What is Saguaro Blossom?
Saguaro Blossom is the pool restaurant of the Four Seasons Resort Scottsdale at Troon North, the 210-key resort at 10600 E Crescent Moon Drive that opened in December 1999 on the old Crescent Moon Ranch below Pinnacle Peak. It has 50 seats, all of them outdoors, and it serves from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day: lunch, snacks and cocktails for the people on the chaises around the resort’s three pools.
The menu is what a good pool kitchen should be. The resort’s own description is fresh ceviche, kale salads and burgers, with an ice-cream sandwich for dessert, and it names the seasonal ceviches and the cheeseburger as the signatures. Guests over the years have added fish tacos, a grilled shrimp salad, a desert strawberry salad, a spicy ahi tempura roll, ahi poke, sweet potato fries and a grouper sandwich that one reviewer called pricey at $32 and worth it. A 2015 travel profile singled out the seafood cobb salad. There is a bento-style kids’ lunch, and the bar does a prickly pear margarita with fresh lime and a Sonoran mojito.
Who it is for is the real question, because you cannot simply drive up and eat here. The restaurant sits inside the pool complex, so the room is hotel guests, day-pass buyers and cabana renters, and the food is carried to your chair and charged to your account. That makes Saguaro Blossom the most affordable restaurant at the resort and, at the same time, the one most of Troon and the rest of Scottsdale has never seen.
When it opened is not in the press we could find. An early hotel directory lists Acacia, Crescent Moon and Saguaro Blossom as the resort’s three restaurants, and since Acacia became Talavera in 2008 and Crescent Moon became Proof in 2012, the pool kitchen is now the oldest restaurant name on the property. Our verdict: it is a very good pool lunch, not a dining destination, and the right way to use it is as the reason to spend a shoulder-season weekday on this pool deck.
Using Saguaro Blossom well
Get into the pool first. Hotel guests walk down; everyone else buys access. ResortPass has sold Four Seasons day passes from $125, covering all three pools from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., and cabanas from $225 for two (misted, two chaises, chips and salsa), $275 for a wellness version with cooling eye masks and fresh juice, and $750 or $790 for six, the top tier adding champagne, Osetra caviar and a beach bag. Our guide to resort pools and day passes compares it with the others; the short version is that this is the quietest of the big-name decks, and pool season here runs long because the resort sits higher and cooler than the Valley floor.
Pick the pool, then order to the chair. There are three: a shallow children’s pool, a 6,000-square-foot main pool heated to 80 to 85 degrees, and an adults-only pool joined to it by a negative-edge waterfall, with Pinnacle Peak in view. All are saltwater. Saguaro Blossom’s counter is at the center, but the better move is to flag an attendant and have the ceviche, the fish tacos or the cheeseburger brought to the chaise or the cabana. Attendants also come round with chilled towels, frozen treats, fruit skewers and smoothies at no charge, and on summer weekends the resort has shown family movies poolside after dark.
Timing. The kitchen stops at 5 p.m. and reviewers warn that it means it. Eat by 4, then walk up to Onyx, the lounge beside Talavera, for the sunset behind Pinnacle Peak and a plate of tapas; in some summers the resort has run a Saguaro Blossom Sunset cocktail special from 5 to 7 on Friday and Saturday with a guava spritz, a garden sparkler and a tropical martini, so ask whether it is on. Dinner is Talavera or Proof, both a short walk across the grounds.
Price and crowd. Expect resort pricing for pool food: the $32 grouper sandwich is the marker, and a lunch for two with margaritas runs well past $100 before the pass. The crowd is families at the main pool, couples at the adults’ pool, and golfers back from Troon North next door. Parking is the resort’s lot and valet off Crescent Moon Drive. The whole complex was refurbished at the start of 2018, so the chaises, daybeds and cabana furniture are newer than the 1999 architecture around them.
The pool kitchen that outlasted the dining rooms
The Four Seasons arrived in the far north of Scottsdale at the end of 1999, when the city’s resort boom was pushing past the Boulders into raw desert. It was built on Crescent Moon Ranch, took the ranch’s name for its street and its three-meal restaurant, and opened with Acacia as its fine-dining room, Crescent Moon for everything else, and a pool deck of 188 rooms and 22 suites’ worth of guests to feed. Saguaro Blossom appears in the resort’s listings next to those two original rooms, and that is as close as the record gets to a birthday.
Everything around it has turned over. In November 2007 Phoenix New Times reported that Acacia would be overhauled and renamed Talavera, which opened in late January 2008 under chef Mel Mecinas with the Onyx lounge beside it. In December 2012 Proof, an American Canteen took the Crescent Moon space with a soda fountain at the bar. The pool restaurant kept its name through both changes, and through the January 2018 refurbishment that replaced every chaise, chair and cabana furnishing on the deck. The resort’s fact sheet still lists it plainly: Saguaro Blossom, 50 outdoor seats, no indoor seating, no hours given. The hours, the menu and the cocktails we describe come from the resort’s dining page and from a decade of guest accounts, and we found no chef’s name attached to the pool kitchen in any of them; the summer specials releases credit Proof’s chef Edgar Flores and Talavera’s sommelier, not Saguaro Blossom.
That anonymity is the point. In North Scottsdale the restaurants that get written about are the ones with a chef and a dinner service. Pool restaurants get judged by whether the ceviche arrives cold and the burger arrives at the right chair, and by that measure Saguaro Blossom has a long record of guests calling it the resort’s best value. The day pass economy of the 2020s has made it reachable for locals for the first time, which is why it belongs in a guide at all.
Honest assessment: this is the best pool lunch in the north end of the city and nothing more. The food is simple and well made, the setting below Pinnacle Peak is the finest of any Scottsdale pool deck, and the price is steep for what is on the plate because the price is really for the chair. Buy the pass on a quiet weekday in April or October, eat early, and let Onyx handle the sunset. For a resort meal worth driving to, the answers are Talavera next door and, down the hill, the rooms of Pinnacle Peak and Troon.