Lake Highlands Never Waited On Its Town Center To Catch Up

Sprouts anchors the retail wing of Lake Highlands Town Center at 7110 Skillman Street, the grocery chain the neighborhood was promised would eventually show up. It took a while. Lake Highlands Town Center was started in 2007 but has been slow to develop. The project was the brainchild of City Council member Bill Blaydes, who represented the area from 2003 to 2007, and in 2005 the city created the Skillman Corridor TIF to subsidize a denser mix of housing around a planned light-rail stop. More than $86 million went into infrastructure alone, including $13 million from the public sector and over $10 million from DART for a new rail station. Sprouts was slated to anchor the project's retail phase once construction finally broke ground years after the TIF was formed, and today it's the one piece of the original plan a shopper can actually walk into.

That's the official story of how Lake Highlands got its grocery store. It is not the story of how the neighborhood got its social life. While the Town Center inched along on its own schedule, the places where people in Lake Highlands actually gather this summer opened somewhere else entirely: a strip center at Northwest Highway and Plano Road that had already burned through three different bar concepts, a Skillman Street pizza spot that never needed the Town Center to draw a crowd, and a farmers market that doesn't have a permanent address at all. The neighborhood didn't sit around waiting for the master plan. It built its own version in the meantime, and this week is a good excuse to see where that version landed.

The address that couldn't hold a concept

Northview Plaza, at 10677 E. Northwest Highway, has been a hard address for a sports bar to hold onto. The space has seen a succession of sports-bar concepts over the years, most recently Tailgaters Sports Bar & Grill, before that Jake's Gameday, a spinoff of the Dallas chain Jakes Burgers & Beer that occupied the location for four years, and previously End Zone Bar & Grill. Three names, one address, none of them lasting.

Charlie's Tavern & Kitchen is the fourth attempt, and it opened with a different theory of what the space needed. The concept comes from restaurateur Justin Newton, who has 20 years of hotel and restaurant experience and opened the original Charlie's Tavern & Kitchen in Arlington near UT Arlington in February 2026 before bringing a second location to Lake Highlands. The Lake Highlands location celebrated its grand opening on Saturday, June 27, 2026, with live music, World Cup watching, all-day happy hour specials, and free drinks for the first 100 guests. Newton's read on why the prior tenants didn't last wasn't about the food. It was about what kind of room the neighborhood actually wanted. "I was looking to build something that was not a typical sports environment, with elevated bar food, in a pub environment," he said.

The name is a small joke: Newton named the restaurant after his 11-year-old canary-winged conure bird, Charlie. The bigger bet is on repetition. Charlie's hosts live music with local bands, karaoke once a week, a pool table, and a poker league that gathers about 30 to 50 people every Wednesday. The bar is also putting together a school supply drive to support nearby public schools. Newton retained much of the staff from the previous restaurant, including employees who worked through several concepts and management teams over the past decade, which means the bartenders who couldn't keep End Zone or Jake's Gameday afloat are the same ones now running the poker league. Newton says he's aiming for the neighborhood spirit of Cheers, and he was drawn to Lake Highlands specifically for its tight-knit sense of community, which so far has exceeded his expectations. A karaoke night and a standing Wednesday card game are not marketing tactics you run for tourists. They only work if the same fifty people show up again next week, which is a bet on the neighborhood the previous three tenants apparently didn't make.

The regulars were already here

Charlie's is the newest name in the neighborhood, but it's not the foundation. Cane Rosso operates its Lake Highlands location at 7150 Skillman Street, with a weekday happy hour running 3 to 6 p.m., and it didn't need a Town Center grand opening to build a following. Elsewhere in Lake Highlands, Resident Taqueria draws on the culinary background of chef Andrew Savoie, whose résumé runs from New York to New Orleans to Napa, including stints tied to Bouchon and Jean Georges. Neither restaurant is inside the master-planned Town Center. Both were already anchoring the neighborhood's dining habits before this summer's openings gave the area a second wind.

Goldie's set the same pattern a couple of years earlier. The nostalgic food-and-drink spot opened at 9850 Walnut Hill Lane #305 in the spring of 2024, in the space previously occupied by RM 12:20 Bistro, which closed in February 2023. The concept came from Brandon Hays, his wife Brittany Grignon, and restaurant veteran Brittni Clayton. Another recycled address, another operator betting that a closed restaurant's old bones just needed the right occupant, not a fresh building.

A market with no fixed address at all

If Charlie's represents commitment to one physical spot, the neighborhood's other institution runs on the opposite model entirely. The White Rock Farmers Market, operated by Good Local Markets, sets up inside Lake Highlands Town Center, but vendors alternate weekly between Green Grocer and Lakeside Baptist Church, so the market's exact location changes from one Saturday to the next. There's no permanent stall, no fixed street corner. The market exists as a standing appointment between the neighborhood and its vendors, not a piece of real estate.

This week happens to carry extra weight for that market. August 6 through 12 is National Farmers Market Week, now in its 24th year as an annual celebration of the role local markets play in the food system, and the Good Local Markets stop that lands inside Lake Highlands Town Center keeps running on its normal weekly schedule right through it, wherever it happens to be parked that Saturday. A reminder that the neighborhood's food infrastructure was never really about the buildings around it.

Where to find it this week

What the pattern actually says

None of this happened because a master plan finally worked. It happened because a handful of operators looked at buildings that had already failed once or twice and decided the location wasn't the problem. The bar at Northwest Highway and Plano Road didn't need better branding after End Zone and Jake's Gameday. It needed someone willing to run a poker night every single Wednesday until people started calling it theirs. The farmers market didn't need a permanent building. It needed vendors willing to show up whether they were parked at a grocery store or a church parking lot that week.

The Town Center itself is still finishing what it started nearly two decades ago, and the Sprouts on the corner is proof that big, planned things do eventually arrive in Lake Highlands. But the parts of the neighborhood that feel most alive this summer are the ones that never waited on that timeline. They rented the space nobody else could hold onto, or they gave up on having a fixed address altogether, and either way, they're the reason there's somewhere to go this Wednesday night that has nothing to do with a twenty-year-old TIF district.

If you're already living here, you probably don't need a reason to try the poker league or catch the market on a Green Grocer Saturday. But if you're the kind of person who notices when a neighborhood's actual rhythm doesn't match its official plan, that's usually a decent sign of a place worth paying attention to. Brianna East works East Dallas neighborhoods like this one every day, including the ones that took twenty years to build the thing they promised and got interesting in spite of it. Let's Connect.