Ride the path along Camelback Lake on almost any evening this year and you'll pass the same thing you've been passing for over a year now: a padlocked patio where Camelback Mountain flips itself upside down in the water and nobody sits there to see it. The restaurant that used to occupy that spot, Chart House, served its last dinner on June 30, 2025, after a 41-year run that started in 1984. Its closing left McCormick Ranch's best-known lake without a single restaurant that put you on the water instead of just near it.
That gap is closing now, from three directions that were not planned together but are landing in the same twelve months.
The Water Has Always Been a View, Not a Reservation
McCormick Ranch was built starting in the 1970s across roughly seven square miles of former ranchland, and its lakes were part of the engineering from the start. They double as drainage infrastructure for the master-planned community, which is a less romantic origin story than most residents picture when they look out at them. For most of the neighborhood's history, that has been the actual role of the water: a view from a patio home, a hazard on the golf course, a backdrop for a bike ride along the Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt. Fishing has always been allowed, under McCormick Ranch Property Owners' Association permits and catch-and-release rules, on Camelback Lake, Lake Margherite, Santa Fe Lake, Lake Nino, and Lake Angela. Swimming has never been allowed on any of them.
The restaurants clustered near the water, at centers like The Village and Mercado Del Lago, have mostly faced their own parking lots rather than the shoreline. Chart House was the outlier, the one place in the neighborhood where you could actually eat with the lake in front of you instead of somewhere off to the side. When it closed, the count of true lakefront restaurant seats in McCormick Ranch went from one to zero.
That is the part worth sitting with before the news of new openings, because it explains why three unconnected developers are all betting on the same stretch of water at the same time.
Three Projects, One Twelve-Month Window
None of these three are collaborating with each other. They are separate companies that independently concluded the same corner of Scottsdale was ready for lakefront dining that had never really existed here before.
| Project | What's actually happening | Timing residents can track |
|---|---|---|
| Starfish Scottsdale | Coastal Asian shareables menu and patio seating at the corner of Hayden and Via de Ventura | Open since May 5, 2026 |
| The Lakefront at Scottsdale | Diversified Partners redevelopment of the old Forever Corporate Plaza office park into restaurants, retail, and a small marina with Duffy boat rentals | Groundbreaking set for September 24, 2026 |
| New concept from Prime Steak Concepts | Ground-up rebuild on the former Chart House site on Camelback Lake, led by the Mastro family | Targeted for fall 2026 |
Starfish is already serving, with a menu pulling from Thailand, Korea, Vietnam, China, and Japan and more than 70 shareable dishes, the first Arizona location for a hospitality group that built its name in Laguna Beach and Newport Beach. The Lakefront project is the bigger structural bet: Diversified Partners is converting a roughly 100,000-square-foot, 1978-era office property at 7501 E. McCormick Parkway, with groundbreaking now confirmed for September 24. Three tenants have been named so far: La La Land Kind Cafe, V Modern Italian, and SUSHISAMBA. And on the Chart House parcel itself, Prime Steak Concepts, run by brothers Michael and Jeffrey Mastro along with their father Dennis and partner Scott Troilo, the team behind Dominick's Steakhouse, Steak 44, and Ocean 44, is building an entirely new restaurant rather than reopening the old one. As of this writing the new concept has not been named publicly, but a fall 2026 opening is the stated target.
Three operators, three separate transactions, one calendar year. The developer behind the Lakefront project has pointed to the math behind that timing: within a three-mile radius of the McCormick Parkway site, the population runs past 56,000 people with average household incomes above $205,000. That is the kind of density and spending power that makes a lakefront restaurant bet look less like a gamble and more like an overdue correction.
What Actually Gets Built on the Water
The Lakefront's restaurant plan calls for four dining spaces ranging from about 5,400 to 10,400 square feet, three of them with patios sized between 3,000 and 4,000 square feet, positioned on the south and west sides of the property so tables face both the lake and Camelback Mountain. The project also includes a small marina with Duffy boat rentals, which is a detail that matters more than it might first appear.
Under current MRPOA rules, boating without a shoreline easement is limited to Camelback Lake and Lake Margherite, restricted to sunrise through sunset, and closed to jet skis, inflatables, and gas-powered engines. A marina concept only makes sense if it is built where boating is already permitted. That the Lakefront's marina plan lines up with the two lakes residents can already legally use suggests this was designed around the neighborhood's actual rulebook, not around a rendering that ignores it.
Meanwhile on the Chart House parcel, the site keeps its water frontage on Camelback Lake, the same lake where boating is already allowed and where the old restaurant built its reputation on lake-and-mountain views for four decades.
What Doesn't Change
The rules governing the lakes themselves are staying exactly as they are. Swimming remains prohibited across all of McCormick Ranch's water. Fishing stays catch-and-release, with artificial lures only and a permit from the property owners' association. Boating stays limited to daylight hours on two lakes, with no gas engines and no jet skis. None of the new restaurant activity changes any of that, because none of it is being built by MRPOA and none of it touches the association's authority over the water itself.
What changes is what sits at the water's edge. For the first time since Chart House opened in 1984, more than one operator is betting that people will come to McCormick Ranch specifically to eat next to the lake rather than near it.
What This Means for a Weekday Evening
If you already walk or ride the Greenbelt path that threads through the neighborhood, past Mountain View Park and along the water toward the Village center, you are about to have actual destinations waiting at the far end of that loop instead of just a nicer stretch of scenery along the way. Starfish is already open for that. The Lakefront breaks ground this month. The Chart House site should have something new by fall.
For fifty-some years the lakes here did their job quietly: they drained the streets, they framed the golf courses, they gave the patio homes something to look at. Watching three separate companies bet real money on the idea that the same water can also fill a restaurant is worth noticing, whether or not you ever set foot in any of them.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own property, or you're simply the kind of person who likes knowing what's changing before the sign goes up, Laura Lee Cahal has been watching this corner of Scottsdale for a long time. Let's Connect.
