Most resort restaurants coast on the view and hope nobody looks too hard at the plate. Hearth ‘61, the dining room of the rebuilt Mountain Shadows, has Camelback filling its floor-to-ceiling windows and Charles Wiley running the open kitchen, so the food holds up its end. The ‘61 is the year Paradise Valley incorporated, in case the trivia comes up.
The menu moves with the seasons, so order the way the kitchen thinks: something from the hearth, something green, and the dish the server is quietly excited about.
When to go: dinner about 45 minutes before sunset, October through April. The real local move is breakfast — same mountain, same standards, none of the Old Town brunch queue.