On a Tuesday night in May, the northwest corner of Hayden and Via de Ventura filled with a kind of foot traffic that corner hadn't seen in years. The space had cycled through Agave del Scottsdale, then briefly Okay Maguey, then sat waiting. Now it's Starfish, a coastal Asian restaurant with a 1,400-square-foot patio and a menu that pulls from Thailand, Korea, Vietnam, China, and Japan. It opened May 5, and it's the first Arizona location for a hospitality group that had never operated outside California.
One restaurant opening isn't a trend. But look at what's happening a few hundred yards away on McCormick Lake, and a mile south on Camelback Lake, and the picture changes. McCormick Ranch is in the middle of the most concentrated run of restaurant development its shoreline has seen since the lakes were dug. If you already live here, this isn't background noise. It's the thing that decides where you'll actually go for dinner for the next two years.
The Corner That Already Changed First
Starfish is owned by Starfish Hospitality Group, founded in 2011 by husband-and-wife team Gretchen and Archie McConnell, who built a following in California with locations in Laguna Beach and Newport Beach. The Scottsdale outpost fills roughly 5,200 square feet at 8390 East Via de Ventura, split between 3,800 square feet of indoor seating and that patio. The menu runs more than 70 shareable plates, including a lobster macadamia nut sushi roll and Chilean sea bass wrapped in banana leaf with Thai basil green curry. Hours run 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and until 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, with a daily happy hour from 3 to 6.
What matters more than the menu is the location. That corner sits inside the walkable core of McCormick Ranch, close enough to the greenbelt and lake paths that a dinner reservation doesn't require getting in a car. For a neighborhood built around water and pathways, a restaurant you can actually walk to changes the calculus of a weeknight.
Fifty Years of Lakes, Thin on Restaurants
McCormick Ranch has multiple human-made lakes and more than 25 miles of walking and biking paths connecting them, a network that's been drawing residents and cyclists for decades. What it hasn't had, until this year, is much in the way of upscale restaurant space actually sitting on the water. The golf courses came early. The lakes came early. The money followed. The restaurants didn't.
That gap is closing fast, and it's closing on two lakes at once.
What's Rising at 7501 East McCormick Parkway
The bigger of the two projects is happening at the old Forever Corporate Plaza, a 100,000-square-foot office building on McCormick Lake that Forever Living Products has owned for nearly 30 years. Scottsdale-based developer Diversified Partners has closed on the property and is turning it into The Lakefront at Scottsdale, a mixed-use redevelopment designed around a modern Santa Barbara aesthetic. Forever Living will keep its headquarters on site even as the rest of the building changes around it.
The restaurant component alone is four separate spaces, ranging from about 5,400 to 10,400 square feet, with three of them getting patios between 3,000 and 4,000 square feet. That's not a food hall. That's four full restaurants with real outdoor dining, all facing the same shoreline. The retail plan reads like a lifestyle strip built for the people who already live nearby: jewelry, a high-end salon, med spa space, yoga and pilates studios, and boutique suites from 1,200 to 5,500 square feet. There's also a small marina planned with Duffy boat rentals, which would be the first time this stretch of McCormick Lake has offered anything like that.
CEO Walt Brown Jr. described the intent behind the project simply:
"We're building a place where people come to spend time."
Construction is happening in two phases. The first, focused on demolition and the restaurant and retail buildout, is slated to begin in the third quarter of 2026, which is right now. The second phase, covering the remaining retail and office space, is expected to start in early 2027. Within a three-mile radius of the site, more than 56,000 residents have average household incomes above $205,000, which is part of why Diversified Partners is chasing destination-level restaurant operators rather than another neighborhood grill.
If you live near McCormick Parkway, expect fencing and demolition equipment around the old office building through the back half of this year, with the first restaurant patios likely opening sometime after the phase one work wraps.
The Steakhouse Coming Back to Camelback Lake
The second project sits on a different lake in the same neighborhood. Chart House had operated on Camelback Lake since 1984, known for its view of the water and Camelback Mountain as much as for its menu. It closed permanently, and the property was bought by Prime Steak Concepts, the group behind Steak 44, Ocean 44, Dominick's Steakhouse, and Durant's Steakhouse. The four partners behind that group, James Beard-nominated brothers Michael and Jeffrey Mastro, their father Dennis Mastro, and business partner Scott Troilo, are rebuilding the site from the ground up rather than remodeling the existing structure.
Jeff Mastro has talked about the location in personal terms. He and his brother, he said, "grew up just a few blocks away in McCormick Ranch." The new restaurant is targeted to open in fall 2026, built new on a site the family has known since childhood rather than borrowed from a national chain with no connection to the area.
That detail matters for how this project will land locally. A steakhouse group with three other well-known Scottsdale and Phoenix addresses rebuilding on a lake they grew up next to is a different kind of investment than an outside operator testing the market. It suggests they expect this corner of the lake to matter for a long time, not just for one opening season.
What Actually Changes If You Live Here
Put the three projects on a single timeline and the shape of the next 18 months becomes clear:
- Now through late 2026: Starfish is open and operating on Via de Ventura. The Forever Corporate Plaza site on McCormick Lake is in active demolition and early construction for its restaurant and retail phase. The Chart House site on Camelback Lake is under construction toward a fall opening.
- Fall 2026: The rebuilt steakhouse on Camelback Lake is targeted to open, giving the neighborhood back a restaurant it lost, in a new building on the same water.
- Late 2026 into 2027: The first restaurant and retail spaces at The Lakefront at Scottsdale should begin opening as phase one construction finishes, with the marina and Duffy boat rentals following as part of that buildout.
- Early 2027 onward: Phase two construction begins on the remaining retail and office portions of The Lakefront at Scottsdale, meaning some construction activity will continue even after the first restaurants open.
None of this required a single new road or a rezoning fight most residents would have noticed. It's happening inside buildings and parcels that already existed, on lakes that have been part of daily life here for fifty years. What's new is that the water finally has restaurants built to match it, instead of office parks and empty patios that faced the wrong direction.
If you've lived in McCormick Ranch long enough to remember what used to sit in these spaces, this is worth watching in real time rather than reading about after the ribbon cuttings. The McCormick Ranch neighborhood guide and our running list of Scottsdale restaurant openings track these projects as they move, and Karen's Collection keeps close tabs on how changes like this one reshape daily life in the neighborhoods we work in every day. If you're weighing what a shift like this means for your own corner of McCormick Ranch, whether you're staying put or thinking about your next move, Karen's Collection is a call away for a concierge consultation grounded in what's actually happening on the ground here, not what a portal listing says about it.
