On a Wednesday afternoon in June, the parking lot behind 5959 Royal Lane was already full before Palladino's Steak & Seafood served its first dinner. The Dallas Morning News noted that customers might need to hunt for spots in the shopping center lot once the doors opened, and by the time Palladino's held its official debut on June 16, that lot had become the busiest square footage at Preston and Royal in years. Six months earlier, nobody circling that intersection was thinking about where they'd park for dinner.
That corner is one of three in Preston Hollow that changed shape this year. Preston Royal, Preston Hollow Village, and Preston Center each picked up a restaurant worth driving across town for, and each one is solving a different problem. One corner now covers a full range of price points in a single lot. Another brought a third location to the neighborhood, joining two already operating elsewhere. The third skipped the local warm-up entirely and imported two concepts that had never operated in Texas before this year. None of that happened by accident, and none of it happened in the same place twice.
Preston Royal Got Both Ends of the Menu in One Lot
Palladino's occupies the old Spec's space at Preston Road and Royal Lane, and the restaurant arrived with the kind of résumé that doesn't usually stop in a strip center. Joseph Palladino, the former NYPD officer who helped build Nick & Sam's Steakhouse and co-founded the Coal Vines pizza chain, opened his first Palladino's inside New York's Grand Central Terminal before bringing the second location to Preston Royal. Preston Royal's landlords approached him directly. Executive chef Sam Hazen, who has cooked at the Michelin three-star Le Gavroche and at Tavern on the Green, runs a kitchen that brings in bread from New York, seafood from the Florida Keys, and meat from Iowa, a supply chain that takes six to seven hours of prep before the doors open at 4:30 p.m. for the bar and 5 p.m. for dinner.
A block away, in the space Fernando's vacated at the same intersection, Cantina La Rosa opened from the ownership behind East Dallas's Smoky Rose. David Tripplehorn Cash, who also co-owns Goodwins, partnered with first-time restaurateur Cameron Levine and brought in Smoky Rose's executive chef Rolando Garcia and co-owner Oscar Aroche to build a menu of tacos, enchiladas, bowls, a cheeseburger, and carne asada, served for both lunch and dinner.
That means the same shopping center now holds a steakhouse built around tableside presentation and a taco counter built around a lunch rush, and a resident deciding on a Tuesday night doesn't have to choose a different part of town to get either one. Preston Royal didn't get a restaurant. It got the two ends of a night out standing across a parking lot from each other, and that lot is the detail worth planning around before a reservation, not after.
Preston Hollow Village Chose a Third Location Over a Second One
Fortune House opens today at Preston Hollow Village, and the timing matters less than the decision behind it. The Shanghainese restaurant, known for soup dumplings in pork, blue crab, and black truffle, already runs a location on MacArthur Boulevard in Irving, where it opened in 2015 under founder Lucy Yong, and a second spot on Lower Greenville that's been open since 2023. Current owner John Kim, who also owns Koryo Kalbi in Dallas's Koreatown district on Royal Lane, picked Preston Hollow Village for the third address at 7825 Firefall Way, a few doors from Another Broken Egg Cafe and across from Mesero.
Fortune House adds another option to Preston Hollow Village's growing restaurant mix.
The corner isn't finished changing either. Construction on the 8300 Douglas project, backed by Ramrock, Lincoln Property Co., HKS, and Willow Bridge Property Management, was slated to begin in March 2026 a few blocks from the Village, with plans for a 12-story office tower, a 17-story residential building, a rooftop park, and 24,000 square feet of new ground-floor retail and restaurant space. Ramrock's Robert Dozier has said the intent is to activate Luther Lane with small-door restaurants and coffee shops once that space delivers, which puts Fortune House's arrival two years ahead of a much bigger supply of storefronts on the same stretch. The restaurants opening now are filling demand that existed before the building did.
Preston Center Skipped the Local Warm-Up
Preston Center took a different path than the other two corners. Craft Restaurant and Beer Market opened April 1 at 5974 W. Northwest Highway, in a building that once housed a COVID-19 hospital before its overhaul into a two-story restaurant with a rooftop patio. Craft is a Canadian company making its first appearance in the United States anywhere, a decision founder PJ L'Heureux tied directly to his partnership with Dallas Stars owner Tom Gaglardi, who also brought Moxies to Uptown Dallas in 2016. Maman, the New York-based all-day café that grew from a single Manhattan storefront to fifty locations across North America, opened its first Texas location in the same Plaza at Preston Center.
Neither restaurant is built around a Friday night reservation. Craft and Maman both run on daytime and workday hours, coffee and lunch traffic more than tasting menus, which puts them on a different clock than Palladino's tableside service or Fortune House's dinner rush. Preston Center's new arrivals answer a weekday question rather than a weekend one, and that's a different kind of restaurant math than the other two corners solved.
Here's what changed across the three corners this year, side by side:
- Preston Royal (Preston Road and Royal Lane): Palladino's Steak & Seafood opened June 16 and Cantina La Rosa opened in the former Fernando's space, sharing one parking lot and covering a steakhouse tasting menu on one end and a taco counter on the other.
- Preston Hollow Village (Walnut Hill Lane and Central Expressway): Fortune House opens today at 7825 Firefall Way, joining Chefika, Centrale Italia, Chicken Guy, Another Broken Egg Cafe, and Thirsty Lion, with the 8300 Douglas project still under construction nearby.
- Preston Center (Northwest Highway and Preston Road): Craft Restaurant and Beer Market opened April 1 as its first U.S. location, and Maman opened its first Texas location in the same plaza, both built around daytime hours rather than a dinner rush.
A neighborhood usually gets one new restaurant row at a time, the kind that shows up in a single headline about a single strip. Preston Hollow got three separate ones running on three separate clocks within the same year, which means the choice isn't which restaurant to try next. It's which corner of the neighborhood matches what the week actually calls for.
If you're weighing what a changing block means for a house nearby, or you're already thinking about your next move in Preston Hollow, Derrus Rogers is easy to reach for a straightforward conversation about it. Let's Connect.
