Drive Preston Road between Royal Lane and Northwest Highway right now and you'll pass three storefronts that didn't exist a year ago, each filled by an operator who had never run a restaurant in Dallas before this year. That's the part worth sitting with. This isn't a story about a neighborhood getting more restaurants. It's a story about a neighborhood becoming the kind of place where a Canadian restaurant company chooses to make its first American stop, and where a Grand Central Terminal steakhouse decides its second location anywhere on earth belongs in a former liquor store on Royal Lane.
Three spaces. Three very different paths to opening night. Here's what actually happened at each one, and what it means for deciding where you're eating this weekend.
The Liquor Store That Became a Steakhouse
Palladino's Steak & Seafood opened June 16 at 5959 Royal Lane, in the space that used to be a Spec's, tucked into the Preston Royal Village shopping center. The name behind it is Joseph Palladino, a former NYPD officer turned restaurateur who Dallas already knows from Nick & Sam's Steakhouse and the Coal Vines pizza chain. This isn't his first restaurant in Texas. It's his first restaurant back.
The build-out is nearly 10,000 square feet with a 4,000-square-foot kitchen, which tells you this was never meant to be a quiet neighborhood spot. Executive chef Sam Hazen came from a run that includes Michelin three-star Le Gavroche, Tavern on the Green, and a decade at Tao, and the menu blends steakhouse fundamentals with Italian dishes and a sushi program that leans on that Tao background. There's a private event room with a red telephone booth built for two, wired to call directly into the kitchen, which is the kind of detail that gets mentioned at every dinner party for the next year.
The practical catch: parking. The Dallas Morning News noted that customers may end up circling the shopping center's lot rather than finding a spot right out front, since the center's existing parking wasn't built with a 10,000-square-foot steakhouse in mind. If you're headed there on a Friday, budget a few extra minutes.
Palladino himself put it plainly when the deal came together: the landlords at Preston Royal came looking for him specifically, betting that the intersection of Preston and Royal could support a steakhouse at this scale. He's said the area hasn't had one like it before.
The Space That Was Fernando's for Twenty Years
A few doors down, Cantina La Rosa opened in the space that spent two decades as Fernando's, a name plenty of longtime residents still use when giving directions. The team behind it isn't new to Dallas. It comes from Smoky Rose, the well-regarded East Dallas restaurant, with executive chef Rolando Garcia and co-owner Oscar Aroche partnering with first-time restaurateur Cameron Levine on the new Tex-Mex concept.
This is the one arrival on the corridor that didn't come from out of town. It's a homegrown team taking over a space that closed after twenty years, which is its own kind of local news even without a single out-of-state investor involved. The menu runs through tacos, enchiladas, bowls, a cheeseburger, and carne asada, and it's open for both lunch and dinner. If you were a regular at Fernando's, this is the closest thing to a direct successor the corridor has produced.
The One That Technically Isn't in Preston Hollow
Head south on Preston Road to Northwest Highway and you'll hit Preston Center, which sits right at the edge of Preston Hollow's traditional boundary rather than inside it. That's where CRAFT Restaurant & Beer Market opened April 1, and it's worth including here because most residents will never think about that boundary line before driving over for dinner.
CRAFT is a Canadian company making its first move into the United States, and it didn't come in small. The Dallas location seats more than 500 guests across indoor and outdoor space, anchored by a rooftop patio visible from Northwest Highway. More than 100 beer taps are in rotation, including partnerships with Dallas breweries Peticolas Brewing Company and Celestial Beerworks, so the "import" isn't ignoring what's already brewing a few miles away. Hours run late, Friday and Saturday keep the kitchen open past midnight, and weekend brunch is on the schedule along with holiday Mondays.
The building itself used to house a COVID-19 hospital before its transformation, which is a strange footnote for a space that now has one of the more talked-about rooftop patios in North Dallas.
Same Corridor, Three Different Reasons to Show Up
Line these three up and the pattern isn't just "new restaurants." It's that Preston Road became, in the span of a few months, a place where a returning Dallas name, a homegrown East Dallas team, and a first-time American entrant from another country all decided to plant something at once. That kind of overlap doesn't happen by coincidence in most corridors. It happens when enough foot traffic and enough curiosity build up that landlords start fielding calls from operators who've never opened here before.
For residents, the practical upshot isn't about property values or what any of this means for the neighborhood's trajectory. It's simpler: the reasons to walk or drive down Preston Road on a Tuesday night just multiplied, and they didn't all come from the same playbook.
Where to Go Depending on What Kind of Night You're Having
A few ways to think about picking between them, based on what's actually changed:
- Marking an occasion or entertaining out-of-towners: Palladino's is built for it, with the private event room and the tableside theater of a full steakhouse menu. Go early or make a reservation, since the parking situation rewards planning ahead.
- A casual weeknight dinner that feels familiar: Cantina La Rosa is the pick if you want something that still feels like it belongs to the neighborhood, built by people who already know how to run a Dallas kitchen.
- A big group, a rooftop, and no particular agenda: CRAFT handles scale better than almost anywhere else on the corridor right now, and the tap list gives you a reason to stay longer than you planned.
None of this displaces what was already working. The Mercury has been serving its sushi bar and fine dining since 1998, still under chef and partner Chris Ward, and Bobbie's Airway Grill continues turning out steaks over Texas post oak a few doors from where Palladino's just moved in. Eatzi's and Tyler's are still anchoring the same shopping center they always have. The corridor didn't get replaced. It got busier, and it got more interesting to choose between.
The Short Version
Three storefronts changed hands on the same stretch of road in the same year, and each one tells a different story about why an operator picked Preston Hollow specifically. A returning Dallas restaurateur bet on a former liquor store. A local team stepped into twenty years of history left behind by Fernando's. A Canadian company chose the edge of the neighborhood for its first American address. That's not a coincidence worth ignoring next time you're deciding where to eat.
If you're weighing a move to this stretch of Dallas, or just curious what else has shifted along Preston Road lately, The Bracchi Group knows this corridor block by block. Contact us anytime you want a local read on what's changing in Preston Hollow and the neighborhoods around it.
