Preston Hollow's Restaurant Turnover Is a Landlord Story, Not a Restaurant Story

If you have driven Royal Lane or Preston Road this summer and noticed a restaurant you liked is suddenly gone, your first instinct is probably the obvious one: it must not have worked out. That instinct is wrong more often than it should be.

Look closely at what has actually closed, opened, and gotten announced across Preston Hollow's three main retail centers since spring, and a different story shows up. This isn't restaurants failing on their own terms. It's landlords deciding, almost simultaneously, that the spaces they own need something bigger, newer, or simply different than what was in them. The restaurants are the visible layer. The real story is who controls the real estate underneath them.

Here's the evidence, property by property.

Three Landlords, One Corridor

Zoom out on Preston Hollow's restaurant scene this year and the list of moves is long: Campisi's, CRAFT Restaurant & Beer Market, and Cantina La Rosa have opened, Scilla has opened, Palladino's Steak & Seafood is landing in a former Spec's space, Tricky Fish closed in March, and Anchor Sushi Bar closed in May. That is not a slow, organic churn. That is seven separate leasing decisions inside a single year, on top of a thirty-year-old restaurant a few miles away shutting its doors for reasons that had nothing to do with its food.

Set aside the restaurants scattered along Northwest Highway and Walnut Hill Lane for a moment, and three specific properties account for most of that churn: Preston Royal Shopping Center at Preston and Royal, the new office tower at Preston Center, and Preston Hollow Village at Walnut Hill and Central. Each is owned and leased separately. Each has made its own call this year about who gets to occupy its restaurant space. And each of those calls happened to land in the same stretch of months.

What Closed Anchor Sushi Bar Wasn't the Menu

The clearest evidence that this is a real estate story sits in the Anchor Sushi Bar space at 6025 Royal Lane. The first Anchor Sushi Bar opened in Knox-Henderson, and then the second at Preston Royal in 2023. Anchor Sushi closed on May 31, with plans to reopen as El Molino at some point in July, according to Vandelay's PR team. It ended up opening a few weeks later than planned, on August 10, which is today.

The reason the space changed concepts entirely, rather than just changing menus, is the part worth sitting with. Vandelay Companies, which owns both brands, treated the two Anchor Sushi Bar locations as a controlled experiment in format. The Knox-Henderson location stays. The Preston Royal one doesn't, because the company decided the concept itself was mismatched to that particular footprint, not because customers stopped showing up.

The new restaurant spans 6,000 square feet, significantly larger than the 83-seat original in Snider Plaza. The Snider Plaza location debuted about ten months earlier and earned a nomination for Best New Restaurant in the 2026 CultureMap Tastemaker Awards. That track record is why Vandelay wanted El Molino in a bigger box, and Preston Royal happened to have one open up. The company's own language on the decision was direct: Anchor works best in an intimate setting, while a larger footprint suits a higher-energy concept like El Molino, which is why the swap landed where it did.

If you're a regular at the Snider Plaza location, the Preston Royal version opens today for lunch and dinner, seven days a week, with the same wood-fired fajita program and flaming margaritas, just with more room to seat a Friday night crowd.

Preston Center Got There First, in a Building That Didn't Exist Two Years Ago

While Preston Royal was shuffling tenants inside existing buildings, Preston Center was doing something structurally different: building a new one. Scilla, a new concept from Duro Hospitality, the group behind The Charles, Sister, Mister Charles, El Carlos Elegante, and Norman's Japanese Grill, is now open as a neighborhood restaurant inside the new 8111 Douglas office tower in Preston Center. The menu is coastal Italian, built around house-made pastas, a raw seafood bar, and wood-grilled dishes like branzino and Wagyu ribeye, with an interior that leans on hand-painted murals and old-world European finishes.

This matters for a simple reason: Scilla isn't backfilling a space that used to be something else. It's the anchor restaurant in a brand-new office building, which tells you Preston Center's owners are betting on the restaurant as part of the draw for tenants in the tower itself, not just foot traffic off the street.

Preston Hollow Village Adds a Third Fortune House

Third property, third approach. Preston Hollow Village, at Walnut Hill and Central, hasn't lost anyone this year. It's adding. Fortune House will open at 7825 Firefall Way, Suite 100, serving lunch and dinner daily starting September 26. This will be the restaurant's third location, and it's known for its xiao long bao soup dumplings.

It joins a lineup at Preston Hollow Village that already includes indie spots Chefika and Centrale Italia, chains like Chicken Guy, and mainstays Broken Egg and Thirsty Lion. If you already eat at any of those, September 26 gives you a reason to walk a few more doors down.

The One That Wasn't a Business Decision

Not every closure this year fits the landlord-repositioning pattern, and the exception proves how deliberate the pattern actually is. Sevy's, at 8201 Preston Road, closed after thirty years. It wasn't struggling. It wasn't being replaced by a bigger concept. According to reporting from the Preston Hollow Advocate, the closure came down to a dispute with its landlord, full stop.

Sevy's deserved better than a landlord dispute. So did we.

That line, from longtime patron Jay Rosser in the Preston Hollow Advocate's coverage of the closure, captures something the El Molino and Scilla stories don't: sometimes the real estate decision costs the neighborhood something it can't easily replace. A thirty-year restaurant surviving the dot-com crash, the 2008 recession, and COVID only to close over a lease disagreement is the starkest possible version of the same underlying fact. In Preston Hollow right now, who owns the building matters more than what's happening inside it.

The Corner Itself Might Get Rebuilt Next

If restaurant leasing feels like a small-scale version of a bigger real estate conversation, that's because there's a much larger one happening at the same intersection. At a May 18 neighborhood meeting hosted by Deputy Mayor Pro Tem Gay Donnell Willis, engineering firm Kimley-Horn presented plans for a project called Preston + Royal that would bring residential units, office space, restaurants, retail, hotel rooms, and open green space to the site.

The scale is not subtle. The proposal includes a 299-foot hotel and condominium tower with roughly 150 hotel rooms and 54 condo units, plus a 250-foot residential tower with 177 multifamily units and about 5,000 square feet of restaurant space. A third component would add a 165-foot office tower with approximately 200,000 square feet of office space.

One detail from that meeting is worth knowing if you drive through this intersection regularly. A traffic study included in the presentation estimated the proposed project would generate roughly 48 percent fewer daily vehicle trips than what current zoning already allows to be built on the property, with AM peak trips dropping 20 percent and PM peak trips dropping 43 percent. Whatever you think of a 299-foot tower at Preston and Royal, the traffic case being made isn't that it adds less to the intersection than doing nothing. It's that it adds less than what's already legally allowed there today.

What's Actually Changing, at a Glance

What This Means If You Actually Eat Here

None of this requires you to do anything differently tonight. But it's worth knowing, if you're a Preston Royal regular, that the shopping center you drive past twice a day has changed tenants three times this year, and it isn't finished settling. Fortune House's September 26 debut at Preston Hollow Village is confirmed. And the bigger question, whether a 299-foot tower eventually rises where the strip mall parking lot currently sits, is still working through the city's zoning process.

If a restaurant you love in one of these three centers looks a little quieter lately, or if a familiar space suddenly has scaffolding up, the odds are decent that the reason has more to do with a lease renewal than a bad night in the kitchen.

Grant Gold Real Estate keeps close tabs on what's actually driving change in Preston Hollow, from the restaurant leases up to the tower proposals. If you're curious what a specific property in the neighborhood is worth, or what's likely to happen to a corner you drive past every day, reach out and we're glad to walk through it.