The Restaurant News Near Paradise Valley Country Club Isn't the Restaurant News You've Been Hearing

If you live inside the gates near Paradise Valley Country Club and someone mentioned this year's big restaurant wave, there's a decent chance they meant the wrong one. Arizona has two places going by "PV" right now, and only one of them is a short drive from the clubhouse.

Paradise Valley Country Club sits on Tatum Boulevard just north of Lincoln Drive, inside the actual Town of Paradise Valley, a member-owned club that has hosted the same neighborhood since 1953. That's the frame for everything below. The restaurant openings, the resort renovation, the stalled luxury project a mile away on Lincoln, all of it gets measured against that address, not against a headline that happens to share the town's name.

Two Places, One Name

The confusion is understandable. The branded redevelopment of the old Paradise Valley Mall, at Cactus Road and Tatum Boulevard, calls itself "PV." It's a $2 billion project from RED Development, and it's genuinely producing news: new restaurants, a fitness club, a relocated grocery store. But that redevelopment sits in Phoenix, not the Town of Paradise Valley, several miles north of the club on the same street name but a different jurisdiction entirely.

Here's the split, plainly:

If your evening plan involves driving ten minutes rather than twenty-five, one of these columns matters and the other doesn't.

What's Actually Close to the Club

The real news for anyone living near PVCC opened quietly at the end of 2025. Hecho Libre, the signature restaurant inside what's now Kimpton Miralina Resort & Villas, began serving customers before the resort's formal rebrand even launched, according to KTAR's coverage at the time. The kitchen belongs to Wes Avila, a chef recognized by both the James Beard Awards and the Michelin Guide for his work in Los Angeles, and the menu leans into Baja coastal cooking layered with Sonoran Desert ingredients. Executive Chef Stephen Jones, a James Beard semifinalist in his own right, runs the day-to-day kitchen across the property.

The wider resort, a $42 million reimagining of the old Scottsdale Plaza Resort, opened officially in January 2026 with 224 guestrooms and 36 casitas as its first phase, with more villas and residences arriving later in the year. That puts a chef-driven restaurant with real culinary credentials inside a property most PVCC residents could reach faster than they could reach the freeway.

The next phase is worth watching too. Miralina's operators are moving into a second stage of renovation that will add Katsuya, a modern Japanese concept making its first appearance anywhere in Arizona, expected sometime between late 2026 and early 2027. Pair that with Hecho Libre already running, and the resort becomes one of the only properties in the actual Town of Paradise Valley with two distinct, chef-led restaurants under one roof rather than a single hotel dining room.

None of this requires driving toward Phoenix. It requires driving toward Lincoln Drive, the same direction the club already faces.

The Project That Was Supposed to Anchor This Corridor

A mile from the clubhouse, on Lincoln Drive, sits the reason this corridor was expected to change even faster than it has. The Ritz-Carlton at The Palmeraie has been planned for a 20-acre site overlooking Camelback Mountain for years, with a resort, branded villas, and custom estate homes built around it. In 2024, developers announced Mott 32, a well-known Cantonese restaurant concept, as the first of three planned dining rooms at the resort, the kind of signing that suggested a fast timeline.

That timeline slipped. The project's developer, Five Star Development, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in November 2025, which paused construction on the hotel and resort itself. Bankruptcy court financing approved in February 2026 released roughly $32 million to keep the project moving, with the bulk of it earmarked specifically for finishing the residential villas rather than the hotel. Some villa buyers had already closed and moved in before the filing. But current project tracking puts full completion at 2027, not this year.

That matters for how you read the neighborhood right now. The Ritz-Carlton is genuinely close to PVCC, close enough that its eventual opening will change the corridor in a way the Phoenix "PV" redevelopment never will for this address. It just isn't open yet, and won't be for at least another year.

What's Happening a Few Miles North, and Why It Doesn't Touch Your Tuesday

Meanwhile, the Phoenix side of the map has kept moving on its own schedule, which is exactly why the confusion persists. Velvet Taco opened its second Arizona location at the redeveloped mall site in March 2026, part of what Phoenix New Times has been tracking as a steady wave of openings since the first tenants arrived there in fall 2024. A new athletic club and more apartment construction have followed. Harry & Izzy's, an upscale grill making its first appearance outside the Midwest, and Cala, a coastal European concept from a well-known local chef, are both attached to that same Phoenix development and expected sometime in 2026.

All of it is real. None of it is a short drive from Paradise Valley Country Club. The redevelopment sits in a different city, serves a different kind of trip, retail errands and fitness memberships more than a Tuesday dinner reservation, and gets folded into "Paradise Valley" news coverage mostly because RED Development named the project "PV" and reporters, understandably, keep the shorthand.

The Practical Read

If you live near the club and want dinner without much of a drive, Hecho Libre is open now and Katsuya is on the way within the next several months. If you're weighing whether the neighborhood's evening options are actually expanding or just getting louder in headlines, the honest answer is both, depending on which "PV" you mean. And if you've been waiting on the Ritz-Carlton to anchor a real restaurant row on Lincoln Drive, the timeline now points to 2027, not this year.

None of this requires deciding anything about your home. It's simply what changed on your side of town this year, and what didn't, despite what the bigger headline made it sound like.

If you're weighing a move near Paradise Valley Country Club, or wondering how any of this shifts the value of a home already inside that stretch of 85253, that's a longer conversation, and one The Martz Group is glad to have when you're ready. Request a Private Market Consultation to talk through what's actually changing on your street.