The McCormick Ranch Lake Sat Empty For Decades. This Fall, Three Kitchens Show Up At Once.

Matt Carter has lived in McCormick Ranch for seventeen years. For most of them, he drove past the same stretch of Hayden Road wishing someone would build something simple there. Not another destination restaurant with a wait list and a wine list the size of a phone book. Just a place to grab coffee before work and dinner after it, without leaving the neighborhood. This November, he's building it himself. Carter, half of the partnership behind Zinc Bistro, The Mission and Fat Ox, is opening Dash at 9619 N. Hayden Road, an all-day spot he describes as being for the years he spent "wishing our community had a real neighborhood joint."

Carter's timing is not a coincidence. Two blocks away and across the water, a fifty-year-old office building is being gutted for the same reason. Vecina, the Arcadia restaurant with a James Beard nomination on its résumé, just opened a second location three times the size of the original, with a patio that looks straight out over McCormick Lake. And the building that once housed the neighborhood's only real waterfront restaurant, closed for a year before anyone touched it, broke ground earlier this week on a $70 million reinvention that will eventually put three more kitchens on that same shoreline.

Three separate operators, three separate timelines, one shared read on the neighborhood: McCormick Ranch has had water for fifty years and almost nothing built to face it.

The Water Was Always There. The Dining Wasn't.

McCormick Ranch was platted in the 1970s around lakes, greenbelt paths and two golf courses, which is still the pitch every real estate listing leads with. The community holds seven man-made lakes across roughly 130 acres, more than 25 miles of paved paths threading through it, and the Palm and Pine courses at McCormick Ranch Golf Club sitting right in the middle. What that inventory has never included, in any real way, is a table where you can eat with the water in front of you.

The one exception sat at 7501 E. McCormick Parkway, where a Chart House operated from 1984 until it closed last year. For most of the three decades before that closure, the building around it functioned as the headquarters of Forever Living Products, which owned the 100,000-square-foot property for nearly 30 years. A waterfront restaurant existed on this shoreline. It just spent most of its life boxed in by a corporate office park that wasn't built to send foot traffic toward the water.

That's the gap three different projects are now closing at the same time, for reasons that have nothing to do with each other.

What's Open Right Now: Vecina's Second Location

Vecina opened its McCormick Ranch location on September 18 at 8300 N. Hayden Road, taking over the former Z'Tejas space on the northwest corner of Hayden and Via de Ventura. The new dining room is close to three times the size of the original Arcadia restaurant that earned Vecina a James Beard nomination for Best New Restaurant in 2020. The extra square footage bought a private dining room, a mezzanine and a lakeside patio, plus a bigger kitchen that lets chef James Fox add catering and, eventually, a lunch menu that hasn't launched yet.

The menu that's carrying over is the one that built Vecina's following in Arcadia: the carne asada-marinated karaage finished with aji amarillo sauce, and Faroe Island salmon tacos with yuzu kosho aioli and citrus. A mural by Phoenix artist Tato Caraveo, painted as a nod to the original Arcadia wall, frames the cocktail bar. Fox says the new location's neighborhood feel reminded him of home from the moment he walked in: "It kind of feels like Arcadia."

Right now, that's dinner and happy hour only, reservations through Vecina's own site. Lunch and brunch service is coming, but no date has been set.

What's Coming By Thanksgiving: Dash

Carter and business partner Brian Raab have run their trio of Scottsdale restaurants for more than 20 years without adding a new concept. Dash breaks that streak, and it's built to be the opposite of what they're known for. Instead of a dinner destination, it's coffee and pastries in the morning, sandwiches and Roman-style pizza through the day, Portuguese-style charcoal chicken at night, and soft serve to close it out. There's also a mushroom cola on the menu, which is exactly the kind of small, odd choice a restaurant makes when it's built for people who'll be back on a Tuesday, not just people celebrating an anniversary.

The dining room holds just 12 seats, with another 40 on the patio, plus online ordering and dedicated curbside pickup for anyone who wants the food without the sit-down. The address is 9619 N. Hayden Road, Suite 101, near Hayden and Mountain View roads, and the target opening is November.

"I've been dreaming of this concept for 10 years, driving past this exact space several times a week wishing our community had a real neighborhood joint."

The Bigger Build: Lakefront at Scottsdale

The largest piece of this fall's shift isn't open yet and won't be for a while. Diversified Partners closed on the $25.5 million acquisition of the old Forever Corporate Plaza site in late May, and interior demolition began on September 24, the same week the developer held a groundbreaking ceremony attended by residents, city officials and business owners. The firm is putting $70 million into the redevelopment, which it's calling The Lakefront at Scottsdale, with a design brief CEO Walt Brown Jr. has described as "modern Santa Barbara."

Three restaurant and cafe tenants were announced at the groundbreaking: La La Land Kind Cafe, V Modern Italian, and Sushisamba. Around them, the plan calls for boutique retail, a med spa, a salon, and yoga and pilates studios along the water's edge, plus Class A office space that keeps Forever Living Products as an anchor tenant in the building it's occupied for decades. Brown framed the ambition plainly: this project is "putting the heartbeat in the heart of Scottsdale."

Sherri Mayhew, who lives across the street from the site, put it in terms that matter more to someone who'll actually use the place: she's looking forward to being able to "walk across the street and have coffee, restaurants and then look at the view to Camelback Mountain." The first phase is expected to be finished next fall.

What This Actually Changes This Fall

If you want dinner on the water tonight, Vecina is already taking reservations and the patio is the draw. If you want the kind of place you can walk into in gym clothes for a coffee before the school run, that's what Carter is building at Dash, and it won't be ready until closer to Thanksgiving. The Lakefront won't put a single new table by the water this year. What it will do, starting now, is put a construction fence and a demolition crew on a shoreline that's been quiet for a year, with a fall 2027 target for the first phase to open.

None of these three projects were planned around each other. A chef who's lived here 17 years finally built the neighborhood spot he wanted. A restaurant group from Arcadia found a bigger building and a lake view. A developer bought an aging office park because the office market had cooled and the water hadn't gone anywhere. What connects them is simpler than a trend: McCormick Ranch had the lakes, the paths and the golf courses for fifty years, and almost none of it ever came with a place to sit down and look at the water while you ate. This fall, that changes three separate times, for three separate reasons, within about sixty days of each other.

If you're the kind of person who watches a shoreline change and wonders what it means for the block you live on, that's a conversation worth having before the fences come down. Jonny West Real Estate keeps a close eye on exactly this kind of shift in McCormick Ranch. Reach out to schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready to talk about what's happening on your stretch of the lake.