Drive through Preston Center this month and you'll find two different stories happening within a few blocks of each other. At the Northwest Highway corner, the rooftop patio at CRAFT Restaurant & Beer Market is standing room only on a Tuesday night, the first U.S. location a Canadian restaurant company chose for its entire American debut. A few blocks over, another stretch of the same commercial district sits behind construction fencing, waiting on a $200 million redevelopment that won't deliver its first completed phase until late 2028. Preston Center isn't simply going quiet. It's doing two things at once, and one street over, Preston Royal and Preston Hollow Village are doing a third thing entirely.
That third thing is the part of this story that doesn't show up in the press releases about the shopping centers themselves. Since construction began on the $200 million redevelopment in March 2026, led by RAMROCK Real Estate, Lincoln Property Company, and HKS Architects, three separate restaurant groups have opened just down the road in Preston Royal, and a fourth is on the calendar for next month. Nobody in this neighborhood paused their dinner plans to wait for one intersection to finish rebuilding.
The Corner That Went Quiet
Not every corner of Preston Center is having the CRAFT moment. The specific stretch clearing out for the $200 million project has already lost Wang's Chinese Cafe, Yolk, and AT Bistro – Au Troisième, all longtime tenants that left the center as the redevelopment approached. CVS and Target are expected to remain through construction, so the everyday errands still work. But the sit-down spots that made that particular stretch a lunch habit for a generation of Preston Hollow residents are gone, and whatever replaces them won't open before late 2028.
Reaction in the neighborhood has been split, and not quietly. One longtime resident, Nicole Scholle, told People Newspapers the corner "has needed a glow-up for some time." Another, DD Rogers, raised the opposite concern in the same piece, saying she worries that "our community's signature charm is being eroded little by little as locally owned businesses are replaced by national chains." Both are describing the same construction site. Neither is wrong about what's actually happening there.
What that debate misses is where the neighborhood's dinner reservations actually went while it plays out.
The Restaurants That Didn't Wait
Preston Royal and Preston Hollow Village, the two retail centers flanking Preston Center on either side, spent the first eight months of 2026 filling in fast, and mostly with concepts that picked this specific stretch of Dallas on purpose.
| Opened | Restaurant | Address | What it replaced |
|---|---|---|---|
| April 1 | CRAFT Restaurant & Beer Market | 5974 W. Northwest Hwy., Preston Center | Former COVID-19 hospital site |
| June 16 | Palladino's Steak & Seafood | 5959 Royal Ln., Preston Royal | Former Spec's |
| August 1 | Campisi's | 5944 Royal Ln., Preston Royal | New location, pickup and delivery focus |
| August 10 | El Molino | 6025 Royal Ln. #250, Preston Royal | Former Anchor Sushi Bar |
| Late September (planned) | Fortune House | 7825 Firefall Way #100, Preston Hollow Village | Previously unoccupied space |
CRAFT is the one worth pausing on, because it's not a local operator testing a second location. It's a Canadian restaurant company, founded in 2011, making its first move into the United States anywhere, and it chose Preston Center for that debut over every other market it could have picked. The 500-seat build includes a rooftop patio and more than 100 beers on tap, with local breweries Peticolas and Celestial Beerworks poured alongside the imports. That's a company betting its entire U.S. entry on this exact intersection, in the same season a different corner of the same district went into construction.
Palladino's tells a similar story from a different angle. Restaurateur Joseph Palladino, the man behind Nick & Sam's Steakhouse and the Coal Vines pizza chain, was approached directly by Preston Royal's landlords about opening a second location here, around the same time he was opening the original Palladino's Steak & Seafood inside New York's Grand Central Terminal. He didn't go looking for Dallas. Dallas came looking for him, specifically for this address.
El Molino's move reads the same way. The restaurant spent about ten months building a following in Snider Plaza on wood-fired fajitas and flaming margaritas before expanding into a significantly larger space at Preston Royal. Hunter Pond, founder of the restaurant's parent company Vandelay Companies, called Preston Hollow "a natural next step for the brand." Not North Dallas broadly. Preston Hollow specifically.
Fortune House rounds this out in late September. It's the Shanghainese dumpling spot's third Dallas-area location after Irving and Greenville Avenue, moving into Preston Hollow Village in part to shorten delivery times to this side of town, a detail that says something about how much existing demand the ownership group had already tracked here before signing a lease.
The Weekend This Piece Is Actually About
If you live here, the practical calendar looks like this right now. St. Michael's Farmers Market, at 4344 Colgate Ave., runs Saturdays from 8 a.m. to noon through September 5, which means there's essentially one weekend left in this year's run before it goes dark until spring. The market skews toward local farmers, ranchers, and food artisans, plus coffee and dog treats, and it's worth building a Saturday morning around while it's still open.
Preston Hollow Village's patio scene has its own established rhythm worth knowing. Mesero runs a weekend brunch menu from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. Blue Sushi Sake Grill hosts happy hour all day every Sunday, with sushi and drinks under ten dollars. Modern Market rotated in a Korean-inspired protein bowl this summer. None of these are new restaurants, but they're a large part of why the Village has, by most accounts, the highest concentration of patios in the neighborhood, and they're worth knowing about before Fortune House adds one more name to the list next month.
What Two Years of Cones Actually Means Here
The easy version of this story is "Preston Center is getting a facelift." The more useful version, if you actually live in this neighborhood, is that the facelift doesn't matter as much as it sounds like it should. Preston Hollow's identity was never really tied to one intersection. It's tied to the half-mile radius around it, and that radius spent 2026 restocking itself faster than the anchor at its center could even finish demolition.
By the time Preston Center's first phase opens in late 2028, this neighborhood will have had two and a half years of a rebuilt restaurant map at Preston Royal and Preston Hollow Village, tested, adjusted, and settled into daily habit. The construction fence isn't a pause button on the neighborhood. It's just where the story isn't happening this year.
Pantuso Properties tracks these shifts closely, not because a farmers market schedule or a steakhouse opening moves a home value on its own, but because knowing which blocks are actually alive right now, and why, is part of understanding a neighborhood well enough to talk about it honestly. If you're weighing a future here, or you already call Preston Hollow home and want a local read that goes past the headline, Pantuso Properties is glad to talk specifics anytime.
