Westlake Finally Has Somewhere to Walk to Dinner, But Only From One Side of Town

Where do you eat in Westlake without getting on Highway 114?

Until this year the honest answer was nowhere. Homeowners here have spent two decades explaining to out-of-town guests that a town built around Charles Schwab's campus and Deloitte's training center is not, in fact, a place with a restaurant scene. You drove to Southlake Town Square for a real dinner, to Roanoke's Oak Street for a walk-around night, and back home to a quiet street with excellent trees and no reservations.

That changed in 2026, but not evenly, and that unevenness is the actual story. Westlake didn't grow one walkable center this year. It grew a working node on one side of the highway and two more promised nodes on the other, and only the first one is real yet.

The Solana side is finished

Start with what's actually open. The old Marriott Westlake at Solana Plaza reopened this spring as The Ricardo Marriott, a rename that honors Ricardo Legorreta, the Mexican architect who designed the original 1987 building and the surrounding Solana campus. Dallas-based Coury Hospitality led a multimillion-dollar renovation for the hotel's new owners, a joint venture between NewcrestImage and Dabu Group. The 293-room property's centerpiece is its new dining lineup.

House of Toro Chophouse and Patio is the one worth knowing by name. Chef de Cuisine Nate Sanders, who helped open Carbone Dallas and Trick Rider in Frisco, runs a menu built around prime cuts, oysters, and steak tartare, working under Executive Chef Joe Riojas. The room leans into dark wood paneling and matador portraits rather than the neutral hotel-restaurant look you'd expect. Past the dining room, the Black Pearl Lounge adds tableside caviar service and a cocktail list for people who want the bar experience without the full meal. Solana Kitchen and Lounge, the hotel's all-day room, and a grab-and-go Café 31 round out the property, and La Scala Pizzeria, family-owned in the same plaza since 1996, has quietly outlasted every tenant turnover around it.

A few buildings over at 1500 Solana Boulevard, Terra Lounge laid the groundwork for this earlier. The wine bar and pizza spot used to serve only tenants of The Terraces, an eight-building, 1.1-million-square-foot office complex, before Chicago-based Glenstar, which owns and manages the property, opened it to the public back in 2024 because the surrounding area had so little to offer. Kristi Layton, Glenstar's vice president and general manager, put it plainly when the doors opened:

"Westlake has very few restaurants in town, so we'd like to see Terra Lounge become the 'Cheers' of the neighborhood, where people can gather as a community, play a game of bocce ball, hear some live music, and just relax and connect with co-workers, friends and neighbors."

The town's own event calendar backs that ambition with programming. This year's schedule includes a free Thursday evening concert series at the Terraces at Solana, with food available starting at 5:30 pm and music beginning at 6. Terra Lounge still keeps limited hours, open weekdays and closed on weekends, but that's a small tradeoff for a spot that gave the plaza its first public gathering place in years.

Here's what makes the Solana side genuinely different from a strip of new restaurants: you can walk to it. Westlake's trail network runs more than 15 miles across five trailheads, and the town has held Tree City USA status for 22 consecutive years, which is why the shade along these paths feels established rather than newly planted. One of the six named segments, simply called Solana, threads directly from residential streets into the plaza behind the Marriott. A resident on that side of town can leave the house on foot and end up at a chophouse host stand instead of a parking lot.

The other two sides are still renderings

Now the part that complicates the "Westlake finally has restaurants" headline. Two more nodes are supposed to bracket the highway alongside Solana, and neither is finished.

Entrada, the Catalonia-themed development at Davis Boulevard and Highway 114, has been promising a walkable core since it broke ground more than a decade ago. It has changed developers more than once along the way, and a $26.3 million public improvement district funded back in 2015 was meant to cover the roadwork, parking garages, and canals still under construction today. The only piece open right now is a Starbucks on Andorra Drive.

