If you asked someone outside the neighborhood where Preston Hollow's restaurant scene is happening right now, they'd probably guess wrong, because there isn't a single answer. This year the neighborhood has opened a Manhattan-import steakhouse at one intersection, a rooftop beer hall at another, and it's about to open a third-generation dumpling house at a third. None of them share a parking lot. None of them are walkable to each other. And each one sits next to a completely different kind of change, from a zoning fight to a multi-year construction timeline.
That's the thing worth knowing if you live here: Preston Hollow isn't getting one hot corridor this fall. It's getting three separate ones, on three separate clocks, and the shelf life of each looks nothing like the others.
Preston Royal Gets Its Steakhouse, With A Zoning Fight In The Background
Palladino's Steak & Seafood opened June 16 at 5959 Royal Lane, in the former Spec's space at the corner of Preston Road and Royal Lane. It's the second location for restaurateur Joe Palladino, whose first Palladino's opened inside New York's Grand Central Terminal, and it's a homecoming of sorts for a guy Dallas already knows from Nick & Sam's Steakhouse and the Coal Vines pizza chain. Preston Royal's landlords approached him directly, betting his local following and the corner's built-in appetite for steakhouses would be enough. Rockwell Group, the same design firm behind the New York location, handled the build-out.
The menu leans on ingredients shipped in rather than sourced regionally: bread from New York, seafood from the Florida Keys, meat from Iowa. Chef de cuisine Henry Johnson, who trained through Le Gavroche and Tao before landing here, says prep takes six to seven hours a day, and his own favorite on the menu is the potato-crusted Faroe Islands salmon. The bar opens at 4:30 p.m. daily, with dinner service running 5 to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 5 to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Parking is worth planning around. During a media preview, a Dallas Morning News reporter noted the shopping center's lot was already close to full on a weekday afternoon, well before the dinner rush.
Here's the part that gives the opening extra context if you live nearby: the same shopping center's largest parcel, the seven acres at the southwest corner of Preston and Royal, is the subject of the most contested zoning case North Dallas has seen in years. Developers Burk Interests and Greenway Investment Company originally sought approval for towers up to 325 feet on a site currently zoned for 54 feet. After months of community meetings, the proposal was revised down to a 240-foot hotel-condo tower and a 210-foot apartment building. A resident-led nonprofit called Preserve Preston Hollow says more than 4,400 people have signed petitions opposing the rezoning, and the case is still working its way toward a City Council vote after the City Plan Commission advanced it. None of that touches Palladino's building directly, but it's the reason you may be seeing yard signs on your evening walk at the same intersection where you're now considering dinner reservations.
Preston Center Is On A Different Kind Of Clock
A few minutes away at Preston Road and Northwest Highway, Craft Restaurant and Beer Market opened April 1 as the first United States location for a small Canadian chain founded in 2011. The two-story rooftop concept went into a building that spent its last life as a COVID-19 hospital, which makes the transformation more dramatic than most restaurant build-outs. Co-owner Tom Gaglardi, who also owns the Dallas Stars, has form here: he brought Moxies to Uptown Dallas in 2016 and is bringing Tavern on Meridian to Las Colinas this fall. Craft's rooftop patio is now visible from Northwest Highway between Preston Road and the Dallas North Tollway, hard to miss if you drive that stretch regularly.
What makes Preston Center different from Preston Royal isn't the restaurant news itself, it's what's happening on the block around it. A $200 million mixed-use redevelopment led by RAMROCK Real Estate, Lincoln Property Company, and HKS Architects broke ground in March 2026, with the first completed phase not expected until late 2028. Several longtime Preston Center businesses have already closed or relocated to make room. Lincoln Property's Hudson Dozier has said the leasing response has outpaced available space. Translation for anyone who eats there regularly: enjoy Craft's rooftop while the surrounding corner still looks the way it does now, because a two-year construction cycle is starting right next to it.
Preston Hollow Village Keeps Filling In
Head northeast to Walnut Hill Lane and US-75 and the pattern looks different again. Preston Hollow Village isn't mid-fight or mid-construction, it's simply adding one more tenant to an already full roster. Fortune House, the Shanghainese restaurant known for soup dumplings and pan-fried pork buns, is set to open at 7825 Firefall Way, a few doors from Another Broken Egg Cafe and directly across from Mesero, with a tentative date of September 26. It'll be the chain's third location, following the original in Irving, opened by founder Lucy Yong in 2015, and a second on Greenville Avenue that opened in 2023. Current owner John Kim, who also runs the well-regarded Koryo Kalbi on Royal Lane, is bringing over the red tufted booths and dim lighting the brand is known for at its other locations.
Fortune House will join Blue Sushi Sake Grill, Modern Market, and Thirsty Lion in the Village's existing lineup, alongside a mix that already includes Chefika and Centrale Italia for something more indie and Chicken Guy for something faster. Unlike the other two nodes, there's no larger real estate story attached here. It's just a shopping center that keeps getting fuller.
The Neighborhood Regulars Are Turning Over Too
Not every opening this year fits neatly into one of the three anchor centers. Cantina La Rosa, a new Tex-Mex spot from the team behind East Dallas's Smoky Rose, recently opened in the former Fernando's space in Preston Hollow, bringing together restaurateur David Tripplehorn Cash, Smoky Rose executive chef Rolando Garcia, and co-owner Oscar Aroche. And D.L. Mack's, the neighborhood's long-running casual American spot known for what regulars describe as Chicago-neighborhood energy, has been busy enough this summer that its owner was still responding personally to guest feedback about an air conditioning issue in late July, since resolved. Between the three anchor centers and these standalone spots, the churn this year has touched nearly every part of the neighborhood at once.
The Trail That Connects Them
If you're doing more walking than driving between all this, the Northaven Trail is the thread that actually links these scattered pockets together. The nine-mile paved trail runs east-west through the neighborhood with access points along Royal Lane, Midway Road, Inwood Road, Webb Chapel Road, and Hillcrest Road, which puts it within reach of both the Preston Royal corner and the US-75 side where Preston Hollow Village sits. A pedestrian bridge project currently in the works aims to eventually extend the trail's reach east toward White Rock Creek Trail, according to renderings shared by the volunteer nonprofit Friends of Northaven Trail.
This fall, that group's calendar includes free bike and helmet safety checkups timed to the start of the school year and the arrival of cooler riding weather. The trail's Monarch Way project continues turning underused greenspace into stopover habitat for migrating monarch butterflies, and a Prairie Plant Rescue effort, run in partnership with students from St. Mark's School of Texas, rehomed native Blackland Prairie plants salvaged from a construction site into the meadow between St. Michael's and Pebbledowne Drives earlier this year. The Friends group also co-hosts a free monthly Saturday series called Walk and Eat with a Doc with the Semones Family YMCA, pairing a health talk and plant-based food tasting with a self-paced trail walk.
Which Corner Is Yours
None of this adds up to a single new "it" street the way restaurant coverage usually frames these things. Preston Hollow's fall is really three separate stories happening at once: a steakhouse opening inside a shopping center whose future is still being argued over at City Hall, a rooftop bar opening right as its block starts a multi-year rebuild, and a dumpling house filling in a corner that was never really in question. Which one becomes your regular spot probably depends less on the food and more on how long you expect that particular corner to look the way it does today.
We spend as much time tracking these shifts as we do tracking home values, because they tend to move together. If you're curious what any of this means for your own corner of Preston Hollow, whether that's Preston Royal, Preston Center, or somewhere along the Village, the team at JP Findley Group knows this neighborhood block by block. Request Your Free Home Valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
