What is Toro?
Golf clubhouse restaurants are, as a genre, where cuisine goes to retire — burgers, iceberg wedges, a view doing all the work. Toro by Richard Sandoval is the Valley’s great exception: a legitimate destination restaurant that happens to sit in the TPC Scottsdale clubhouse, its patio staring down the 18th green of the most raucously famous course in golf.
Opened in 2015 and operated by the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess as part of its formidable dining collection, Toro is the pan-Latin arm of Richard Sandoval’s global restaurant empire. The menu runs an unusual double game — Latin grill cooking on one side, sushi and crudo crossovers on the other — spanning the continent’s fire-and-smoke traditions and its coastal raw bars in a single sitting. The bar makes its own contrarian bet: in the heart of tequila country, Toro built a rum program, and the deep list rewards the detour.
Then there’s the setting, which no competitor can replicate. The Stadium Course’s finishing hole spreads out below the patio; the McDowell Mountains handle the backdrop; and one week a year, the ground you’re dining beside becomes the closing stretch of the WM Phoenix Open, the best-attended golf tournament on the planet. A mid-2020s renovation and menu relaunch polished the whole operation for its second decade.
Fifty-one weeks a year, it’s simply one of north Scottsdale’s most scenic serious dinners. The other week, it’s the most coveted address in golf.
Playing Toro’s two menus
Book the sunset. The reservation strategy here is astronomical, not culinary: aim for the hour when the 18th green goes gold and the mountains purple, and request the patio. Arizona does few things better than dusk, and Toro’s western exposure over manicured golf turf is among the finest stages the state gives it. Interior tables keep the view through glass and add the renovated room’s considerable polish; in summer, they’re the only sane choice until the sun quits.
Order across the split. The menu’s pan-Latin range is the point, so build dinner in two movements: start from the coastal side — the sushi-crudo crossovers, ceviches and raw preparations that read like Peru and Japan comparing notes — then shift to the grill, where the fire-and-flavor cooking earns the Toro name. Sharing widely beats individual entrées; the kitchen’s breadth is wasted on a table of solo orders.
Drink the rum. The bar’s rum-first identity is rare in a state that defaults to agave, and the list runs deep enough for education — ask for a flight or let the bartenders match pours to courses. The cocktail program works both traditions anyway, so the tequila loyalists aren’t abandoned.
Know the calendar. January through April is prime everything: weather, light, demand. Phoenix Open week is its own universe — the tournament consumes TPC Scottsdale and normal dining logic with it, so don’t plan a casual dinner then; plan around it, or embrace the spectacle on the event’s terms. Summer flips to value season, when locals get renovation-fresh surroundings and softer pricing.
Getting there: the clubhouse sits off Hayden Road at the Princess resort’s edge; parking is straightforward outside tournament season. Non-golfers, to be clear, are the majority of the dining room. No handicap required.
The clubhouse that joined the dining scene
Toro’s existence traces to a piece of 1980s master-planning that shaped everything in its zip code. In 1987, the Scottsdale Princess resort and TPC Scottsdale opened together — a resort with a stadium-golf amphitheater attached, purpose-built for the tournament that became the WM Phoenix Open’s modern circus. For its first few decades, the clubhouse fed golfers the way clubhouses do. The 2015 arrival of Toro marked a different idea: that the address deserved a restaurant people would drive to with no intention of playing.
The choice of Richard Sandoval made it a family affair. The Fairmont had already handed its storied Mexican room, La Hacienda, to Sandoval for reimagining; Toro extended the partnership with a looser, pan-Latin brief — grill smoke, crudo, rum — that complements rather than duplicates its elder sibling. Together with Bourbon Steak and the everyday Ironwood American Kitchen, they form the strongest single-property dining bench in Arizona, and a case study in the resort-as-restaurant-group strategy that now defines high-end Scottsdale hospitality.
Toro also marks how thoroughly the city’s dining map tilted north. The Princess-TPC-Kierland corridor evolved from resort periphery into a self-sustaining dining pole, where rooms like Toro and Mastro’s Ocean Club serve a population that may not see Old Town for months at a stretch. The clubhouse restaurant as neighborhood anchor would have sounded absurd in 1987. It’s simply true now.
Honest assessment: Toro’s hybrid breadth means it occasionally trades depth for range — specialists beat it at pure sushi, pure grill, pure Mexican — and tournament-adjacent weeks warp the entire experience. But no specialist has its view, and few Scottsdale rooms balance spectacle, cooking, and setting this well. The mid-2020s relaunch suggests the Fairmont knows exactly what it has: the rare restaurant where the backdrop is famous and the food still gets top billing.