Drive down Skillman Street on a Saturday morning and you will pass a chain-link fence wrapped around a squat brick building at 1904 Skillman, the old home of Matt's Rancho Martinez. The fence has been there long enough that the runners looping back from White Rock Lake barely glance at it anymore. Three doors down, the patio at Mot Hai Ba is already filling up for lunch.
That contrast is the actual story of this stretch of Lakewood right now. Everyone has been waiting on the big Italian steakhouse behind the fence. Meanwhile the neighborhood kept cooking without it.
The Restaurant Everyone Keeps Almost Opening
Serritella Prime Italian Steakhouse was announced in 2024. It was supposed to open in early 2025, then early 2026. As of a Cravedfw report from this spring, it still had not opened, though the co-owner confirmed to the Dallas Morning News that the project was delayed but still happening. Whether the doors are actually open by the time you read this is genuinely hard to say, given the track record.
What's coming, whenever it lands, is not small. Lakewood Hospitality Group is building out 16,000 square feet with a 250-seat dining room, a market for grab-and-go pasta and Wagyu, and a hidden back-room lounge called COSA. The kitchen will be run by Ryan Ferguson, previously head chef at Nonna and Fachini in Highland Park. This is the kind of anchor project a corridor waits years for.
The waiting is exactly the point. While a 16,000-square-foot concept works through permitting and buildout timelines, the three blocks around it did not sit idle.
What Grew Up Around the Construction Fence
Mot Hai Ba has been on this stretch since 2013 and already carries a Michelin Bib Gourmand. Chef Peja Krstic blends French technique with Vietnamese cooking, built on a whole-animal philosophy passed down from his grandfather. The menu runs to ginger and lemongrass duck hearts and kimchi foie gras dumplings, served on a patio strung with bulb lights that DiningOut has called one of the neighborhood's better settings for a relaxed night out. Lakewood Landing and The Wine Therapist sit within the same few blocks. None of these places needed Serritella to open first. The corridor already had its Michelin nod without the anchor tenant.
The Slow-Cook Method
A few blocks over on Gaston Avenue, Molino Olōyō is taking the opposite path to a storefront. Chef Olivia López and her partner Jonathan Percival started as a ghost kitchen selling tamales, tortillas, and salsas. From there they moved into casual pop-ups at Wayward Coffee Co., where their breakfast tacos earned recognition from Texas Monthly, before layering in full tasting-menu nights with contemporary takes on Mexican cooking. Now they are building out a permanent space at 4422 Gaston Ave, in the storefront that used to house Cry Wolf. A May 2025 Instagram post from the pair hinted at an opening within the first half of 2026, a window that has since closed. Whether the doors on Gaston are open by the time you read this is worth confirming locally, the kind of understated timeline you would expect from a restaurant that spent years earning its regulars one delivery order at a time.
It is a different growth pattern than Serritella's, and arguably a more typical one for this part of Dallas. The neighborhood's best openings tend to arrive slowly, tested first as a pop-up or a market stall, before they ever sign a lease.
Two More Reasons the Regulars Aren't Worried
Bagel Bros followed a similar arc. Brothers Johnny and Ruben Gomez are well known in Lakewood for their bagels. After Ruben sold Benny's Bagels Lakewood in 2024, the two came back with a sequel, opening Bagel Bros at 9219 Garland Rd this past fall. The menu leans into a pork roll, egg, and cheddar bagel sandwich alongside a nostalgic pizza bagel, proof that a good bagel program in this neighborhood does not disappear when a name changes hands. It just gets picked back up.
And on Mockingbird, Olivella's has been slinging Neapolitan and Roman-style pies since it first opened near SMU in the 2000s. The Lakewood location's black truffle pizza, a no-sauce pie with mozzarella, Italian ham, mushrooms, and a finish of truffle oil, remains one of the more reliable reasons to skip the wait list somewhere else entirely.
The Trail Sets the Clock
None of this happens in a vacuum. White Rock Lake covers 1,015 acres with more than nine miles of biking and hiking trail circling the water, and the weekend rhythm around it shapes what gets built nearby. Saturday mornings belong to run clubs and marathoners logging miles around the lake. On Wednesdays, many of those same regulars turn up at White Rock Alehouse and Brewery to recharge. It is a built-in customer base for anyone opening a patio within walking distance of the water.
The Saturday market circuit adds its own texture. The White Rock Local Market rotates weekends between two spots, the first and third Saturdays at Lakeside Baptist Church and the second and fourth at The Green Spot, running 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. with local growers, bakers, and the kind of duck eggs that sell out before ten. Down on the shoreline, the Bath House Cultural Center, a converted 1920s bathhouse, keeps the water working double duty as both a trail and an arts venue, hosting everything from small art fairs to the Festival of Independent Theaters.
Put those pieces together and a Saturday here writes itself:
- Trail loop before 9 a.m., while the lake is still quiet
- Market stop at whichever location is up that weekend
- Lunch at Mot Hai Ba or a slice from Olivella's
- An afternoon detour to the Bath House if something is showing
- Wednesday circles back for the Alehouse recharge, whether you ran that day or not
The Actual Lesson of the Fence on Skillman
The interesting thing about Serritella is not the delay itself. Restaurants slip their timelines constantly. The interesting thing is that the surrounding corridor never treated the delay as a problem to solve. Mot Hai Ba did not wait for a bigger neighbor to validate the block. Molino Olōyō did not rush a storefront just because a flashier project was moving faster on paper. Bagel Bros did not need a splashy debut to bring back a following that already existed.
That is a different kind of food scene than the one built around a single marquee opening. It is one where the small, chef-driven spots carry the corridor on their own, and the big anchor, whenever it finally arrives, gets to join something that was already working.
If you already call Lakewood home, none of this requires you to do anything. Just know the fence on Skillman will come down eventually, and when it does, it will be opening into a neighborhood that never stopped setting its own table. If you are comparing Lakewood to Dallas's other classic neighborhoods, we have also mapped out how these areas differ from Highland Park, University Park, and Bluffview elsewhere on our site.
S&R Development has spent years building custom homes in Lakewood and the neighborhoods around White Rock Lake. Contact Us if you would like to talk about building here.