Pedregal Finished Renovating. Turns Out the Bar Was the Best Part.

In June, Forbes Travel Guide quoted its CEO describing the winners of its 2026 Hotel Star Bars list as "Extraordinary hotel bar experiences that create lasting impressions with guests." The list includes 37 bars worldwide, chosen after anonymous inspectors visited every property as paying guests. One of them sits behind the Dos Mares tunnel, past the guardhouse, inside the resort most Pedregal residents already treat as their own backyard.

If you have lived in Pedregal for a while, you already know the shape of this year. Scaffolding went up around Waldorf Astoria Los Cabos Pedregal, stayed up through most of 2025, and came down in stages until the final phase of the renovation was declared complete in March. What you may not have clocked yet is what actually changed once the dust settled. It is not the new mattresses or the redesigned lobby art. It is the fact that a resort built around occasion dining spent the last year turning itself into a place you can drop into on a Tuesday, and that a global rating body noticed before most of the neighborhood did.

What the renovation actually rebuilt

The headline numbers are straightforward: all 112 guest rooms, suites, and villas redesigned, the spa's salon refreshed, the gym rebuilt around new equipment. None of that is the interesting part for someone who already has a key fob and doesn't need a room. The interesting part is what happened to the food and beverage program, because that's the part residents actually use.

The old Beach Club is gone, replaced by La Palapa, an open-air terrace that now runs a Sunday brunch from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. with rotating food stations, a weekly surprise dish, and coffee from Neutral Coffee Lab. Mar y Leña, the property's new oceanfront steak concept, grills over mesquite, pecan, and binchotan wood and anchors a Thursday-night Steak Night at the same terrace. And El Farallon, the cliffside restaurant that has always been Pedregal's answer to "where do we take out-of-town guests," now opens for lunch. Its Champagne Terrace runs a midday ritual called Savor the Sea from noon until 11 p.m., pairing towers of Baja oysters, king crab, and blue shrimp with a rotating list of champagnes, including two new additions to the resort's own private label, the Pedregal Collection.

Here is what that lineup actually looks like on a normal week if you live nearby:

• Sunday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. — brunch at La Palapa, no reservation drama, DJ set included
• Any afternoon, starting at noon — oysters and champagne at El Farallon's terrace, a lunch option that didn't exist at this address a year ago
• Thursday evenings — Steak Night at Mar y Leña, wood-fired and oceanfront

None of this required booking a table three weeks out for a special occasion. That's the shift. A resort that used to give Pedregal one marquee dinner spot now gives it a weekly rotation, and the rotation is built for people who already live within walking distance of the tunnel, not just for guests staying four nights.

The bar nobody built for tourists

The award is where this stops being a hospitality story and becomes a neighborhood one. In June, Forbes Travel Guide named Don Manuel's, the resort's signature restaurant and bar, to its 2026 Hotel Star Bars list. That puts it alongside 36 other bars across 18 countries, chosen through incognito inspections that grade beverage programs, presentation, and service the same way Forbes grades hotels for its star ratings. Shanghai and Tokyo each landed three honorees. Don Manuel's was the recognition tied to Los Cabos.

What earned it a spot wasn't a gimmick cocktail menu built for Instagram. Forbes described the space itself as an open-air setting with a cocktail program built around Mexican ingredients and tradition, right down to the Talavera tile and thatched roof that make it feel more like a courtyard than a hotel bar. The signature pour, the Pedregal Reyes, is a play on a margarita: reposado tequila, Ancho Reyes chile liqueur, citrus, and a housemade ancho-chile syrup whose chile garnish gets dehydrated and caramelized for more than twelve hours before it ever reaches a glass. That's the kind of detail that shows up when a bar is building for people who will order the same drink twice, not once.

Chef Manuel Huerta, who has run the kitchen at Don Manuel's for more than seven years, brought influences from León and a stint at Grand Velas Riviera Maya into the seasonal menu. The restaurant itself runs from breakfast, with made-to-order huevos rancheros and Cabo Benedicts, straight through to dinner service with live music. A bar that wins a global award while also serving your neighbor's weekday breakfast is not really operating as a resort amenity anymore. It's operating as a piece of neighborhood infrastructure.

Outside the tunnel

Pedregal's food scene doesn't begin and end at the Waldorf, and residents who want a different table without leaving the hillside have Loretta Restaurant, an independent spot tucked into the enclave with sweeping views over the city below. It runs a shorter, more intimate menu, seared sea bass in a wine sauce is a frequent standout, and it operates outside any hotel booking system, so reaching it means calling directly rather than tapping through an app. For a neighborhood built around privacy and a single point of entry, having an independent kitchen that isn't tied to a resort's calendar matters. It means Pedregal's dining options don't rise and fall entirely with one property's renovation schedule.

Why the timing matters more than the amenities

It would be easy to read all of this as a list of nice additions and move on. The more useful way to read it is as a signal about what kind of neighborhood Pedregal is becoming. A resort spends a multi-year cycle rebuilding its rooms and public spaces, and the piece that ends up earning global recognition three months later isn't the redesigned suite, it's the bar. That tells you where the actual investment went, and it tells you that the investment was aimed at repeat use rather than first impressions.

For a community reached through a private tunnel, where the same faces show up at the same tables month after month, that kind of shift is worth paying attention to even if you have no plans to eat there this week. It changes what "a night out" means when you live five minutes from a cliffside terrace instead of thirty. It changes whether Sunday morning involves a drive into town or a walk to brunch. And it means the next time someone asks what's actually new in Pedregal, the honest answer isn't a room count. It's a drink named after the neighborhood itself, served in a bar that a panel of anonymous inspectors decided was one of the best 37 in the world.

If you're curious about what else has shifted in Pedregal this year, or you're weighing whether this hillside enclave fits how you actually want to live day to day, Be In Cabo knows the neighborhood block by block and is happy to talk through what you're seeing on the ground.