Preston Hollow Doesn't Have One Restaurant Row Anymore. It Has Three.

Ask three different Preston Hollow neighbors where they ate dinner last weekend and you may get three answers that don't overlap at all. One drove to Preston Center for a table on a 500-seat rooftop. Another walked to the corner near Central Market for tacos in a space that used to be Fernando's. A third headed south to Preston Royal for a steakhouse that started in Grand Central Terminal. All three will tell you the neighborhood's restaurant scene has never been better. None of them are talking about the same place.

That's the story worth understanding here in the fall of 2026. Preston Hollow's dining map didn't simply add restaurants this year. It split into three distinct commercial nodes, each growing under a completely different logic, and each one now feels like a slightly different version of the neighborhood.

Preston Center Is Betting on Scale

Start at the corner of Preston Road and Northwest Highway, where the changes are the hardest to miss because they involve cranes. Construction broke ground in March 2026 on 8300 Douglas, a project from Ramrock Real Estate and Lincoln Property Company that will eventually bring a 12-story, 300,000-square-foot office tower and a 17-story residential tower with 147 units to the corner, along with a 35,000-square-foot rooftop park and new ground-floor retail and restaurant space, according to D Magazine's reporting on the project. The first phase isn't expected until late 2028, but the ground-level effects are already visible. Longtime tenants Wang's Chinese Cafe, Yolk, and AT Bistro – Au Troisième have all closed to make way for it.

Meanwhile, a few doors down, the 75-year-old Plaza at Preston Center just wrapped its own $5 million renovation, the largest since the property added an underground garage more than a decade ago. New tenants moving into that refreshed space include the French bistro Frenchie and the West Coast boutique Trina Turk, according to CultureMap's coverage of the Plaza's renovation.

And then there's the restaurant that best captures what Preston Center is going for now. CRAFT Restaurant & Beer Market opened its first United States location there on April 1, 2026, at 5974 W. Northwest Highway, a building that spent part of its earlier life as a COVID-19 hospital before its transformation. The Canadian chain, backed in part by Dallas Stars owner Tom Gaglardi, built the Dallas location for more than 500 guests across a two-story footprint with a rooftop patio and over 100 beers on tap, according to the Dallas Morning News. That's not a neighborhood bistro. That's a destination built for corporate events and large group bookings, dropped into a corner that used to run on smaller, quieter tenants.

Preston Center's bet, in other words, is that bigger works. More seats, more square footage, more of a reason to make the trip from somewhere else.

The Village Near Midway Is Betting the Opposite

A short drive north and west, near Midway Road and Central Market, the story reads almost like a rebuttal. This stretch, often called the Village of Preston Hollow, lost two longtime anchors in recent memory and replaced them with concepts built for a walk-in crowd of regulars, not a citywide reservation list.

Fernando's Mexican Cuisine held its Preston Hollow corner for 20 years before closing in May 2025. Neighbors kept stopping by the storefront during construction to ask when it would reopen, according to the Dallas Morning News, which reported that at least five people walked up during a single hour-long interview to ask if the new restaurant was open yet. That restaurant, Cantina La Rosa, opened February 13, 2026, from the team behind East Dallas's Smoky Rose. Owner David Tripplehorn Cash built the concept around an 80-to-90-seat covered patio with drop-down siding, meant to be used year-round, and a menu he describes in plain terms: good margaritas, good chips and salsa, good queso. The paper's reporting on the opening makes clear the goal was never a citywide draw. It was replacing a 20-year habit for the people who live within walking distance.

A few months later, Preston Hollow Village filled its own long-vacant corner. Ella, an American bistro from restaurateur Blaine McGowan, opened June 17, 2026, in the space once occupied by Chido Taco Lounge, sharing a lounge with the existing Customs Speakeasy next door. The kitchen is led by chef Kyle Farr, previously executive sous chef at the Michelin-recognized Sachet, according to the Dallas Observer's coverage of the opening. Serious culinary pedigree, but delivered at bistro scale, in a shopping center built for foot traffic rather than valet lines.

Where Preston Center is adding square footage, the Village near Midway is filling in gaps left by closures, one storefront at a time, with concepts sized for the neighborhood that surrounds them.

Preston Royal Is Running Its Own Arms Race

Head south to Preston Royal Shopping Center and you'll find a third pattern entirely, one that looks less like scale or restoration and more like a competition for who can attract the bigger name.

Joe Palladino, the restaurateur behind Nick & Sam's Steakhouse and the co-founder of the Coal Vines pizza chain, opened Palladino's Steak & Seafood at 5959 Royal Lane on June 16, 2026, in the former Spec's space. It's his second location, following the original inside New York's Grand Central Terminal, and he brought in executive chef Sam Hazen, whose résumé includes stints at the Michelin three-star Le Gavroche and Tao, according to CultureMap's report on the opening. The space was designed by Rockwell Group, the same firm behind the New York original.

Less than two months later, El Molino opened a second, larger location at Preston Royal on August 10, 2026, taking over the former Anchor Sushi Bar space at 6025 Royal Lane. The new spot spans roughly 6,000 square feet, a significant jump from the 83-seat original in Snider Plaza, where the wood-fired fajita concept first built its following, per CultureMap's coverage of the expansion.

Two brand names, both choosing Preston Royal for their next move within the same summer, is not a coincidence. It's a shopping center that has become the place regional operators pick when they want proof their concept can scale beyond its original location.

What the Split Actually Means

Here's the piece that matters if you live inside these boundaries rather than reading about them from across town. Preston Hollow's restaurant scene isn't unifying into one bigger, better version of itself. It's diverging into three commercial identities that happen to sit within a few miles of each other, and each one is now legible from the businesses that chose it.

That means the answer to "where do I eat tonight" now depends less on what you're craving and more on which version of Preston Hollow you feel like being in. Want scale, a rooftop, and a reservation that took planning? Preston Center. Want the kind of spot where the server remembers your order? The Village near Midway. Want a name you already trust from somewhere else in the city, now five minutes from home? Preston Royal.

None of these directions is more Preston Hollow than the others. That's the actual news here. A neighborhood that used to have one dining identity now runs three of them at once, and the businesses betting on each one are telling you, through where they chose to open, that they think all three bets are good ones.

If you're weighing a move within any of these corners, or wondering how a changing commercial corner affects what a home nearby is worth, Mark Bradford Group knows this stretch of Preston Hollow block by block. Request a free home valuation and we'll walk you through what these changes mean for your specific street.