The Lake Highlands Rundown: New Openings, Familiar Corners, and What's Actually Happening This Season

For a long time, the shorthand for Lake Highlands was geographic. You lived near White Rock Lake, you had a big backyard, and if you wanted a real night out, you drove south to Lakewood or west to Greenville. That map is quietly redrawing itself. The interior of the neighborhood, roughly the spine that runs from Skillman and Walnut Hill down to Abrams and Audelia, now holds enough gravity that most weeks you can leave the car parked.

This isn't a story about a boom. It's a story about a neighborhood that finally has the density of small, specific places a resident can build a week around. Below is what's new, what's holding steady, and what's worth putting on the calendar between now and fall.

The shift you can feel on Skillman

Ten years ago, the phrase "chef-driven" attached to Lake Highlands was a novelty. Resident Taqueria opened at Lake Highlands Plaza at Walnut Hill Lane and Audelia Road because owners Andrew and Amy Savoie lived in the neighborhood and realized there were few taquerias nearby, with Andrew bringing a résumé that included Jean Georges in New York and Bouchon in Yountville. That single opening set a template other operators have since followed: pick the neighborhood first, build the concept second.

The most recent example is the most telling. Brothers Esneyder and Richard Ospina opened the first U.S. location of Unimarket, a Latin American one-stop shop for dinner, coffee, or groceries to take home, sixteen years after opening the first Unimarket in Calgary, Canada, transforming a Lake Highlands space that formerly housed a tanning salon. The Ospinas had three Calgary locations and picked Dallas, and inside Dallas they picked Lake Highlands.

That's the shift. Operators who could go anywhere in the metro are choosing this ZIP code on purpose.

New arrivals worth a first visit

A handful of places have opened or are still finding their regulars. Treat this as a shortlist to work through over the next month.

• Unimarket. A market, cafe, and sizzling grill in one, stocking 650 items from across Latin America. The steak plate lands at $19.50 and cooks like a maximalist version of fajitas, the horchata latte and guava puff work as a nightcap, and a Colombian bowl with sweet plantains and chicharron runs about $12. A soft opening began January 10, and dedicated regulars showed up almost immediately.
• Goldie's. A neighborhood spot serving nostalgic food and drinks at 9850 Walnut Hill Ln. #305, in the space that was previously RM 12:20 Bistro, which closed in February 2023, open for dinner and late-night. The concept comes from Brandon Hays of This and That Hospitality, whose earlier projects include Sfuzzi and Ferris Wheelers, with executive chef Matt Perry, a DFW veteran of Neighborhood Services, The Porch, and Billy Can Can. The late-night hours are the tell. Late-night dining used to be the thing you left Lake Highlands to find.

The corners that anchor everything else

New places get the press. The corners that hold a neighborhood together are the ones you stop noticing because you're there every week.

Cane Rosso, at 7150 Skillman St. #190, is that kind of corner now. Happy hour runs Monday through Friday from 3 to 6 p.m. with $2 off apps and house cocktails, $6 house wines, and $10 Margherita pizzas, and weekend brunch brings $4 mimosas and $3 frosé. The math on a Tuesday walk-in is hard to beat.

Resident Taqueria still does what it set out to do. A vegetarian taco with mushroom, poblano, Oaxaca cheese, and a walnut sauce drawing on the tradition of chiles rellenos rotates its mushroom variety by season, sometimes maitake, sometimes oyster, occasionally morel. That's not a taco you order without noticing.

Cedar & Vine frames itself around the neighborhood explicitly, with the restaurant stating that it is East Dallas and it is Lake Highlands. That framing sounds like marketing until you've eaten at three neighborhood restaurants in a row that clearly wish they were somewhere else. Cedar & Vine doesn't.

The Nextdoor consensus for the area consistently returns to a couple of names that predate all of this. Roman Cucina draws first-class-and-just-delicious reactions from neighbors who picked up dinner the night before, and Dream Cafe holds the informal title for best patio brunch in northeast Dallas. Both continue to earn the loyalty.

The Town Center as the neighborhood's living room

Lake Highlands Town Center sits at the southeast quadrant of Walnut Hill Lane and Skillman, anchored by Sprouts, with a mix of restaurant and retail tenants oriented toward the surrounding trade area. Anchor plus retail is the mall-brochure version. The version residents live is that the Town Center has quietly become the neighborhood's shared front lawn.

The Lake Highlands and North Lake Highlands PIDs run free outdoor concerts at the new and improved town center, along with the annual Trunk or Treat and the annual Teen Job Fair that connects teens to local employers. The concerts are the piece worth calendaring now. They aren't ticketed, they aren't downtown, and they land within walking distance of a Sprouts run and a Cane Rosso pizza. Few Dallas neighborhoods can string those three things together in one evening.

The Town Center's real function isn't retail. It's the informal town square Lake Highlands didn't have twenty years ago, and once you notice the substitution, most of the neighborhood's other changes start making sense.

The lake side of the week

The other half of Lake Highlands life still runs along the water. For the Love of the Lake, the volunteer organization dedicated to preserving and enhancing White Rock Lake through hands-on service and ongoing events, notes that the bald eagles are back at Lake Highlands Park. That is a genuine reason to walk over with binoculars this season if you haven't. It's also a fact that says something quiet about the health of the corridor. Bald eagles don't stage a comeback on a corridor that isn't being looked after.

Across the lake on the Lakewood side, the Bath House Cultural Center's Lakefront Live! season on the Lake Level stage wrapped in spring, with the next season slated for Fall 2026 and applications open for the September 2026 through May run. That gives residents a good excuse for a longer loop around the lake in October with a concert at the end of it.

The construction you'll start noticing

One item belongs in a rundown like this even though it isn't open yet. Mattamy Homes started development on Lake Highlands Village in Northeast Dallas, a gated townhome community of 85 homes with private garages, with sales expected to start in June 2027. Mattamy's Dallas division president, John Kuntz, framed the appeal as the suburbia-inside-the-city feel with strong schools, parks, and quick access to the places people need to be.

For current residents, the practical takeaway is street-level. Construction traffic tends to reroute the small daily habits, coffee runs, school drop-offs, the way you cut through to Skillman, more than any single number in a market report. If your usual route runs near the site, expect to swap it out for a while.

A weekend, sketched

Here's a low-effort weekend that only works because of what's now within a few minutes of most Lake Highlands front doors.

• Saturday morning: a slow lap of White Rock Lake, then coffee and a guava puff at Unimarket.
• Saturday evening: brunch-menu holdovers at Cane Rosso if you time the 3 p.m. happy hour, or a proper dinner at Goldie's if you want the late-night option.
• Sunday: Dream Cafe patio, followed by an easy walk into the Town Center for whatever the PID has programmed on the lawn.

None of that requires the tollway. That is the part that would have sounded implausible a decade ago.

The through-line

Lake Highlands used to borrow its identity from White Rock Lake and its address from East Dallas. It is starting to have an identity of its own, built out of specific operators who chose this neighborhood over more obvious ones, a town center that functions as a living room, and a lake corridor healthy enough to bring the eagles back. That combination is rarer in Dallas than it sounds, and it's the reason the neighborhood feels different to live in this year than it did two years ago.

If you're thinking about how your own home fits into that shift, or you're curious what the changing texture of the neighborhood means for the block you already live on, we'd love to talk. Start your home story with Graham Group and request a free home valuation whenever you're ready.