six-month renovation and reopened it as The McCormick Scottsdale in October 2014, promising innovative Sonoran cuisine at Piñon Grill. Since then the restaurant has settled into a hotel rhythm: breakfast for guests, sunset dinners for couples, private rooms for small groups. Tripadvisor’s 137 reviews average 4.3 of 5, with the praise going to the patio and the service and the complaints to breakfast and the occasional bland plate. What the record does not say is who cooks now, when the restaurant first took its name, or when the hours shrank to five days and a 7 p.m. close; the hotel’s own material is silent on all three.
Honest assessment: Piñon Grill has never been a reason to drive across the Valley, and in its weak years it was not even a reason to leave the hotel. Its strength is geographic. Scottsdale has few restaurants on open water, and this is the most accessible of them, with a terrace that Gayot, New Times and three decades of guests all describe the same way. Go for the lake, order the corn bread and the margarita, keep expectations at hotel level, and time it for the light.