What's New in Preston Hollow Dallas This Year?

Drive down Royal Lane past Preston Road and the shopping center still looks like the shopping center you remember. Same low brick facade, same parking lot that fills up around 6 p.m., same corner where Spec's used to sell you a bottle of wine on the way home. Nothing about the outside tells you that inside that building, a steakhouse designed by the same firm that built a Grand Central Terminal restaurant is now plating potato-crusted salmon flown in from the Faroe Islands. That's the story of Preston Hollow in 2026. The neighborhood isn't expanding. It's being rewritten from the inside, one existing address at a time, and the pattern is worth noticing if you actually live here.

Nobody Poured New Concrete for Any of This

Palladino's Steak & Seafood opened June 16 at 5959 Royal Lane, in the space Spec's left behind at Preston and Royal. The restaurant comes from Joseph Palladino, the New York restaurateur behind Nick & Sam's and the Coal Vines pizza chain, and it arrived with a résumé most steakhouses don't bother assembling: executive chef Sam Hazen, whose background includes Michelin three-star Le Gavroche and Tao, and a buildout from Rockwell Group, the design firm that also created Palladino's original Grand Central location. Parking is already tight enough that the shopping center's lot fills on a weekday afternoon, which tells you something about how fast the neighborhood adopted it.

A few blocks over at Preston Center, Craft Restaurant and Beer Market opened its rooftop patio on April 1 at 5974 West Northwest Highway. It's the first U.S. location for the Canadian chain, backed by Dallas Stars owner Tom Gaglardi, and it went into a building that spent part of the pandemic as a COVID-19 field hospital before getting what founder PJ L'Heureux called a bold makeover. That's not a metaphor. The address itself did a full pivot from emergency medical use to a two-story beer hall with a rooftop patio, without a single new lot being platted.

Then there's the space that used to be Fernando's, the Tex-Mex restaurant that ran for 20 years before closing. It's now Cantina La Rosa, a new concept from the ownership team behind East Dallas's Smoky Rose. David Tripplehorn Cash, who also co-owns Goodwins, partnered with first-time restaurateur Cameron Levine along with Smoky Rose's executive chef Rolando Garcia and co-owner Oscar Aroche to reopen the address for lunch and dinner rather than build something new down the street.

The pattern holds for what's coming next. Fortune House, the Shanghainese dumpling restaurant with locations in Irving and on Greenville Avenue, is set to open a third location in Preston Hollow Village at 7825 Firefall Way, a few doors from Another Broken Egg Cafe and across from Mesero. The space has sat empty. A spokesperson set a tentative opening date of September 26, which means the wait for soup dumplings inside the neighborhood is measured in weeks, not a construction timeline.

Four of the year's biggest openings, four addresses that already existed. That's not a coincidence. It's what a neighborhood looks like when it's out of room to grow outward and starts recompiling what it already has.

The Delivery Radius Is Part of the Decision Now

The Fortune House move is worth a second look because the reasoning behind it says something about how restaurants think about this part of Dallas. The chain already runs a dedicated pickup and delivery spot at Preston-Royal, at 5944 Royal Lane, separate from its dine-in locations. Opening a full restaurant inside Preston Hollow Village isn't just about adding tables. It streamlines delivery to this side of town, since delivery represents a large share of the business. In other words, the neighborhood's density of apartments, townhomes, and single-family streets within a short drive of Central Expressway made this corner worth a second kitchen, not just a bigger dining room.

The Trail Is Doing Work a Zoning Map Can't

None of this would connect into a real pattern without the Northaven Trail, the 2.5-mile paved path that runs through the Oncor power line easement between Northaven Road and Royal Lane, with endpoints at Valleydale Road on the east and Preston Road on the west. Friends of Northaven Trail, the volunteer nonprofit that maintains it, has spent this year building programming that treats the restaurants above as trail stops rather than separate errands. One of the group's recurring rides starts near Pensive and finishes with lunch at Flower Child at Preston Royal, with the restaurant donating a share of that day's sales back to the trail. The organization's third annual Rhythm & Blooms fundraiser, held April 11 at Jonathon's on Forest Lane, drew a bigger crowd than the year before.

"This event is getting bigger every year," board member Dorothy Buechel said, adding that it shows the community is behind making the trail a place for families to bike, walk their dogs, and enjoy the gardens.

The trail's calendar keeps going past spring. Its Movie Night tradition, dessert donated by Corner Bakery on Preston and Forest and Shake Shack at Preston and Royal, has featured outdoor screenings like Paddington 2 for families who bring a blanket and a picnic dinner. A free bicycle safety checkup event, paired with ice cream, runs around the start of the school year. The trail also takes part in North Texas Giving Day each September, with funds going directly toward the wildflower meadows and pollinator habitat volunteers have been building along the corridor, including a spring 2026 project with St. Mark's School of Texas students who rehomed native Blackland Prairie plants rescued from a construction site.

The trail isn't decorative. It's the connective tissue that turns four separate restaurant openings into a single loop you can do on a bike.

A Saturday That Doesn't Touch Preston Road at Rush Hour

Here's what that loop looks like in practice this fall:

1. Start at the Semones Family YMCA on Northaven Road for the monthly Walk and Eat with a Doc, a free Saturday morning event pairing a plant-based food tasting with a self-paced walk on the trail.
2. Head west on the trail toward Pensive, then cut over to Kiln, the flexible workspace brand's first Texas location, which opened at The Hill earlier this year, if you need a few hours at a desk that isn't your kitchen table.
3. Loop back east toward Preston Royal for lunch at Palladino's bar, which opens daily at 4:30, or grab tacos at Cantina La Rosa if you're going for an earlier meal.
4. Save Craft's rooftop at Preston Center for the evening, when Northwest Highway traffic has thinned out and the patio catches the last of the light.

None of that requires getting on Preston Road during rush hour, and none of it existed in this exact form a year ago.

What This Actually Means If You're Already Here

Neighborhoods usually signal growth with cranes. Preston Hollow is signaling something else this year: a level of demand strong enough that operators would rather fight for an existing address than wait for new ground to open up. A 20-year-old Tex-Mex space, a former pandemic hospital, a shuttered wine shop, and an empty retail bay all found new life within months of each other, and a volunteer trail group is stitching them together with bike rides and movie nights rather than waiting for the city to do it. If you've lived here a while, that's worth noticing the next time you're deciding where to eat on a Tuesday. The neighborhood didn't get bigger this year. It got denser in the best sense, more useful per square foot, without a single new curb cut.

If all this new energy along Royal Lane and Preston Center has you thinking about what it would take to make one of these quiet side streets home, or what your own address might be worth in a neighborhood this active, that's a conversation Jeremy Whiteker has regularly. Reach out anytime for a straightforward, no-pressure home valuation or just to talk through what's changing on your street.