Preston Hollow's Restaurant Map Split Into Three Different Neighborhoods This Year

Drive Preston Road from Royal Lane down to Walnut Hill this month and you'll pass three completely different versions of eating out, sometimes within the same half mile. One corner has a steakhouse with a Rockwell Group interior. Another is fenced off for a construction project whose first phase isn't due until late 2028. A third looks almost exactly like it did last summer, which turns out to be its own kind of news.

Preston Hollow has always had enough restaurants scattered across Preston Royal, Preston Center, and Preston Hollow Village that residents treated them as interchangeable, pick whichever lot has parking. That stopped being true sometime around April. The three nodes are no longer redundant options a few minutes apart. Each one now does something different, and knowing which is which changes how you plan a Tuesday night versus a Saturday one.

Preston Royal got a steakhouse with a backstory

The corner of Preston Road and Royal Lane picked up its most talked-about opening of the year on June 16, when Palladino's Steak & Seafood opened at 5959 Royal Ln, in the space that used to hold Spec's. Joseph Palladino, the restaurateur behind Nick & Sam's Steakhouse and the Coal Vines pizza chain, built his name on a New York flagship that drew coverage from Eater and Forbes before he brought the concept to Texas. The Dallas menu leans into the same combination that worked in Manhattan: prime steaks, Italian plates, and a sushi program run by executive chef Sam Hazen, whose résumé includes stints at Le Gavroche and Tao.

What's easy to miss is why Palladino ended up at this specific address. According to CultureMap Dallas, Preston Royal's landlords approached him directly, betting that his New York following and the intersection's built-in foot traffic were worth the investment. The bar opens at 4:30 p.m. daily, with dinner service running 5 to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and until 11 on weekends.

Elsewhere in Preston Hollow, Cantina La Rosa moved into the old Fernando's space earlier this year. It comes from the team behind East Dallas's Smoky Rose, with executive chef Rolando Garcia and co-owner Oscar Aroche joining restaurateur David Tripplehorn Cash on a Tex-Mex menu built around tacos, enchiladas, and carne asada. It's a quieter opening than Palladino's, but it fills a gap Preston Royal had been missing: an easy, no-reservation weeknight option that doesn't require a jacket.

Preston Center is running two storylines at once

Preston Center is where the contrast gets sharper. Construction crews broke ground in March 2026 on a $200 million mixed-use redevelopment led by RAMROCK Real Estate, Lincoln Property Company, and HKS Architects, and the first completed phase isn't expected until late 2028. To make room, several longtime Preston Center businesses closed or relocated, among them Wang's Chinese Cafe, Yolk, and AT Bistro – Au Troisième, according to People Newspapers' reporting on the project. CVS and Target are staying put, at least for now.

Longtime residents have mixed feelings about the trade.

"This corner has needed a glow-up for some time. You just have to head east a couple of blocks to see why everyone flocks over to that area right now."

That's resident Nicole Scholle, quoted in coverage of the redevelopment. Not everyone agrees.

"I worry that much of our community's signature charm is being eroded little by little as locally owned businesses are replaced by national chains."

That's DD Rogers, in the same reporting. Both are describing the same 103-acre commercial district, which is part of what makes Preston Center confusing to navigate right now: one corner is a demolition site, while the wider district just landed two of the most ambitious restaurant openings in the neighborhood's recent history. CRAFT Restaurant & Beer Market opened its first U.S. location there on April 1, a 500-seat operation with a rooftop patio and more than 100 taps. Scilia, a new coastal Italian concept from the hospitality group behind Duro, The Charles, and El Carlos Elegante, opened this summer at 8111 Douglas Ave. and was fresh enough that a recent write-up in the Dallas Observer described the paint as barely dry.

So Preston Center in August 2026 is really two different places wearing one name: a construction zone at one corner, and a genuine dining destination elsewhere in the same district.

What each node is actually good for right now

Preston Hollow Village hasn't changed, and that's the point

While the other two nodes were busy reinventing themselves, Preston Hollow Village mostly held steady, which is its own kind of story. Mesero rolled out a new weekend brunch menu running 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Blue Sushi Sake Grill runs happy hour all day every Sunday, with sushi and drinks under ten dollars. Modern Market added a Korean-inspired protein bowl and edamame hummus to its seasonal lineup. None of it is headline material the way a Rockwell Group steakhouse is, but the Village's patio density, the highest concentration in the neighborhood according to the Preston Hollow Advocate, means it's still the default answer for a Tuesday night when you don't want to think too hard about where to go.

The weekend rhythm underneath all of it

Whatever is happening with the restaurant map, the neighborhood's weekend markets haven't skipped a beat:

• Saint Michael's Farmers Market runs Saturdays from 8 a.m. to noon through September 5, at 4344 Colgate Ave., right at the edge of Preston Hollow and the Park Cities.
• The Boho Market returned to Preston Hollow Village this spring, bringing back its curated small-business vendor lineup for another season.

These are the fixed points residents have organized weekends around for years, and they're the reason the neighborhood still feels continuous even while its restaurant rows are being rebuilt around them.

Reading the map correctly

The mistake would be treating this as one uniform wave of new restaurants hitting Preston Hollow. It isn't. Preston Royal picked up a marquee steakhouse and a casual Tex-Mex option with no construction disruption. Preston Center is simultaneously losing longtime tenants at one corner and gaining two of the most talked-about kitchens in North Dallas elsewhere in the same district. Preston Hollow Village didn't change much at all, and its consistency is exactly why it still works as the easiest option on a weeknight.

If you've been defaulting to whichever node has the shortest drive, this is the year that stops making sense. The three corners of the neighborhood are having genuinely different years, and planning around that difference, rather than around habit, is the more useful way to think about where to eat next.

For residents who know this stretch of Preston Road well enough to notice when it changes, that kind of granular, block-by-block read on a neighborhood is exactly what informs good decisions later, whether that's picking a restaurant for Friday or understanding what a corner like this is worth. If you ever want that same level of attention applied to the real estate side of Preston Hollow, Identity House Real Estate is happy to talk. Begin Your Lifestyle Search whenever you're ready.