If you run, walk, or bike the loop around White Rock Lake, you spent a chunk of 2026 rerouting around orange barricades near the spillway. If you've driven past 1904 Skillman Street hoping to see lights on at the Italian steakhouse everyone's been talking about since 2024, you're still waiting. Both projects hit trouble around the same stretch of Lakewood. Only one of them finished on time.
That gap is the story worth telling, because it says something true about how this neighborhood actually works that a simple list of openings won't.
Five Months, One Sinkhole, Two Closures
The trouble started the first week of March, when a sinkhole opened near the lake's spillway between Lawther Drive and Garland Road. Early estimates of how deep it went were all over the place. CBS Texas reported it at roughly 14 feet. The Lake Highlands Advocate put it at 20 to 40 feet. Nobody was measuring the same hole the same way, which is its own small lesson in how fast information moves before anyone's actually finished the assessment.
The trail closed for the weekend, reopened Monday, then closed again Wednesday after storms rolled through. That pattern, close, patch, reopen, close again, repeated through March and into April, when a Lakewood/East Dallas Advocate reader flagged that a digital sign near the Dallas Arboretum bridge still read "Trail closed ahead" weeks after the trail had reopened. Dallas Park and Recreation confirmed the trail was open and blamed a lagging sign update, which took another few days to sort out.
Then, on April 2, the city announced the real fix was coming: a full closure to grout an abandoned 36-inch wastewater main running about 2,800 feet under that same stretch of trail, the root cause behind the sinkhole in the first place. Mobilization began the week of June 15. Dallas Water Utilities crews worked 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., Monday through Saturday, with an estimated two to three months to finish.
They didn't need that long. On August 5, the White Rock Lake Task Force reported that the White Rock Lake Trail along Garland Road will reopen no later than Friday, August 7. It did. Two months ahead of the schedule the city itself had set.
The Restaurant Everyone in Lakewood Already Knows the Name Of
A mile and a half away on Skillman Street, a different kind of construction has been running on a very different clock.
Serritella Prime Italian Steakhouse was announced back in September 2024, taking over the old Matt's Rancho Martinez building after that Tex-Mex institution closed following almost 35 years in the neighborhood. The plan, from Lakewood Hospitality Group, was ambitious even by East Dallas standards: a 250-seat steakhouse under executive chef Ryan Ferguson, formerly of Nonna and Fachini, a companion market selling house-made pasta and Akaushi wagyu from the ownership group's own cattle operation, and a hidden speakeasy called COSA tucked behind it. The original target was spring 2025.
Spring 2025 came and went. By October 2025, co-owner Jason Gorsuch was telling the Dallas Morning News, "We're moving forward, absolutely. We've had some hurdles to clear," and pushing the opening to the first quarter of 2026. By May 2026, the project still had no confirmed date, and the trail down the street had somehow already caught up and passed it in urgency.
None of this means the project stalled for lack of ambition. The building needed more work than the team expected, with recent upgrades touching the roof, plumbing, and air conditioning according to city permitting records. It sits in a corridor that already includes Mot Hai Ba, Lakewood Landing, and The Wine Therapist within a few blocks, so the anticipation isn't manufactured. It's just been running on private-sector time, which behaves differently than a city crew working against a council newsletter deadline.
Here's the timeline side by side:
Month | White Rock Lake Trail | Serritella (1904 Skillman St) |
|---|---|---|
Sept 2024 | No update | Project announced, opening targeted for spring 2025 |
Oct 2025 | No update | Co-owner confirms delay, new target "first quarter of 2026" |
March 2026 | Sinkhole closes trail near the spillway, reopens, closes again after storms | No update |
April 2026 | City announces a second closure to grout the old pipeline beneath the trail | No update |
May 2026 | No update | Still no confirmed opening date |
June 2026 | Grouting work mobilizes, trail closes for an estimated two to three months | No update |
Aug 2026 | Trail reopens Aug. 7, two months ahead of schedule | No confirmed date has surfaced since |
What You Can Actually Walk Into Right Now
While all that was unfolding, three other spots quietly changed what a Tuesday night in Lakewood looks like.
My Dream Latin Cuisine opened in late March at 7260 Gaston Avenue, in a building with some history: it was Andrea's Italian for more than a decade before Las Favela took it over, and now it's a family-run Latin American kitchen from Salvador Gamón, who moved to Dallas from Zacatecas in 1992 and spent three decades working his way up from dishwasher to kitchen manager at Matt's Rancho Martinez, Mattito's, Truluck's, and Hugo's Invitados. He opened the place with his brother Hugo and his niece Ivette Ipina.
Burger Schmurger has been holding down 718 North Buckner Boulevard since April 2025, a few blocks from the lake in the old BarNone space. It's the brick-and-mortar version of a pop-up that started in founder Dave Culwell's backyard during the pandemic and went on to be called the best burger in Dallas by D Magazine, the Dallas Observer, and the Dallas Morning News before it ever had a permanent kitchen. This year it landed a nomination for CultureMap's 2026 Tastemaker Award for Best New Restaurant, alongside names like Avra Estiatorio and Domodomo Ko.
Total Wine & More opened August 20 at 6330 East Mockingbird Lane, in the space that sat dark for over a year after Joann Fabrics closed as part of that chain's nationwide shutdown. The remodel came in at roughly $1.2 million to convert 25,000 square feet, and it's the third Total Wine location inside Dallas city limits, joining an intersection that already has Tom Thumb, Sephora, and Sprouts.
What's Still on the Calendar
Serritella and COSA remain the neighborhood's most anticipated no-show. Maman, the New York bakery known for its chocolate chip cookies at Preston Road and Northwest Highway, has also confirmed it's coming to Lakewood, with no address or date attached yet, part of a broader expansion that includes Casa Linda and Frisco locations expected sometime in 2026 or 2027.
Two open storefronts, two different kinds of patience required.
The Docks Stayed Open the Whole Time
Not everything on the water needed a permit. On July 5, the White Rock Boat Club held its open house at 340 East Lawther Drive, inviting anyone curious about sailing or kayaking to walk the dock and talk to members. The club has run as an all-volunteer operation since 1961, which means it predates most of the construction signage that's gone up and come down around it this year. While the city was grouting pipe and the steakhouse was still waiting on drywall, the club just kept doing what it's done for 65 years: putting people on boats.
Why One Timeline Held and the Other Didn't
The pattern here isn't that public projects are always faster or that restaurants always run late. It's that the trail had one thing Serritella never did: a standing task force, a district council member's newsletter, and a hard public deadline that got repeated in writing every few weeks. Somebody was checking the city's homework in real time, and the pressure of that visibility seems to have moved the actual work along faster than anyone promised.
Serritella answers to permitting, financing, staffing, and a build-out that turned out to be more complicated than a 16,000-square-foot, three-concept project usually is. Nobody's publishing a monthly update on its construction the way Dallas Water Utilities had to publish one on a wastewater main. That doesn't make the wait less real for the neighbors who've been watching that corner since 2024. It just means the two clocks in this story were never running on the same system, even though they sit a mile and a half apart.
If you've lived here long enough to have an opinion about both, you already know which one to check on your phone and which one you just have to keep driving past.
For anyone thinking through what a year like this actually does to a specific block, not just a headline median, The Ryan Group has spent years watching Lakewood's small changes add up to something bigger. If you want to talk through what's happening on your own street, schedule a free consultation and we'll walk through it together.
