What it’s actually like
There is nothing to see, and that is the point of the story. Lincoln Village is a low strip of storefronts on the east side of Scottsdale Road a few hundred yards south of Lincoln Drive — a parking lot, a row of doors, a sign. It sits in the most expensive retail corridor in the Valley, between the towers of the Borgata and the bell tower of Hilton Village, with the Andaz a few hundred yards farther south, and it looks like it belongs in any suburb in America.
For twenty-seven years, though, one of those doors was Rancho Pinot, Chrysa Robertson’s kitschy-chic dining room where Arizona farmers had a champion before the city knew it needed one. For seven of those years the door next to it was Restaurant Hapa, where James McDevitt cooked well enough to be named a Food & Wine Best New Chef and to draw James Beard nominations to a strip center. Lincoln Village is Scottsdale’s standing lesson that the best rooms are often in the plainest buildings, because plain buildings have rents a chef can afford.
Today it is what it always was underneath: a neighborhood center for the resort corridor and the Paradise Valley border, with salons, services and a few small shops, and restaurant spaces that have turned over since the great rooms closed.
The stores worth the walk
The roster is the corridor’s daily-needs mix — a salon, a spa, a dry cleaner, professional offices, a boutique that changes every few years — and it turns over on the normal cycle, so any list here is dated on arrival. The honest local read is that you come to Lincoln Village for a specific appointment or a specific meal and not to browse; the browsing corridor is a few minutes north at Hilton Village and a mile south at the Borgata’s courtyard.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
Parking is a surface lot in front of the doors and almost never full, with a signalized exit onto Scottsdale Road — which makes it, quietly, the easiest place to leave a car in a stretch of road where the resort and restaurant lots jam on cool-season weekends. From the Lincoln Drive resorts it is under five minutes. From Old Town, ten minutes north.
Hours are neighborhood-center hours: daytime for the services, evenings for whatever restaurant currently holds the corner. In summer the corridor goes quiet and the lot is the shadiest place to park on the whole road.
Eat while you’re there
The ghosts first, because they are why the page exists. Rancho Pinot ran here from 1994 until May 2021, and Restaurant Hapa from 1998 to 2005; both have full guides. For what is open now: Weft & Warp at the Andaz is a five-minute walk south and the natural heir to Rancho Pinot’s Arizona-sourced instincts. Veneto Trattoria at Hilton Village is the old-guard Italian room a few minutes north, Fleming’s and Fogo de Chão hold down the Hilton corner for a big night, and Blanco Cocina + Cantina next door is the Borgata’s second act.
How it got here
The corner of Scottsdale Road and Lincoln Drive was the frontier between two Scottsdales in the 1980s: the resort city rising along Lincoln — the Camelback Inn’s expansions, the Hilton, the Registry, the Cottonwoods — and the Paradise Valley estates across the road that wanted the resorts’ restaurants without the resorts’ crowds. Every corner along that stretch got a shopping center to serve the traffic, and most of them dressed up for the job. Hilton Village got a bell tower. The Borgata got San Gimignano. Lincoln Village got a parking lot and a row of doors.
That plainness turned out to be its gift. When Chrysa Robertson went looking for a room in 1994 for a bistro built around Arizona produce — an idea with no market yet and no margin for a fancy address — a strip-center space on the corridor was what she could afford, and Rancho Pinot’s mismatched Western kitsch made a virtue of the ordinary box. Four years later James and Stacey McDevitt opened Restaurant Hapa next door with the same calculation, and for seven years in the late 1990s and early 2000s the two rooms gave Lincoln Village a dining reputation that outshone every resort on the road.
Hapa closed in 2005 when the McDevitts moved on; Rancho Pinot held out through the recession, the farm-to-table boom that finally caught up with it, and the pandemic year before closing in May 2021. The corridor mourned it the way it had mourned Mancuso’s at the Borgata, and for the same reason: an institution had turned out to be a person, and the person was done.
The center itself never changed. It was a plain neighborhood strip before Rancho Pinot and it is one after, which is the quiet moral of the corridor: the buildings with the towers are the ones that struggled, and the building nobody photographed is the one that held the food.