Drive down Tarragona Drive in Westlake on a Friday night and you will pass two fully built restaurant spaces with no lights on inside. The stucco is finished. The signage bays are framed and waiting for logos. If you didn't know better, you'd assume a permit is stuck on someone's desk and the whole thing opens in a few weeks. That assumption is wrong, and the reason it's wrong tells you more about how this town actually gets built than any ribbon-cutting would.
Three miles west, at the front edge of Circle T Ranch, there is no building at all yet. Just a cleared 44-acre parcel at the interchange of Highway 114 and 170. And that project, somehow, has a firmer sense of when it opens than the one with finished walls.
The Buildings Are Done. The Road Isn't.
The three tenants slated for Entrada's Restaurant Row, at 63 and 55 Tarragona Drive, are Primo's MX Kitchen, Dahlia Bar & Bistro, and Parliament. According to the town's Director of Planning and Development, all three are ready to file for their opening permits. Interior finish-out is not what's holding this up. The developer is waiting on a service road connection to Highway 114 before letting anyone open the doors.
That's a specific, almost mundane reason, and it makes sense once you've tried to make the current left-turn sequence off 114 into Entrada during a weekday dinner rush. Opening three restaurants into a driveway pattern that gets rebuilt six months later would mean two disruptions instead of one. The town's own development update frames it as sequencing, not stalling, and pairs it with two smaller but real signs of movement: a permit issued at 49 Arta Drive for a four-story mixed-use building with ground-floor commercial space and ten condo units above, and The View, an office building next to Primrose Academy, that is nearing completion and expected to open by fall.
The condo permit matters more than it sounds like it should. Entrada's developer, Centurion American, has said publicly that it will seek approval for the project's next phase only after this first wave proves the condo market in Westlake actually exists. Restaurant Row, the parking garage, and that one condo building are the test case. If Westlake residents buy in, the next entitlement request comes with more density than Entrada has carried so far. If they don't, there's no obvious reason to rush.
What Front 44 Doesn't Need to Prove
Front 44 doesn't have a condo market to prove. It has three corporate campuses already sitting on Circle T Ranch, and the project exists because those campuses asked for it.
Charles Schwab's Westlake headquarters, Fidelity Investments, and Deloitte University sit inside the same 2,500-acre ranch, and Front 44's own site counts roughly 7,000 Schwab employees, 6,000 Fidelity employees, and 75,000 annual Deloitte visitors within reach of the new development, a Deloitte number the company expects to climb toward 150,000. Reporting from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, cited in Hoodline's coverage of the project, says Schwab executives specifically asked Hillwood for more dining and lodging options near their campus. That is not a developer guessing at demand. That is a tenant with 7,000 employees telling its landlord what's missing.
The plan, according to Connect CRE's reporting, calls for more than 65,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space, a 54,000-square-foot Class A office building, and a 150-room hotel, arranged around a roughly 10,000-square-foot outdoor plaza. Hillwood's Vice President of Retail, Guy Grivas, has said the company is in active talks with potential tenants for about half of the project, including a steakhouse, and that 70 to 80 percent of the remaining space will go to food and beverage, with the rest split toward health and wellness. Groundbreaking is targeted for this year, with the first wave of retail expected in 2027.
Here's the side-by-side, because the contrast is the whole point:
| Entrada Restaurant Row | Front 44 | |
|---|---|---|
| Status as of fall 2026 | Buildings complete, interiors ready, doors dark | Cleared site, groundbreaking targeted this year |
| What's holding it back | Service road connection to Highway 114 | Nothing announced; on schedule |
| Confirmed or expected tenants | Primo's MX Kitchen, Dahlia Bar & Bistro, Parliament | Steakhouse in negotiation; roughly 70-80% of space planned for food and beverage |
| Demand driver | Entrada's own condo and residential absorption | Existing employee base at Schwab, Fidelity, Deloitte |
| Target opening | No public date | Phase I retail, 2027 |
One project is finished and waiting on infrastructure tied to its own future housing sales. The other hasn't broken ground and is moving on a clock set by tenants who already work next door. That's the actual mechanism behind "more restaurants are coming to Westlake." It isn't one story. It's two, running at different speeds for different reasons.
What's Actually Open While You Wait
None of this means Westlake residents are stuck eating at home until 2027. The most useful change happened a while back at The Terraces, the eight-building office campus at 1500 Solana Boulevard, and it's still the answer today. Terra Lounge, tucked at the back of Building 7, used to be open to tenants only. Chicago-based Glenstar, which owns and manages the property, opened it to the public because the surrounding area had so few options of its own.
Glenstar's vice president and general manager for The Terraces, Kristi Layton, has described the goal plainly: turning Terra Lounge into the "Cheers" of the neighborhood, a place with bocce ball, live music, and enough regulars that co-workers and neighbors overlap. The catch is the schedule. Terra Lounge runs Monday through Thursday, noon to 8 p.m., and Fridays until 5 p.m. It's closed on weekends, which makes it a weekday lunch and after-work stop rather than a Saturday night option.
For something closer to an occasion, the hotel at Solana Plaza splits its dining between two concepts under the same roof. House of Toro leans into Spanish ingredients and dark wood, a pairing that fits the Catalonian architectural theme running a mile up the road at Entrada. Solana Great Room stays on for the quieter, casual-lunch crowd. Between the two, it's now possible to host an out-of-town client dinner in Westlake without driving to Southlake or Grapevine for it.
The Fall Calendar Isn't Waiting on Either Project
None of the town's fall programming depends on Tarragona Drive or Circle T Ranch getting finished. Earlier this year, Westlake marked its 70th anniversary with a concert built around Texas-born music, spanning Beyoncé to Willie Nelson, part of a #westlaketogether campaign the town has kept running all year. The next confirmed date on the calendar is the annual tree lighting, returning to the Terrace at Solana on November 30 from 6 to 9 p.m., with horse-drawn carriage rides, live reindeer, a performance from Texas High Road, and the usual visit from Santa that draws hundreds of families every year.
None of that requires a restaurant to be open. It's the town doing what it already does well while two very different developers work out their own timelines on their own terms.
The Takeaway
If you're wondering when Westlake gets a real restaurant scene, the honest answer depends on which project you're asking about. Entrada's Restaurant Row is finished and waiting on infrastructure tied to whether its own housing sells. Front 44 hasn't started construction and has a cleaner path, because the demand for it already exists next door at Schwab, Fidelity, and Deloitte. Watching the wrong one for a signal will leave you either impatient or falsely reassured. Watching both, for what they actually are, tells you something true about how this town gets built one bet at a time.
Questions about how Westlake's ongoing development is shaping property values in specific pockets of town? Pantuso Properties tracks these projects closely because they matter to the people who already live here, not just the people shopping for a home. Request a Private Consultation to talk through what's changing in your corner of Westlake.
