Westlake's Newest Restaurant Row Is Still Dark. The Hotel Next Door Got There First.

Drive Highway 114 through Westlake on any given evening and you will pass two unfinished stories standing about a mile apart. One is Entrada, the Catalonian-style village that broke ground with Town Council approval back in 2013 and has spent the years since collecting a CVS, a Starbucks, a wedding chapel and a repository of very patient buyers. The other is Solana, the older 1980s office-and-hotel development that nobody in town expected much from this year.

By September, the older one is winning. Solana's hotel finished a full renovation in April and reopened with three new places to eat. Entrada's headline restaurant row, the one everyone in Westlake has been waiting on since the buildings went up, is still dark, held closed by a single unfinished road connection that has nothing to do with the kitchens inside.

What Actually Opened While Nobody Was Watching

The building most residents still call the Marriott Solana got a new name this spring. After a multimillion-dollar renovation led by Dallas-based Coury Hospitality, the 293-room property reopened in April as The Ricardo Marriott, a nod to Ricardo Legorreta, the Mexican architect who designed both the original hotel and the surrounding Solana development. NewcrestImage and Dabu Group bought the hotel in September 2023 specifically to redo it, and the finished product leans hard into the architect's legacy: bold color, geometric massing, dramatic light and shadow.

The renovation's real payoff for anyone who lives in Westlake is what got added at ground level. House of Toro Chophouse & Patio is now the hotel's signature restaurant. Black Pearl Lounge handles cocktails and tableside caviar service. Solana Kitchen & Lounge covers all-day dining, and Café31 does Lavazza coffee and grab-and-go for the corporate crowd upstairs. Mehul Patel, NewcrestImage's managing partner, described the intent plainly at the relaunch: the hotel was rebuilt to be "a vibrant and contemporary blend of swanky luxury and homey comfort that provides us with strong rate performance in a strategically active market."

That is a hotel executive's way of saying the property needed to work as a neighborhood restaurant, not just a place business travelers sleep between meetings. Four dining rooms under one roof, open now, on a corner residents already drive past most days.

The Road That's Keeping Three Restaurants Closed

Entrada tells a different story, and the mechanism is worth understanding because it explains why the timeline keeps sliding.

According to the Town of Westlake's own project updates this year, the buildings for Entrada's restaurant row are finished and the tenants are ready to file for occupancy permits. The Town's Director of Planning and Development, Ron Ruthven, has said as much in multiple updates posted to the Town's site this year. What's missing is not a permit application or a kitchen buildout. It's a service road connecting Entrada to Highway 114, and the developer is holding the restaurants closed until that road is done rather than open into a driveway pattern that will get rebuilt six months later.

Anyone who has tried to make the left turn off 114 into Entrada during a Friday dinner rush understands the logic even if the wait is frustrating. Traffic circulation, not interior finish-out, is the bottleneck.

The tenant lineup for that restaurant row has also shifted more than once since the project broke ground, a reminder that "open by fall" has been said before about this address. The Town's most recent updates list Primo's MX Kitchen, Dahlia Bar & Bistro and Parliament as the three names slated for the space. As of this summer, the Town also reported the parking garage serving Entrada was 95 percent complete and expected to open by summer's end, and a permit had been issued for a four-story mixed-use building at 49 Arta Drive that will pair ground-floor commercial space with ten condo units above.

Here's the plainer way to see the gap:

Entrada's first Council approval came in 2013. Thirteen years later, the village square everyone in Westlake points newcomers toward still can't seat a table for dinner.

Trails That Are Already Finished, Even If the Buildings Aren't

Here's the part that most guides to this corner of Westlake skip entirely, and it's the detail that actually changes what you do with an evening this fall.

Westlake maintains a network of six named trails: Dove-Davis, Solana, Granada, Glenwyck, Entrada Loop and Entrada Canal. The Town has held a Tree City USA designation for 22 consecutive years and picked up the program's Growth Award four times, credentials that track directly to how much of the trail system runs through mature tree cover rather than open shoulder. The Town's printed Trail Map and Guide marks trailheads with parking, pedestrian underpasses, shade structures and drinking fountains along the way, plus a handful of historical markers.

Two of those six trails, Entrada Loop and Entrada Canal, already run directly past the dark restaurant row. The walking infrastructure around Entrada finished years before the restaurants did. You can walk the loop tonight, pass within a few feet of Primo's and Dahlia's future storefronts, and see exactly what a finished building looks like when the road in front of it isn't.

That's worth knowing before you plan a fall evening around "when Entrada opens." Half of Entrada, the part built for walking rather than dining, has been open the whole time.

The Actual Calendar This Fall

If restaurant openings are the thing everyone in Westlake keeps half-tracking and never quite getting to see, the Terra Lounge concert nights are the thing that's already locked in.

The Town's Westlake Together Concert Series has two dates on the fall calendar, both free and both at Terra Lounge, located at 1500 Solana Blvd behind Building 4:

• October 9: Hazard County, playing a mix of Top 40 and country hits spanning the 80s through today
• October 23: Lover, a Taylor Swift tribute band

Both nights run roughly 6 to 7:30 p.m. with food, drinks and games set up alongside the music, and Terra Lounge itself stays open for the evening. The series pulls a genuinely mixed crowd. Free admission means it's less a date-night draw and more families with kids, retirees and the office workforce from the surrounding corporate campuses, all showing up to the same patch of grass on the same Thursday.

Pair either night with the new dining options a few hundred feet away at The Ricardo Marriott, and the corner that bracketed Highway 114 for two decades with nothing but office parks now has an actual reason to park the car and stay for a couple of hours. Entrada's version of that same evening is still a few permits and one service road away.

What This Means If You're Watching the Bigger Picture

None of this changes the fundamentals of a Westlake address: the corporate campuses that anchor the tax base, the trail network that keeps residents outside year-round, the town's identity as, in its own words, seven square miles built around scenic trails and a genuinely close-knit community. What's changed is which node actually delivers a night out right now, and that answer surprised even longtime residents who assumed Entrada would get there first.

If you're weighing what this kind of build-out momentum means for a specific street in Westlake, or you're comparing an Entrada address against something closer to Solana, that's exactly the kind of question worth working through with someone who tracks this market street by street. Bray Real Estate Group works across Westlake and the surrounding DFW communities every week. Get a Free Home Valuation and let's talk about what the next year of Westlake's build-out could mean for your home.