For years, living in Lakewood meant keeping a mental list of trips you'd eventually have to make somewhere else. A wine run meant driving to Mockingbird Station or further west. A proper Italian dinner meant Henderson or Knox. A special-occasion table with white tablecloths and a reservation you actually had to plan for meant Uptown. Lakewood had the lake, the bungalows, the Sunday-morning coffee shops. It did not have the errands that pull people out of the neighborhood on a Friday night.
This summer, three of those four trips got shorter. The fourth one is still boarded up behind construction fencing on Skillman Street, more than a year past when it was supposed to open.
That gap between what landed and what's still stalled is the actual story of Lakewood's 2026. Not that things opened. Things always open somewhere in Dallas. It's which trips got solved fast and cheap, and which one keeps sliding, that tells you something true about how this particular stretch of East Dallas changes.
The List Lakewood Has Been Working Off For Years
Ask anyone who's lived off Gaston or Skillman for a decade what they drive out of the neighborhood for, and the answers repeat. A big-format liquor and wine store, because Lakewood never had one. A destination Italian dinner, because the closest thing was a 20-minute drive. A Latin restaurant nice enough for a birthday, not just weeknight tacos. A cocktail lounge with live music you could walk to instead of drive to.
Here's where each of those actually stands as of this month:
| The errand | Old answer | Where it stands now |
|---|---|---|
| Wine and spirits run | Mockingbird Station or Oak Lawn | Total Wine & More opened at 6330 E. Mockingbird Ln. on August 20 |
| Special-occasion Italian dinner | Henderson Avenue or Knox Street | Serritella Prime, still under construction, no confirmed date |
| Latin celebration table | Uptown | My Dream Latin Cuisine, open now at 7260 Gaston Ave. |
| Evening cocktail lounge with live music | Deep Ellum or Uptown | COSA Speakeasy, tied to the same delayed Serritella build-out |
Two out of four are done. One is a work in progress that's been in progress for almost two years.
What Actually Turned the Lights On This Summer
The Total Wine opening is the cleanest win, mostly because it had a hard date and hit it. The store took over the old Joann Fabrics box at Mockingbird Lane and Abrams Road, a space that had sat dark since Joann closed in early 2025 after the chain's national bankruptcy. Total Wine's own opening release put the finished retail floor at over 15,000 square feet, carrying more than 8,000 wines, 4,500 spirits and 2,500 beers, plus an in-store classroom for tastings with visiting winemakers and distillers. It's the company's third store inside Dallas city limits and its 15th across Dallas-Fort Worth. For a neighborhood that had exactly zero big-format bottle shops, that's a real change to the weekly errand list, not a press-release change.
My Dream Latin Cuisine is the more interesting opening, because the address has a history most drive-by visitors won't know. 7260 Gaston Ave. was Andrea's Italian for more than a decade before that restaurant closed, then briefly became Las Favela, which also didn't last. Now it's a Latin restaurant from Salvador Gamón, who moved to Dallas from Zacatecas in 1992 and spent three decades working his way through the city's restaurant scene, starting as a dishwasher and later working the floor and kitchen at Matt's Rancho Martinez, Mattito's, Truluck's and Hugo's Invitados. If you'd noted the space cycling through two failed concepts and assumed it was cursed, Gamón's résumé is the reason to reconsider. He's spent thirty years learning exactly which Dallas restaurants work and which don't, and he's betting that knowledge on the third life of one building.
Neither of these arrived alone. Back in April, Maman opened its second Dallas café inside Hillside Village, just up the road, bringing the French bakery chain's espresso and pastry program to Lakewood after its first Dallas location in the Park Cities. It's a smaller addition, a coffee-and-croissant stop rather than an evening destination, but it's one more piece of evidence that the corridor had already started filling in before the bigger summer openings landed.
The One Everyone Actually Asks About
Ask a Lakewood resident what they're waiting on, and it's not Total Wine. It's Serritella.
The project was announced in September 2024 as a three-in-one concept: Serritella Prime Italian Steakhouse, a grab-and-go Serritella Market, and a speakeasy called COSA tucked behind it. It's taking over 1904 Skillman St., the address that was Matt's Rancho Martinez for nearly 35 years before that restaurant closed. The same ownership group, Lakewood Hospitality Group, also took over 6115 La Vista Dr., the former Chip's Old Fashioned Hamburgers, which had been open for a decade before it closed too. So this isn't a single vacant storefront getting a new tenant. It's two long-running East Dallas institutions, both shuttered, both absorbed into one build-out.
The original target was April 2025. By October 2025, co-owner Jason Gorsuch was telling the Dallas Morning News the project had run into unexpected structural work on the roof, plumbing and air conditioning, and pushed the opening to the first quarter of 2026. As of the most recent reporting this spring, there is still no confirmed opening date. Chef Ryan Ferguson, previously head chef at Nonna and Fachini in Highland Park, is still attached to the project. The restaurant is still designed to seat roughly 200 guests, with COSA planned as a members-and-public speakeasy operating seven nights a week, which is unusual for that kind of concept. None of that has changed. What's changed is that the gap between announcement and opening is now closer to two years than one.
If you're the kind of Lakewood resident who's been checking the restaurant's Instagram for an opening date since last spring, you're not imagining the wait. It's real, and it's longer than almost anything else that's opened in the neighborhood recently.
The Lake Runs on Its Own Calendar
None of this changes what White Rock Lake is doing, because the lake doesn't wait on Skillman Street construction. The park itself covers 1,015 acres about five miles northeast of downtown and remains one of the most heavily used parks in the entire Dallas system.
Earlier this month, on August 8, a group of volunteers spent a Saturday morning on the lake's cleanup crew, the kind of low-key community turnout that happens without needing a restaurant opening to justify it. Looking ahead, the White Rock Lake Conservancy has a member gathering planned at Birdie's Eastside on September 9, and the White Rock Lake Foundation has a community update event scheduled for September 10, followed by another evening event on November 5 built around the lake's future. None of these require a car. All of them are things a Lakewood resident can walk or bike to from a 75214 address.
That's worth sitting with. The lake's programming calendar moves independently of the restaurant openings on Mockingbird and Gaston. One doesn't depend on the other. But together, they're the reason a Lakewood resident can plan an entire week, wine store, dinner table, evening walk to a community event, without leaving the neighborhood at all. Two years ago, that wasn't close to true.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
The lesson isn't that Lakewood is having a moment, every Dallas neighborhood claims that eventually. It's that the small, fast wins and the one big anchor project are moving at completely different speeds. A national retailer with a corporate real estate team and a single-owner Latin restaurant both hit their targets inside a normal build-out window. A locally owned, ambitious three-concept project from a well-connected hospitality group has now missed its own deadline by more than a year, with no new date on record.
If you're weighing how fast this stretch of East Dallas is actually changing, that's the number to watch, not the count of new storefronts, but the gap between when something gets announced and when the doors actually open. Right now in Lakewood, that gap is telling two very different stories at once.
If you're thinking through what any of this means for your own plans in Lakewood or elsewhere in Dallas-Fort Worth, Namrata Bhatt has spent years tracking exactly this kind of neighborhood-level change. Let's Connect.
