Preston Royal and Preston Center Just Split Up Preston Hollow's Restaurant Scene

For most of the past decade, Preston Royal and Preston Center functioned the way most Dallas shopping centers do: a rotating cast of tenants, some beloved, some forgettable, with no particular relationship to one another beyond sharing a zip code. That changed this year. Between February and August, both centers landed marquee restaurants, and a few blocks over, a twenty-year neighborhood fixture also turned into something new. Taken together, the openings stopped looking like separate leasing decisions and started looking like a neighborhood sorting itself into distinct jobs.

Preston Royal became the place for a proper night out, and also the place for a no-plans happy hour two doors down. Preston Center became the place you take a group of twelve on a Tuesday. And the old Fernando's space became the place you walk into on a Wednesday because cooking felt like too much. None of this was announced or coordinated. It just happened, corner by corner, and if you've been eating in the neighborhood this year without connecting the dots, here's the shape of it.

The Corner That Used to Be Spec's and a Sushi Bar

Preston Royal, the shopping center at Preston Road and Royal Lane, spent years with two tenant spaces that felt permanent in the way older strip centers do. One was a Spec's. One was Anchor Sushi Bar. Both are gone now, and what replaced them tells you something about what this particular block of Preston Hollow wanted.

Palladino's Steak & Seafood opened June 16 in the former Spec's space at 5959 Royal Lane. It's the second location for restaurateur Joseph Palladino, a former NYPD officer who built his name in Dallas with Nick & Sam's Steakhouse and the Coal Vines pizza chain before opening the original Palladino's inside New York's Grand Central Terminal. The Dallas kitchen is run by executive chef Sam Hazen, whose résumé includes stints at the Michelin three-star Le Gavroche and at Tavern on the Green, and the space was designed by Rockwell Group, the same firm behind the New York location. This is a special-occasion room. Dinner starts at 5 p.m., the bar opens at 4:30, and the kitchen is doing prime cuts, sushi, and Italian-inflected seafood with six to seven hours of prep behind each night's service.

Two months later, on August 10, El Molino opened two doors down at 6025 Royal Lane, in the space that used to be Anchor Sushi Bar. This is the second location for the wood-fired fajita concept that built a following at Snider Plaza roughly ten months earlier, and the Preston Royal build-out is considerably bigger: about 6,000 square feet against the original's 83 seats. If Palladino's is where you go to mark something, El Molino is where you go on a Thursday for a 3 to 6 p.m. happy hour of flaming margaritas and not much occasion required.

There's a third layer to this same corner worth knowing about, separate from the restaurants. The southwest corner of Preston and Royal is also the site of a proposed $800 million high-rise development that has been working its way through Dallas zoning review for most of the year. The hearing was pushed from September 9 to the Dallas City Council's October 14 meeting after a nearby property owner exercised the right to delay it, and a resident group called Preserve Preston Hollow has collected more than 4,600 signatures opposing the height increase. It's an unrelated story to the restaurant turnover, but it means the same intersection that just got two of the most talked-about restaurant openings in Dallas this year is also the subject of the most closely watched zoning case in the neighborhood.

The Rooftop Nobody Expected at Preston Center

If Preston Royal picked up two restaurants built for two people, Preston Center picked up one built for fifty. Craft Restaurant & Beer Market opened April 1 at 5974 West Northwest Highway, its first location in the United States after more than a decade of expansion across Canada. The space runs 10,500 square feet, seats over 500 across indoor and outdoor areas, and centers on a 360-degree bar and a rooftop patio that's visible from Northwest Highway between Preston Road and the Dallas North Tollway. There are more than 100 beers on tap, including pours from Dallas breweries Peticolas Brewing Company and Celestial Beerworks, alongside a globally leaning food menu built around dishes like miso salmon and Korean sticky ribs.

The Dallas location is a partnership between Craft founder PJ L'Heureux and Dallas Stars owner Tom Gaglardi, who also brought Moxies to Uptown a decade ago. What that ownership and that seat count add up to is a room built for volume and groups rather than intimacy. It's open from 11 a.m. to midnight on weeknights, later on Friday and Saturday, with weekend brunch. Where Palladino's asks you to make a reservation and dress for it, Craft is designed to absorb a birthday party, a work happy hour, and a Saturday morning brunch table in the same week without anyone feeling out of place.

The Twenty-Year Tenant That Finally Turned Over

Not every new opening this year was built to hold a crowd or fill a reservation book. Cantina La Rosa moved into a space that had operated as Fernando's for twenty years before it closed, and the change says something different than either of the Preston Royal openings or Craft's arrival at Preston Center. The Tex-Mex concept comes from the ownership team behind East Dallas's Smoky Rose, including chef Rolando Garcia, and it's built around the kind of lunch-and-dinner menu, tacos, enchiladas, carne asada, that doesn't ask anyone to plan ahead or dress up.

What makes this one worth noting alongside the bigger openings is the twenty-year run it replaced. Fernando's wasn't a tenant that churned through a few short leases before closing. It was the kind of address regulars thought of as a fixture, and its closing and replacement is a reminder that even the steadiest corners in Preston Hollow eventually turn over. This corner of the neighborhood is now doing the job that a reservation-only steakhouse or a 500-seat beer hall can't: being the place you go on a random Tuesday without thinking twice.

What Each Corner Is Actually For

The Pattern Underneath the Openings

What's easy to miss, if you only clocked these one at a time as they opened, is that none of the new tenants directly duplicate what closed. Palladino's didn't replace a steakhouse. El Molino didn't replace a Mexican restaurant. Cantina La Rosa didn't really replace Fernando's either, since the two restaurants were built around different menus and different paces of service. Each address effectively got handed a different assignment, whether by coincidence of leasing timing or by operators reading the same market signal at roughly the same moment.

The practical upshot for anyone who already lives here is that you no longer have to leave Preston Hollow to cover the full range of a week's worth of eating. A year ago, a proper date-night dinner, a big group hangout, and a lazy Tuesday dinner run might have sent you in different directions, some of them well outside the neighborhood. Now all three live within a few minutes of each other, sorted by function rather than by chance.

If you're trying to decide where to go this week, the honest answer is that it depends less on cuisine than on what kind of night you're having. A reservation and a bottle of something from the wine list points you to Royal Lane. A table for ten with mixed opinions on what to order points you to Preston Center. Everything else, the nights where the only decision that matters is not cooking, points you toward the old Fernando's corner.

For anyone who wants a closer read on how a specific block or a specific listing near these corners is holding up, or who's simply curious what a home in this stretch of Preston Hollow actually looks like right now, Adrienne Brown is always glad to talk through it over coffee, no agenda required.