Xetava Gardens Cafe sits at 815 Coyote Gulch Court in Kayenta Art Village — the planned desert community on the west side of Ivins, against the Snow Canyon boundary, where the houses are earth-tone and the streets are named after coyote washes and Anasazi sites. Greg Federman and Rachel Stettler turned the small cafe into a full-service restaurant in 2006 and ran it for eighteen years. In October 2024 they sold to a four-person partnership: Matt and Nikki MacKay and Wendy and Jason Lewis. The Salt Lake Tribune covered the sale; B921, the local Southern Utah radio outlet, covered it independently.

Kayenta and the Reason People Drive to Ivins

Most of what brings traffic into Ivins comes from people who already know what Kayenta is — an arts community built into the slickrock, with a small gallery district, a meditation labyrinth, and Xetava as the only dine-in restaurant inside the village. The patio is the room’s identity. The gardens fill the back; the menu leans Mediterranean and seasonal; the dinner crowd skews heavily toward Snow Canyon residents and Kayenta homeowners, with park-day Zion travelers folded in around lunch. For eighteen years that mix held steady under Federman and Stettler.

The MacKay-Lewis Group and Rusted Cactus

The new ownership group brought restaurant experience from the Salt Lake Valley and kept homes in Ivins, splitting time between Draper and the desert. Salt Lake Magazine named Xetava one of its Best Restaurants in 2025, and the same recognition cycle linked Xetava with Rusted Cactus — another concept the MacKay-Lewis group operates — suggesting some shared menu and operational infrastructure between the two brands. Matt MacKay also runs The Cliff per public coverage, which makes the new owners’ Southern Utah footprint larger than just Xetava on its own.

Xetava in the 435

For a register of Southern Utah independents, Xetava is a textbook listing: a long-tenured Ivins kitchen with a recent, well-documented ownership change that the public web has not fully caught up to. The restaurant has the kind of address — Coyote Gulch Court inside Kayenta Art Village — that doesn’t read as a restaurant address until you’ve been there. The new owners have kept the patio, kept the gardens, kept the Mediterranean lean. The register’s job is to make the handoff from Federman and Stettler to the MacKay-Lewis group findable in the same place as the menu.

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