Did they ever tear down El Set?
If you have lived along the Conchas Chinas hillside for more than a couple of years, you have probably asked some version of that question, or heard someone else ask it. The restaurant sits right on the coastal highway at Carretera a Barra de Navidad 1182, next to the Lindo Mar Resort, in the stretch of road most people take on the way down to Easy Street and the beach access below. For a while, it looked like the answer was yes. Now it is not so simple.
The Demolition That Was Supposed to Already Be Underway
In early 2023, word moved through the usual channels, guests staying at Lindo Mar passing along updates from resort management, that El Set's demolition was imminent. The plan, as it circulated among people who stayed in the area regularly, was for a four-story condo building to go up in its place. Someone posted that construction crews had already started. Another guest, booked for an upcoming stay, asked how much noise to expect during their trip.
This was not idle speculation about a building that might someday change hands. El Set had been there for decades, long enough that longtime visitors could tell you what stood on the site before it, a restaurant called Café José, run by a couple named Freddie and Federico, before El Set took over. The restaurant's own site describes more than 42 years in business and a guest list that once included Elizabeth Taylor, Bob Dylan, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Whatever you think of a restaurant advertising its celebrity history, that kind of tenure means the building had outlasted most of the newer construction around it. A four-story condo replacing it would have been a visible break from what the hillside looked like for most of its residents' memory of the place.
Three Years of Watching Nothing Happen
Here is roughly how the story unfolded, based on the running conversation among people who kept staying in the area and kept checking:
- Early 2023: reports from Lindo Mar guests say demolition is starting that month, with plans for a four-story condo tower.
- Shortly after: a guest confirms crews "have started."
- Into 2024 and 2025: a returning visitor who stayed three months over the winter reports passing by almost daily and not seeing a single sign of progress on what they describe as the now sad-looking building.
- Around the same period: another regular guest, booked for a third consecutive year at the same hotel next door, is still asking whether the teardown might disrupt their stay, meaning as far as they knew, nothing had actually been torn down yet.
That is not a contradiction so much as a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched a redevelopment rumor move through a small coastal neighborhood. An announcement gets made with some confidence. Early activity, real or assumed, gets reported as proof the thing is happening. Then months pass, then years, and the building everyone was ready to say goodbye to is still standing, just looking a little more tired than before.
What's There Now
As of this year, El Set is open. Its current listing shows daily hours from 8:30 in the morning to almost 11 at night, the same phone number regulars would have called years ago, and a banner advertising a new menu. Whatever happened to the condo plans, and the record is genuinely unclear on that point, the restaurant did not close. It updated instead.
That distinction matters if you have been avoiding the place because you assumed it was gone or mid-demolition. It also matters if you are the kind of resident who tracks which businesses on your daily route are stable fixtures and which ones are always one bad season from disappearing. El Set, it turns out, belongs more to the first category than the forum chatter from a few years ago suggested. Reviews of the food itself have always been mixed, some visitors call the sunset view unbeatable and the seafood platters generous, others found a Valentine's dinner underwhelming, unripe mango in a salad, a Caesar drowned in dressing. That kind of split opinion is normal for a restaurant that has been serving the same stretch of coastline for four decades. It is not the profile of a business quietly winding down.
The Change That Actually Happened Next Door
While El Set's demolition stalled somewhere between announcement and forum speculation, something else on that same short block of highway did change, without anywhere near the same amount of discussion. The Hotel Playa Conchas Chinas, a name longtime visitors would recognize, rebranded at some point as Hotel Marboca. One guest, mid-conversation about the El Set situation, mentioned in passing that they did not recognize the new name and had to look it up.
That is the part worth sitting with. The redevelopment plan everyone talked about for years never visibly finished. The name change nobody was discussing happened quietly enough that even regular guests missed it until they stumbled across it. If you are trying to read what is actually shifting on this stretch of the Conchas Chinas hillside, the loud rumor and the real change are not always the same event.
Reading the Hillside
Conchas Chinas has carried the "Beverly Hills of Puerto Vallarta" label for long enough that it shows up in almost every description of the neighborhood, old money villas stacked above a beach most people reach by a set of stairs off the highway rather than a marked entrance. That reputation is built on the assumption that the neighborhood does not change much, that the villas and the gated hillside communities and the handful of restaurants along the water stay roughly as they were.
El Set's near miss says something more specific than that. Announced change here does not automatically happen on the timeline anyone expects, and sometimes it does not happen at all, or not in the form first described. Meanwhile the smaller shifts, a rebrand, a refreshed menu, the kind of thing that would not make it into a forum thread, are the ones that quietly stick. If you live here, that is probably closer to how the neighborhood actually moves than the version where every rumored teardown becomes a finished building on schedule.
Next time you drive past El Set on the way down to the beach stairs, the lights should still be on.
If you want a clearer read on what is actually changing along the Conchas Chinas hillside, from the businesses that stay put to the properties quietly coming up for sale, Daniel Alvarez Real Estate knows this stretch of coastline block by block. Get in touch anytime.
