Lakewood Dallas New Restaurants That Actually Opened

Drive down Skillman Street past Mockingbird and the old Matt's Rancho Martinez building is still dark. That Tex-Mex spot fed the neighborhood for nearly 35 years before it closed. Since 2024, the building at 1904 Skillman has been promised to something bigger: an Italian steakhouse, a market, a hidden speakeasy in the back. As of the most recent public update on the project this spring, it still hadn't opened.

Meanwhile, two blocks over on Gaston and half a mile up on Mockingbird, actual doors have opened. That gap between what's been announced and what's actually running is the real story of Lakewood's summer, and it says something about how this neighborhood grows that's worth understanding before you believe the next big announcement.

Two summers, one building that's still empty

The project is called Serritella, named by co-owner Jason Gorsuch after his grandmother. The plan, from Lakewood Hospitality Group, is ambitious for this stretch of East Dallas: a 250-seat Italian steakhouse across 16,000 square feet, paired with an Italian market for grab-and-go pasta and bread, plus COSA, a members-only speakeasy tucked in back with live music. Chef Ryan Ferguson, who ran the kitchen at Nonna and Fachini in Highland Park, is set to lead it. The steaks are supposed to come from Gorsuch's own ranch, under the name Brigade Meat Co.

On paper, it's the kind of anchor a corridor waits for. In practice, it's been waiting on itself:

• 2024 — Project announced for 1904 Skillman St., the former Matt's Rancho Martinez space.
• Spring 2025 — Original target opening date.
• Q1 2026 — Revised target, confirmed by Gorsuch to the Dallas Morning News after neighbors started asking questions about the stalled construction.
• May 2026 — Latest public status check: still no confirmed opening date. Gorsuch told reporters the building needed more work than the team anticipated, with recent upgrades to the roof, plumbing, and air conditioning.

That's not a rumor about a slow contractor. That's a business owner on the record, twice, explaining why a project keeps slipping. Lakewood Hospitality Group also picked up 6115 La Vista Drive, the former home of Chip's Old Fashioned Hamburgers, which had served the area for a decade before it closed. Two prominent, long-running East Dallas restaurants sit inside one company's plans right now, and only one of the three concepts promised for them has a confirmed opening date, and it isn't Serritella.

None of this means the project is dead. Gorsuch has been consistent that it's moving forward. But if you've been telling out-of-town guests to save room for the new Italian place on Skillman, it's worth knowing you might be waiting into next year to make good on that.

What actually opened while everyone was watching Skillman

Contrast that with Gaston Avenue, where a family opened a restaurant with no delay and no press cycle of broken promises. My Dream Latin Cuisine opened this spring at 7260 Gaston Ave, in a space with its own history: Las Favela ran there most recently, and before that, Andrea's Italian held the spot for over a decade. The new owner, Salvador Gamón, has lived in Dallas since 1992 after coming from Zacatecas, Mexico. He started in restaurant kitchens as a dishwasher and worked his way up through server and kitchen manager roles at Matt's Rancho Martinez, Mattito's, Truluck's, and Hugo's Invitados before opening his own place with his brother Hugo and niece Ivette Ipina. That's three decades of Dallas hospitality experience going into a menu that draws on his own family's cooking, and it opened on schedule, quietly, the way most neighborhood restaurants do.

Then there's the retail side. On Thursday, August 20, Total Wine & More opened its doors at 6330 E Mockingbird Lane, in the space that sat dark after Joann Fabrics closed there in early 2025. This isn't a small addition. At over 15,000 square feet, it's the chain's 42nd Texas location and its 15th in Dallas-Fort Worth, stocked with more than 8,000 wines, 4,500 spirits, and 2,500 beers, plus an in-store classroom for tastings with visiting winemakers and distillers. That's the kind of programming Knox and Preston Center have had for years and Lakewood hasn't, until this week.

So in the same stretch of months that Serritella has gone from spring 2025 to Q1 2026 to no date at all, a family restaurant and a national retailer both hit their targets and opened. The neighborhood didn't wait on the big promise to get something new.

The street didn't need saving

Part of what makes the Serritella delay easy to overstate is the assumption that Skillman has been sitting idle, waiting for one project to give it a reason to exist. It hasn't. Within a few blocks of 1904 Skillman, the corridor already has Mot Hai Ba, Lakewood Landing, and The Wine Therapist, each an established stop in its own right. Serritella isn't building a dining destination from nothing. It's trying to add a third concept under one roof to a street that already had a functioning identity before the project was announced.

That distinction matters if you live here. A neighborhood that depends on a single anchor to justify itself is fragile. One that already has a handful of independent, unrelated businesses doing fine on their own can absorb a two-year delay without losing anything. Lakewood is the second kind. The Serritella build-out will land whenever it lands, and Skillman will have been a real street the entire time it was waiting.

Saturday's race and the lake at the end of the block

The other half of Lakewood life doesn't run through a storefront at all. White Rock Lake sits about five miles northeast of downtown, a 1,015-acre reservoir that's one of the most heavily used parks in the entire Dallas system, and Lakewood's own streets trace its western shore. This past Saturday, August 22, the ninth annual Hot Trot Half Marathon, 10K, 5K, and Memory Mile brought runners around the full loop, courses tracing the same shoreline Lakewood residents walk and bike every week. It's the kind of event that doesn't need a grand opening or a press release cycle. It just happens every year, runners lace up before sunrise, and the lake does what it's always done for this neighborhood.

That's the pattern across this whole stretch of summer. The things that actually delivered, a wine superstore with a confirmed date, a family restaurant that opened without fanfare, an annual race that ran on schedule, all did what they said they'd do. The one thing still generating headlines is the project that keeps missing its own deadlines.

What this tells you about how the neighborhood actually works

If you live in Lakewood, the lesson isn't to write off Serritella. Gorsuch has stayed public and consistent that the project is real, even while it slips. The lesson is that the neighborhood's actual texture, what you can walk into this week, isn't dictated by the biggest announcement. It's built out of smaller, less-covered moves: a Latin restaurant from a cook who spent thirty years in other people's kitchens before opening his own, a retailer finally filling a box that sat empty for a year, a race that fills the lakefront every August without needing anyone's permission.

Keep an eye on 1904 Skillman if you want. Just don't plan your week around it yet. Plan it around what's already open.

If you're thinking about what a neighborhood like this looks like from the inside, not just the headlines but the actual rhythm of a street like Skillman or a lake like White Rock, Marla Sewall has spent almost two decades paying attention to exactly this kind of detail across Lakewood and the Park Cities. Reach out anytime to talk through what you're seeing in the neighborhood, no matter what stage you're at.