That's changing, according to the town itself. In a newsflash posted this past March, Westlake confirmed that its Town Council approved a development plan amendment from Entrada's developer, Centurion American, unlocking a significantly bigger amenity core: a new retail and events plaza next to the parking garage under construction, a hotel, office space, restaurants, a residential building along Highway 114, and potentially luxury condominiums stacked above the retail and office space. Construction on those pieces is proposed to begin in early 2027. Combined with restaurant space, a reception hall, and a chapel that are already close to opening, the town's language was direct: "Residents will soon see a significant change in activity. The heavy lifting of the commercial portion of the development is starting."

Direct, but future tense. The Entrada Canal trail segment already runs alongside the site, so residents can walk the loop today, but they're walking past a construction zone more often than a finished plaza, and which version they see depends entirely on which month they happen to go.

Then there's Circle T Ranch, a third node forming on the opposite side of the highway fork from Solana. Hillwood, which developed the ranch, announced in February that it will break ground this year on Front 44, a 44-acre mixed-use project sitting between the Charles Schwab offices and the intersection of Highway 170 and 114. The plan calls for a 150-room hotel and a steakhouse Hillwood's vice president of retail, Guy Grivas, said the company is actively negotiating, with 70 to 80 percent of the remaining space going to food and beverage tenants. Completion is targeted for 2027. Right now the site is still open land next to an office campus, with no trail connection and nothing to walk to yet.

So three nodes, one finished. That's a different claim than "Westlake got restaurants," and it matters if you're deciding where in town to actually live your evenings.

Town Center just got less commercial, not more

The piece that should tie all of this together is Westlake's long-promised Town Center, the walkable district residents were shown in renderings when they bought their homes. What happened there this August cuts against the momentum on the Solana side.

The Town Council approved a 360-unit apartment community called The Avery after what the local Town-Crier newspaper described as a lengthy and contentious debate over parking, density, and whether the project fits the walkable vision residents were promised. The plan includes six four-story residential buildings, two three-story buildings, a roughly 9,000-square-foot clubhouse, and amenities like pickleball courts and dog parks, but no retail or restaurant space. Several residents at the meeting said The Avery doesn't resemble the imagery they were shown of shops and restaurants with housing built above, and worried that approving the apartments first, before a concrete commercial plan existed, left too much uncertainty about what would actually get built next to it.

The developer's attorney, Tara Duhy, told the council that multifamily use is permitted by right on that parcel and that the council couldn't legally use this site plan to strip future residential rights elsewhere. City Attorney Donald Doody backed that reading, saying the council had to apply its existing zoning code to the application in front of it rather than settle the bigger policy question on the fly. Parking waivers drew separate criticism: city code would normally require 708 spaces for a project this size, and the developer proposed 664, with a possible flex to 703.

The remaining roughly 44 acres of that parcel are still designated for future mixed-use commercial development, so the shops-and-restaurants piece hasn't been ruled out. But the same meeting also advanced a rezoning of about 22.6 acres in a separate area called Westlake West, converting it from Mixed Use to Residential-2. That's a small but telling data point. The town isn't just building the residential half of Town Center before the commercial half. In at least one parcel, it's actively reducing how much land is even zoned for anything but housing.

What this actually means for your Thursday night

If you live close to Solana, you have real options tonight: a chophouse, a caviar lounge, a pizzeria that's been there since 1996, and a trail that gets you there without starting your car. If you live closer to Entrada or Circle T, you're looking at 2027 for anything comparable, and the town's own language about "the next year or two" is the most specific timeline anyone has given you.

The town center that was supposed to make this a moot question by giving every resident a walkable core is, as of this August, further from that outcome than it was in the renderings, not closer. Three hundred sixty apartments got approved. The retail underneath them didn't.

None of this is a reason to worry about property values or to rush a decision. It's simply the kind of granular, block-by-block texture that only shows up if you're paying attention to Town Council agendas alongside restaurant openings. If you're trying to figure out which side of Westlake actually matches the lifestyle you want, or you're weighing a move within the same 76262 zip code and want someone who tracks both the dinner menu and the zoning docket, that's exactly the kind of conversation the Rosie Smelcer Group has every week. Schedule your private consultation and we'll walk you through it, Solana trail included.