What is Rita’s Kitchen?
Rita’s Kitchen is the everyday restaurant of the JW Marriott Camelback Inn, the resort at 5402 E Lincoln Drive that has anchored the Paradise Valley side of the Camelback Corridor since December 15, 1936. The resort now markets it as Rita’s Cantina & Bar, a name it also used on Experience Scottsdale’s listing, but the room, the menu and the phone number are the same, and the regulars still call it Rita’s.
It is the room where the Inn keeps its oldest walls. When Marriott finished an 18-month, $45 million renewal of the property in October 2008, it had masons reclaim the resort’s original adobe brick by brick and rebuild it with 1930s methods, and Rita’s Kitchen was relaunched inside those original adobe walls, with reclaimed wood floors, beamed ceilings, stone and copper, and sliding glass doors that open onto The Courtyard. The room seats up to 80 inside, and the large stone patio looks at Mummy Mountain. The same project opened BLT Steak in the old Chaparral Room and the R Bar next to Rita’s.
The food was described at the relaunch as simple, fresh Southwestern cooking with Mexican influences, and that has held. The 2008 specialties were huevos rancheros, chicken enchiladas and flat iron steak, built on house-made corn tortillas, organic lettuces and herbs from the resort’s own garden; today’s menu lists chicken enchiladas rojas with Cotija and a beet and goat cheese salad with Arizona pecans. It serves breakfast, lunch and dinner daily from 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., with the bar open until midnight and live music Thursday through Saturday.
Who it is for: resort guests at breakfast, Paradise Valley neighbors at happy hour, and families who want the Camelback Inn without the Lincoln Steakhouse check. Phoenix New Times, which is not generous to resort dining rooms, has given it Best Red Sangria (2010 and 2013), Best Restaurant for Kids (2011) and Best Guacamole (2012), each time for something eaten on the patio. Our verdict: the food is honest rather than ambitious, and the patio, the sangria and the adobe make it the best casual table on Lincoln Drive.
How to eat at Rita’s Kitchen
Order the patio set. The guacamole is made tableside from avocados, jalapeños and lime, adjusted to your taste; New Times called it pricey and worth it in 2012. Rita’s red sangria is the house drink, red wine with apples, grapes, vanilla and cinnamon, and the paper’s writers admitted in 2013 that they had the recipe and still could not reproduce it. In warm months the golden gazpacho, yellow tomatoes and peppers with a hot-sauce kick, was number 99 on New Times’ 2011 list of 100 favorite dishes; it is a resort recipe that also shows up at the spa pool. A jalapeño margarita was $12 in 2015.
Then eat Southwestern. Breakfast is the meal the room was built for: huevos rancheros, the 2008 signature, from 6:30 a.m. At dinner the enchiladas rojas and the flat iron steak are the long-running plates, and Experience Scottsdale lists entrées at $31 to $40. The desserts at the relaunch were Mexican chocolate fondue, churros and an Indian peach cobbler; ask what survives. Rita’s also serves the Sunday brunch the Inn has run for decades, by the resort’s account a tradition of more than 30 years when it returned here in 2008 as a buffet with carving stations, sushi, a raw bar and unlimited Champagne. The current dining page does not list it, so confirm by phone; our brunch guide has the alternatives.
Happy hour is in the lounge. New Times graded it a B-minus in July 2016: 3 to 6 p.m. daily in the R Bar, with the Cuervo Gold house margarita at $6 (from $10), the red sangria at $7, a Desert Pear Cosmo of Absolut Pear, Cointreau and prickly pear at $7, Four Peaks and Fat Tire drafts at $5, and plates at $6 to $10, including a grilled cheese with Gruyère and bacon, filet sliders, Hellfire wings and chips with guacamole. The reviewer’s advice holds: order the margarita and sit outside, because the interior is “comfortable, but uninspiring” while the patio has fire pits, bistro lights and the mountain. The resort now lists happy hour specials without times; see the happy hour guide.
Timing. Live music runs Thursday through Saturday and in 2016 started at 6 p.m., when the lounge turns loud. Conventions are the other variable: the Inn has a 20,000-square-foot ballroom, and when it is full, Rita’s bar fills with name tags. Weekday lunch and weekend breakfast are the quiet services. The one posted rule is no bathing suits.
Getting there. The Inn is on Lincoln Drive between Tatum Boulevard and Scottsdale Road; turn in at the main entrance and park in the self-park lot or use valet, then walk through the lobby to The Courtyard. Reservations are on OpenTable or at (480) 948-1700. Lincoln Steakhouse, Tavern 37 and Hoppin’ Jacks at the Jackrabbit Pool are a few minutes’ walk.
The casual room at the Inn that taught Scottsdale to vacation
The Camelback Inn was built by Jack Stewart with John C. Lincoln’s money and land, and when it opened in 1936 its dining was a single room for 77 guests. The formal dining tradition came later: the Chaparral Room, after Marriott bought the Inn in 1967, served chateaubriand and soufflés for four decades. The casual side is harder to trace. By March 2005 the Inn was listing Rita’s Taqueria & Bar alongside The Navajo and the Chaparral, but we found no record of when the Rita’s name first appeared; the resort’s own material calls the current room a new classic.
The 2008 renewal is the real opening. Marriott spent $45 million over 18 months on a 71-year-old property, with Hill Glazier Architects, and general manager Ralph Scatena described the project as opening the resort to its desert surroundings while preserving its history. The Chaparral Room became Laurent Tourondel’s BLT Steak, the first celebrity-chef import on this side of Camelback Mountain; the courtyard got native plants, a Paolo Soleri wind chime and an herb garden that new beverage director Trudy Thomas designed for the R Bar’s martinis. Rita’s Kitchen was the modest piece of that plan, and the only one of the resort’s half-dozen venues where you sit against the original adobe.
It then did something resort restaurants rarely do, which is win awards for small things. Between 2010 and 2013 New Times gave it Best Red Sangria twice, listed its gazpacho, named it the best place in the Valley to bring children, with the pool and Camelback views as the argument, and crowned its tableside guacamole. None of that is destination cooking, and the paper said so, calling the food “not bad” and “pretty good” while raving about the drinks and the patio; the 2016 B-minus happy hour grade made the same point.
The neighbors changed around it. BLT closed in September 2016 and became Lincoln, first a farm-to-table bistro and then a JW Steakhouse with a Josper oven, and the Inn has since added Tavern 37 and the Ora Café. Rita’s picked up the Cantina & Bar name and kept its 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. schedule. For a property that has been through a national controversy, a corporate purchase and several rebrands since the 1930s, the casual room has been the stable part.
Honest assessment: Rita’s Kitchen is a good resort restaurant and not a great one, and it has never pretended otherwise. The cooking is reliable Southwestern comfort food at resort prices, the enchiladas and huevos rancheros are worth ordering, and the service runs on Marriott’s systems rather than a chef’s personality. What you are paying for is the setting, and the setting is genuinely rare: 1936 adobe, a stone patio under Mummy Mountain, and a sangria good enough that the city’s toughest critics gave up trying to copy it. Go at sunset, sit outside, and you will understand why the Camelback Inn’s slogan is Where Time Stands Still.