For most of its history, McCormick Ranch treated its water as a backyard amenity. The retail lived on Scottsdale Road and Hayden. The lakes were interior. You walked to them, you didn't dine on them.
That is changing this year, and faster than most residents realize. Between May and the end of 2026, four separate projects are converting shoreline and water-adjacent parcels into commercial frontage. If you already live inside the Greenbelt loop, the practical result is that some of your best new dinner options will be a bike ride away instead of a car trip up to Kierland or down to Old Town.
The 2026 scorecard, in order of what opens first
- May 5, 2026 — Starfish Scottsdale opens at 8390 E. Vía de Ventura
- June 2026 — Diversified Partners breaks ground on Lakefront at Scottsdale, 7501 E. McCormick Parkway
- Fall 2026 — Prime Steak Concepts opens a new Mastro brothers concept on the former Chart House site
- Already reopened — Scottsdale Resort at McCormick Ranch, following a full pool, lobby bar, and restaurant rebuild by PHX Architecture
Those are four line items in eight months, all clustered inside the same square mile of shoreline. That is not a coincidence.
Starfish is the first test of the Vía de Ventura corridor
The May 5 debut of Starfish Scottsdale matters less for the menu than for the address. The restaurant is scheduled to debut on May 5, 2026, at 8390 East Vía de Ventura, filling roughly 5,200 square feet with indoor seating and a sizable patio. That footprint splits approximately 3,800 square feet indoors and a 1,400-sq.-ft. patio, which is the tell. Patios of that size only pencil out on this stretch if operators expect walk-in and bike-in traffic, not just valet.
Starfish Scottsdale marks Starfish Hospitality Group's first restaurant outside California, and the menu leans on more than 70 shareable plates pulling from Thailand, Korea, Vietnam, China and Japan, including Lobster Macadamia Rolls, BBQ Pork Buns and Thai Curry Chicken. Practical hours for a resident planning a Tuesday: 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, with a daily happy hour from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.
If you're on the path near Lake Marguerite, this is the closest new full-service opening you'll have this summer.
The office-to-lakefront swap at 7501 is the bigger structural change
Starfish is one restaurant. Lakefront at Scottsdale is a real estate thesis.
Diversified Partners is transforming an aging office property in McCormick Ranch into a compact lakefront shopping and dining hub called Lakefront at Scottsdale, focused on the water-facing site at 7501 E. McCormick Parkway, where the developer aims to swap out office space for restaurants and boutique retail along the shoreline. The project is expected to feature four restaurants and boutique retail, effectively converting the existing office site into a lakefront destination for shoppers and diners. Groundbreaking is currently targeted for June 2026.
Read that carefully. A commercial parcel that has been generating office-tenant rent for decades is being reprogrammed to face the water. The developer is betting the shoreline itself is the leaseable feature. That is a very different assumption than the one McCormick Ranch was built on in 1972, when the lake system and greenbelt were designed as a water drainage system that in conjunction with the Indian Bend Wash is equipped to handle a 100-year flood.
Drainage infrastructure becoming a leasing feature is exactly the kind of quiet re-rating that shifts how nearby homes are valued over a five to ten year horizon.
If the Vía de Ventura corridor and the McCormick Parkway shoreline both start pulling their own dinner traffic, "walking distance to the lake" stops meaning "walking distance to a view" and starts meaning "walking distance to a table."
Chart House gets a Mastro replacement, not a chain replacement
The third piece is the one long-time residents will care about most. Chart House, a longtime Scottsdale staple since 1984, has permanently closed. The site is being taken over by Prime Steak Concepts, the group behind the Mastro name. The new restaurant is expected to open in Fall 2026.
What matters here is who is stepping in. In the group's own statement about the project, Jeff Mastro said "My brother Mike and I grew up just a few blocks away in McCormick Ranch, and this is the perfect place for us to do something very special that fits this iconic location." That is a local operator returning to a site they grew up near, not a Vegas import testing the market. The pricing tier is likely to hold, and the reservation calendar is likely to fill from the neighborhood before it fills from the Biltmore or Silverleaf.
For a resident, that translates to one thing worth planning around: get on their waitlist early.
The resort quietly went first
The Scottsdale Resort at McCormick Ranch is the update most residents have already driven past without registering how deep the changes went. Per the project team at PHX Architecture, renovation enhancements feature notable upgrades to the entry drive landscaping and event lawn features, courtyard and guest amenities, a new lobby bar, a new restaurant featuring a display kitchen as well as renovations of the guestrooms.
The bigger move was the water. The crowning jewel of the renovations features a complete removal of the entire existing pool and pool patio, replaced with a new pool and pool patio, a new outdoor pool bar with bar-height seating, bistro lighting, and TVs, and a pedestrian bridge spanning over the pool with a water feature. A property that was previously a conference destination has been rebuilt around a resort axis. That is another entry in the same pattern: water as the primary organizing element, not the secondary one.
The Greenbelt is the reason any of this works
None of these four projects would be building this way if the pedestrian and bike network weren't already there. McCormick Ranch was designed with internal paths that link directly to Scottsdale's 11-mile Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt, creating an easy, car-light way to reach parks, lakes, and nearby destinations, and the community itself carries more than 25 miles of bicycle paths, public tennis courts, 130 acres of man-made lakes.
Practical routes for the new openings, if you're planning around them:
- From the northern Greenbelt access at Mountain View Park, Starfish on Vía de Ventura is a straight southern run on the path system.
- From Lake Marguerite, the 7501 E. McCormick Parkway parcel sits directly on the shoreline you already circle on evening walks.
- The former Chart House site is the closest of the four to the golf course loop, which makes it the natural post-round option once Prime Steak Concepts opens.
If you fish the lakes, none of this changes the rules. All lakes are catch and release only and you must have a fishing permit from the McCormick Ranch Property Owner's Association. The commercial edge is being rewritten. The water use isn't.
What it means if you already own here
The point of tracking this in one place isn't to hand you a dining calendar. It's to make one observation about your own address.
For fifty years, homes in McCormick Ranch have been marketed on the interior amenities: the fairway lot, the lake view, the greenbelt-adjacent cul-de-sac. Starting this year, the exterior edge of the community is finally being built with the same care. Lakefront at Scottsdale is programming four sit-down operators onto a shoreline that used to hold a beige office building. Starfish is putting a 1,400 square-foot patio on a corridor that residents used to drive past. The Mastro brothers are anchoring the golf-club-adjacent end.
If you have been in your home for a decade, the walking radius of what your address actually reaches is materially larger in December 2026 than it was in January. That is the kind of quiet shift that shows up later in appraisal comps, not in this week's MLS data.
When you're ready to talk about your address specifically
If you own in McCormick Ranch and you're curious how these openings, the reprogrammed 7501 parcel, and the resort's rebuild interact with your specific block, we're happy to walk it with you. The team at Sacha Blanchet Fine Homes works this neighborhood at the street level, and we can tell you which subdivisions gain the most from the Vía de Ventura and McCormick Parkway shifts, and which are far enough from the new frontage that the change is aesthetic rather than economic. Request a Free Consultation or Home Valuation to start the conversation.
