Stand on the sidewalk at 228 South Main Street and you're looking at a building that didn't exist a year ago. Walk through the door on the left and you're at Luna Loco, ordering a Lucha Libre margarita and a plate of street tacos. Walk through the door on the right and you're at Southern Soul & Co., trying on turquoise jewelry and western wear. Same slab, same roofline, two grand openings six weeks apart. The building itself is new construction, put up specifically to give both businesses their own storefront frontage on Main Street.
That detail matters more than either tenant. Old Town Keller has spent years filling its old bones back in. This corner is the first sign that the district has started running out of old bones to fill.
What just moved into the new building
Luna Loco soft-opened on August 21 with a limited menu, went official on August 27, and has a full menu launch set for October 20. The 2,100-square-foot space is backed by restaurateurs Cary Moon and Greg Polson, along with business partner David DeWald, who already run several other venues in Old Town Keller. The current lineup leans Tex-Mex comfort food: chips and queso, enchiladas, burritos, a Taco Tuesday special, and a drink list that runs from Modelo and Dos Equis on tap to an espresso martini and a Fanta creamsicle cocktail alongside the margaritas.
Southern Soul & Co. took the other half of the building and held its official grand opening celebration on September 12, selling women's western fashion, accessories, and turquoise jewelry. Two businesses, one address, one building that the county didn't have on file a year ago.
A few blocks over, the pattern is different. Especially Sweet Gourmet Chocolate Boutique has been open since January 17, tucked behind a simple storefront sign, built around a family story that includes a son named Shane and a mission to create a space where the special needs community feels welcome. Houghton Horns, a brass instrument shop that serves musicians and educators around Keller, sits nearby as one of the district's quieter, longer-running fixtures. Neither business required new ground. They moved into buildings that were already standing.
The building that sat empty for two years
The clearest contrast to 228 South Main is 111 West Vine Street, where Wabi House opened its fourth Dallas-Fort Worth location with a soft opening on December 3 and a grand opening two days later, complete with free ramen, live DJs, and liquor tastings. The building had been Station Patio Icehouse until it closed in 2023. It sat there for roughly two years before Wabi House's chefs, Dien Nguyen and Kenzo Tran, took the 5,200-square-foot space and turned it into the largest Wabi House location the group has built, with an upgraded, family-friendly patio and a menu that includes items made specifically for the Keller crowd.
That's the more familiar Old Town story: a building goes dark, sits for a while, then gets a second life under a new operator. It's what happened at 228 South Main that breaks the pattern. Nobody backfilled a vacancy there. Somebody built a building because the existing inventory in Old Town Keller had nothing left to offer two new tenants at once.
The same thing is about to happen again a few blocks south. Hops Kitchen + Bar, an upscale steakhouse from Donny Wu and Tommy Zheng, the team behind Hush Sushi + Bar since 2022, broke ground in August at 200 Keller Parkway. The concept is billed as East China meets steakhouse, pairing premium cuts and fresh seafood with traditional Chinese cuisine and a full bar, inside a reported 7,200 square feet with a speakeasy-style lounge. Wu and Zheng relocated to North Texas from Marysville, Ohio, during the pandemic, and as Keller residents themselves, they've said they saw a gap in the neighborhood for something more elevated. It won't open until summer 2027. That's a long runway for a groundbreaking, and it means the corner will be a construction site through most of next year.
The streets underneath all of it are still being rebuilt
None of this is happening on finished ground. The city's Old Town Keller project has been running in phases since at least 2022, when construction began on Bates Street to rebuild it around a new park designed to host festivals, complete with an elevated pavilion, public art benches, added parking, gateway structures, and a landscaped path built specifically to pull pedestrians off the busier stretch of Main Street. That phase wrapped in fall 2023.
The next phase, Elm Street, is the one still underway. It covers utility replacement, improved drainage, new sidewalks, on-street parking, and a full roadway reconstruction, with $5 to $5.5 million of the funding coming through a Tarrant County transportation bond program that voters approved in 2021. The city's own timeline put completion somewhere between 2024 and 2026. The city has also described plans for a pedestrian hybrid beacon and crosswalk on Main Street just south of Bates Street, meant to connect the east side of Old Town to the west side, where similar work was finished back in 2017.
Put the pieces next to each other and the sequence looks different than it would from a single restaurant announcement. A brand-new commercial building went up and filled with two tenants. A steakhouse broke ground and won't open for another year. And the street infrastructure meant to support foot traffic between all of it is still, by the city's own account, finishing its rollout on a timeline that only just closes out this year. Old Town Keller isn't adding restaurants to a finished district. It's adding square footage while the sidewalks in front of it are still being poured.
What that means walking around this fall
For anyone whose regular loop through Old Town already includes a stop at Old Town Icehouse on South Main or a Saturday night listening to live music at Shotzee's Bar & Grill or Hollywood's Pour Shack, the practical change is proximity. The newest stops, Luna Loco, Southern Soul & Co., and eventually Hops Kitchen + Bar, sit within easy walking distance of those established anchors and of Pecan Park, where the district's history and train museums still draw a steady stream of visitors on weekends.
The Old Town Keller Merchants Association traces the district back to a train stop that opened in 1881, and the through line from then to now has always been small, independently run storefronts along US 377 on either side of FM 1709. What's different this fall is that the district is, for the first time in a while, running short on existing buildings to put those storefronts in. That's a different kind of growth than swapping out tenants in the same handful of buildings, and it's worth knowing which one you're looking at the next time a new sign goes up on Main Street.
If you're weighing what a home near this corner of Keller is actually worth once you factor in what's opening around it, that's a conversation Eric Hacker is glad to have over coffee, no obligation attached.
