Drive the intersection of Preston Road and Royal Lane on a Friday night and you will see the split for yourself. On one corner, valets are stacking cars three deep outside a steakhouse with a jazz lounge and a private room named for a golf club. On the corner facing it, there is a fenced lot that has sat mostly empty since a tornado tore through in 2019, its future still being argued over three floors up at Dallas City Hall.
Both corners belong to the same intersection. Only one of them needed permission to change.
Palladino's Steak & Seafood opened June 16 inside Preston Royal Village, taking over the old Spec's space at 5959 Royal Lane. The build-out runs nearly 10,000 square feet and includes a full dining room, a bar, a private dining room, and a jazz lounge, a combination that puts it in a different category than the steakhouses that typically anchor a Dallas shopping center.
Restaurateur Joseph Palladino co-founded Nick & Sam's Steakhouse in Uptown almost thirty years ago. His namesake concept debuted first at Grand Central Terminal in New York, where it drew coverage from Eater and the New York Post before Palladino brought a second location home to Dallas. The kitchen is led by executive chef Sam Hazen, whose résumé runs through the Michelin three-star Le Gavroche and a decade at Tao, alongside chef de cuisine Henry Johnson, a Culinary Institute of America graduate who most recently ran the kitchen at EVELYN and represented Texas on Hell's Kitchen. The Rockwell Group, the same firm behind the New York location, designed the space. One private event room, The Aria, is named for Palladino's daughter and includes a grand piano. Another, The National, is named for Dallas National Golf Club.
Palladino has said the landlords at Preston Royal Village approached him directly, betting that the corner's local following and the neighborhood's appetite for a serious steakhouse would carry a concept this ambitious. The bar opens at 4:30 p.m. daily, with dinner service running until 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.
None of this required a zoning change. The shopping center operates under the same rules it always has. A landlord looked at demand at Preston and Royal as it exists today and bet nearly 10,000 square feet on it.
Across the intersection, the southwest corner tells a different story. The roughly seven-acre site has sat largely vacant since 2019, when a tornado damaged the property. Developer Leland Burk of Burk Interests, partnered with Gerald Stool's Greenway Investment Co., wants to replace it with an $800 million mixed-use project. The proposal has been reshaped repeatedly since it first surfaced. The earliest version called for a 28-story hotel tower reaching 325 feet. After a series of community meetings, including one hosted by council member Gay Donnell Willis at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in May, the plan now on the table calls for a 19-story hotel and condo tower at 240 feet, an 18-story mixed-income apartment tower at 210 feet, a 12-story office building, ground-floor retail, and a half-acre public green space. Current zoning caps buildings on the site at 54 feet.
On August 6, the Dallas City Plan Commission voted 10-4 to recommend approval, sending the case to the Dallas City Council for a final decision. Commissioners Joanna Hampton, Alicia Serrato, Jack Kocks, and Kathy Coffman voted against it. Kocks proposed capping the site at 75 feet as a compromise; the amendment failed, with only Coffman in support. Commissioner Melissa Kingston argued the site fit exactly the kind of high-traffic location the city's ForwardDallas 2.0 land use plan is meant to steer density toward, rather than adding density inside existing single-family neighborhoods.
Of the 283 property owners notified ahead of the hearing, 261 opposed the project and eight supported it. That opposition has a name and an origin story. Preserve Preston Hollow formed specifically to fight this proposal, organizing under the line "no skyscrapers, no rezoning at Preston and Royal" and collecting more than 4,500 signatures against it. Not every voice at the hearing ran that direction. Resident Steven McCoy spoke in favor, telling the commission the project could offer downsizing options for aging homeowners and bring "walkable retail and restaurants" back to the corner. The city council has not yet set a date for its final vote.
Here is the tension worth sitting with: supporters describe this corner as underused, a site that needs density to come back to life. But it sits directly across the street from a corner that just landed one of the most talked-about restaurant openings in Dallas this year, without a single zoning variance.
One detail from the August hearing matters more than the vote count. City planning staff told commissioners that a recent Texas law now allows significant multifamily development by right on commercially zoned property, meaning the site could theoretically support hundreds of apartment units even without this rezoning request, depending on parking, engineering, and traffic constraints. That single fact reframes the choice in front of the council. A vote against Burk's specific towers is not automatically a vote for keeping the corner as it is today. The baseline itself has shifted.
On August 4, more than 150 residents filled Northaven United Methodist Church for the public launch of a new coalition called D13 Together, bringing Preserve Preston Hollow into a broader alliance with neighborhood groups from Bluffview, Wimberley Court, Melshire Estates, SoHip, West Kessler, Pepper Square, the HEB Coalition, and Safe City Hall. Spokesperson Doug Hazelbaker, a former Plano planning commissioner, and Preserve Preston Hollow's Margaret Chabris both addressed the crowd. The coalition's complaint extends beyond Preston and Royal to a second rezoning request at Walnut Hill Lane and Betty Jane Lane in Melshire Estates, and to what several speakers described as unresponsive leadership from council member Gay Donnell Willis on both cases.
That is the part a drive through the intersection won't tell you. What looks like a single corner dispute is now the flashpoint for a citywide argument about how much say an established neighborhood gets over what rises on its own commercial edges.
No council date has been set. Until one is, the corner will keep doing what it has done all summer: one side full of reservations, the other side full of yard signs. Testimony at the August hearing raised concerns about traffic near St. Mark's School on Preston Road, a detail that will likely resurface whenever the council does calendar its vote.
For now, the fastest-moving change at Preston and Royal isn't the one tied up in City Hall. It's the one you can already walk into tonight.
If you're weighing what a shift like this could mean for property values, traffic patterns, or the pace of change in a neighborhood you already call home, that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground read the J. Klefeker Group tracks across Dallas-Fort Worth. Book a consultation and we'll walk you through what we're seeing corner by corner.
