The Edit · Dining · Paradise Valley
Paradise Valley doesn't do restaurant rows. It's a town of homes, mountains, and resorts — which is exactly why its two great dining rooms feel like secrets: both tucked into residential streets, both older than the town itself, and both with origin stories no restaurant group could invent. If you want to understand why people fall for this place, start with dinner.
The First Table
Start with the name. Lon Megargee was an orphaned Philadelphia kid who hopped a train west to become a cowboy — and became, instead, Arizona's most celebrated cowboy artist, painting the murals for the State Capitol at thirty. In 1935 he bought land beneath Camelback Mountain and built himself a hacienda with no blueprints at all: adobe walls, beams salvaged from an abandoned mine, exteriors aged with poured oil and ash. He called it Casa Hermosa — beautiful house — ran it as a guest ranch, hosted legendary poker nights, and dug an escape tunnel to the stables for when the law came knocking.
Today that hand-built studio is the dining room. LON's at the Hermosa Inn serves globally inspired, wood-fired Arizona cooking under Megargee's hand-hewn beams, with his original paintings on the walls — the inn holds one of the largest collections of his work anywhere — and a patio that People and OpenTable put among the 50 most beautiful restaurant settings in America, with Camelback framed beyond the fountain. Come at dusk. Afterward, take a drink at LON's Last Drop, the little western bar named for his most famous painting — or, if you're celebrating, book the candlelit wine cellar beneath the restaurant, vaulted in reclaimed brick and kept at a steady 57 degrees.
Paradise Valley's best rooms aren't restaurants that added history. They're history that learned to cook.
The Second Table
A few minutes east on Lincoln Drive sits the other institution, with an origin just as unlikely. In 1934, John C. Lincoln — the man building the Camelback Inn — put up a one-room schoolhouse for girls on this land so his daughter could study nearby. Three years later it became something else entirely: the Camelback Inn didn't serve alcohol, so thirsty guests walked a dirt path across the desert to the old schoolhouse, which the Gruber family had reopened as a lodge and bar. El Chorro was born as, quite literally, the neighborhood watering hole — and Clark Gable, John Wayne, and Barry Goldwater all found their way down that path.
The stories only get better. The original Marlboro Man was a regular — and kept a pet elephant with a taste for the house sticky buns, the warm, gooey Gruber-era recipe that still lands on every table and remains the most beloved bite in Paradise Valley. When the lodge faltered in 2009, Paradise Valley philanthropist Jacquie Dorrance stepped in and restored it rather than let it fall — a renovation careful enough to keep the cowboy charm and forward-looking enough to make El Chorro Arizona's first LEED Gold restaurant. Order the classics the room was built on — beef stroganoff, trout amandine — and end on the patio, by the fire, with Camelback and Mummy Mountain holding the last of the light.
Two rooms, ninety years of stories, and Camelback out every window — this is dinner in Paradise Valley. They're also five minutes from most of the homes Marta represents here, and honestly, they're part of why people never leave. Weighing a move to the neighborhood? Marta is always happy to trade notes — perhaps over sticky buns.