Drive along the western edge of The Ridges this month and the fairways behind the wall are still quiet. Chain-link and orange fencing have wrapped the old Bear's Best grounds for more than a year now, since the course closed to public play on June 22, 2025. From certain backyards you can watch the shaping equipment work the dirt where the ninth green used to be. It has been the longest stretch anyone here has gone without a ball in the air on that hillside.
A few minutes down the hill, the opposite has been true all year. Valet has stayed busy. Hearthstone Kitchen & Cellar came back from the dead in January. A new pizza spot and a smash-burger joint moved into the food court in May. Red Rock Resort spent 2026 rebuilding its dining lineup in public, in real time, while the golf course a short drive away rebuilt itself behind a fence. Only one of those two projects reopens to you this fall.
A Golf Course That Skipped a Whole Summer
The redevelopment began in September 2025, a few months after that final round of public play, and it has been a full teardown rather than a refresh. The $300 million project is converting the old Jack Nicklaus design, an 18-hole, par-72 course built as a tribute to 18 of his holes from around the world, into something called Amara Golf Club, with the course itself reworked by Jackson Kahn Design. The grand reopening is set for October 2026.
What reopens is not the course that closed. Amara will operate as a private club with a hard cap of 250 memberships, plus 15 more reserved for owners of club villas still to be built. Initiation starts at $250,000 and rises every time another 50 memberships sell. Dues run close to $4,000 a month. The villas themselves are not expected to be ready until December 2027, more than a year after members start walking the new fairways. So even the reopening date is really the start of a longer rollout, not a finish line.
It is worth remembering what the course was before any of this. Longtime players describe green fees that were already steep for a public track, the kind of price that made it a special-occasion round rather than a Tuesday habit, even for people who lived a wedge shot from the first tee. The course drew golf tourists chasing its lava-rock bunkers and replica holes as much as it drew neighbors. That matters here because it means the shift from public course to private club is not really the story of a neighborhood losing its backyard amenity. Most households on the hill were paying to play there occasionally, if at all, long before the fences went up.
Here is what that contrast looks like side by side:
| Amara Golf Club (opens October 2026) | Red Rock Resort dining (open now) | |
|---|---|---|
| Who can get in | 250 memberships total, 15 reserved for future villa owners | Anyone with a reservation or a seat at the bar |
| Cost to start | $250,000 initiation, increasing every 50 memberships sold | The price of dinner |
| Ongoing cost | Roughly $4,000 a month in dues | None |
| What changed in 2026 | Entire course and clubhouse rebuilt from the ground up | Hearthstone returned, Good Pie and With Love, Always moved into the food court |
The Restaurants Didn't Wait for the Golf Course
While the fairways sat fenced off, Red Rock Resort worked through the most active year of restaurant turnover the property has had in a while.
Hearthstone Kitchen & Cellar led it off. The restaurant had closed in 2023 after nearly a decade at Red Rock, and its return in late January 2026 put it back in the same 6,500-square-foot space it originally occupied, run again by Clique Hospitality. Executive chef Jason Janson, who has cooked at restaurants connected to José Andrés and Marc Vetri, kept a handful of dishes as direct callbacks to the old menu and rebuilt the rest from scratch. People noticed the reopening. Regulars started lining up before the doors even opened.
The food court followed a few months later. Fatburger closed on January 12, 2026, clearing the space for With Love, Always, the smash-burger concept that started as a 2021 pop-up before Kevin Whelan, Drew Belcher, and Damian Ocampo opened their first brick-and-mortar location in 2024. It moved into Red Rock's food court in mid-May. Good Pie, the pizzeria that has been building a following in the valley since 2018, opened its third location in the same food court around the same time.
None of this required Amara to reopen first. Marc Vetri's Osteria Fiorella has been running at Red Rock the whole time, along with the newer Rouge Room lounge, both a short walk from the pool. The dining side of the property didn't pause for the golf course's construction schedule. It kept adding names while the fairways sat empty.
What Actually Changes on Your Street
The headline this fall reads like the neighborhood is getting its main amenity back. The reality is narrower. Amara's membership cap of 250, drawn from a national and international buyer pool given the price point, means the reopening is aimed at a small slice of the valley rather than at the households living closest to the gate. Most people in The Ridges will watch this one from the outside, the same way most of them watched the old public course from the outside when green fees made it an occasional round rather than a daily habit.
Club Ridges, the community's own pool, tennis, and fitness facility, kept running the entire time the golf side was under construction. Nobody here lost access to recreation during the rebuild. What changed is what sits a few minutes down the hill. Red Rock Resort spent the same year the course was fenced off adding a returning favorite and two new names to a dining lineup that anyone can use without an initiation fee or a waiting list tied to membership sales.
If you already live behind these gates, the practical version of this fall looks like dinner reservations at Hearthstone before the crowds settle in, a walk down for a Good Pie slice or a smash burger from With Love, Always, and maybe a conversation about Amara membership if golf and a $250,000 buy-in genuinely interest you. Those are two different fall calendars happening at the same address, and only one of them needed you to sign anything.
If the shifting shape of life around The Ridges has you thinking about what a home here is actually buying you this year, from club dues to the walk to dinner, Greg Clemens and the rest of the Clemens Team know this hillside well enough to talk it through in plain terms. Reach out when you're ready to compare notes.
