"I like to resurrect them, that's really my passion," Jim Reid said about old buildings, standing in a former gas station on Highway 377 that he'd just turned into a farmhouse café. He wasn't talking about Harvest Town Center. Nobody was, back when he said it. The national tenants everyone in Argyle has been watching for two years were still just permit filings and construction fencing at the time.
Now Chuy's is close enough to touch. The chain's own locations page lists an August 10 opening at 1061 Market Way, though the Cross Timbers Gazette reported in April that the restaurant had set a Monday, August 24 date. Either way, the wait is measured in days now, not quarters. That's real news for a town that has watched this corner of I-35W and FM 407 fill in one national name at a time. But it's not the biggest thing that happened to how Argyle eats this year. The two restaurants that already reshaped this town opened months ago, and neither one has a second location anywhere else in the country.
The Corner Everyone Was Watching
Harvest Town Center has been the story for so long that it's easy to forget how recently most of it existed only on a rendering. Chick-fil-A opened first, on August 30, 2024, with local owner-operator Kenny Arthur running it. McDonald's and a Chase Bank branch followed. Then, this spring, Tom Thumb opened its 63,000-square-foot store at 1046 Market Way, the grocery anchor that Harvest and Pecan Square residents had been asking for since the neighborhoods themselves broke ground.
Chuy's will be the first sit-down, full-service concept in that lineup, and it's the chain's first location anywhere in southern Denton County. According to state filings, the building runs about 5,426 square feet and cost roughly $1.75 million to build. The Cross Timbers Gazette reported in May that European Wax Center, Chipotle, Mo' Bettahs, and a Bank of America branch have also joined the center recently, and that a second retail building, an 18,000-square-foot project called 5:18 Plaza, is planned across from Argyle West Elementary on Old Justin Road, with a summer 2027 completion target.
So here's what's actually true right now, in the first week of August 2026, if you're standing at that intersection:
- Open: Chick-fil-A, McDonald's, Chase Bank, Tom Thumb
- Opening this month: Chuy's Tex-Mex
- Under development nearby: 5:18 Plaza (expected 2027)
That's a real corner. It's also, at this point, a predictable one. Every tenant that's landed there is a company headquartered somewhere else, expanding into a growing zip code because the math worked. That's not a criticism. It's just not the part of the story that tells you anything about Argyle specifically, as opposed to any other fast-growing suburb along I-35W.
Two Restaurants Already Changed How Argyle Eats
The restaurants that actually changed something opened on the older side of town, along the historic 377 corridor, and both of them exist because of decisions that had nothing to do with demographic projections.
A Pitmaster Came Home
Brandon Hurtado didn't need Argyle. Hurtado Barbecue already had locations in Arlington, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Mansfield, a concession stand at Globe Life Field as the official barbecue of the Texas Rangers, and an honorable mention on Texas Monthly's list of the state's top 50 barbecue joints. What he wanted was a location he didn't have to drive to.
When he signed the lease, he posted on Facebook that he was "raising our family in Argyle, coaching sports here" for years before finally opening a restaurant in his own zip code. The fifth Hurtado Barbecue location took over the former St. Argyle's Cajun Kitchen building at 421 US-377, a space that had sat vacant since July 2022. Reporting from Community Impact put the opening at March 2026, which means the restaurant most food writers in North Texas have been trying to get a table at for years has been sitting on Argyle's Main Street for months now, with brisket plates, house-made sausage, and a brunch menu that includes pork belly butt on french toast.
The Mexicue style Hurtado built his name on, smoked meat run through Tex-Mex technique, means Argyle now has a nationally recognized pitmaster's full menu within a few minutes of homes that used to require a drive to Fort Worth or Arlington for the same thing.
The Gas Station Jim Reid Wouldn't Let Die
Little Joe's Farmstead opened on October 1, 2024, in a building most people in Argyle had driven past for decades without a second thought: the old Johnny Joe's convenience store and gas station, built in the 1960s. Owner Jim Reid, a real estate developer who has spent his career finding old buildings worth saving, remodeled it into something closer to a Napa Valley farmhouse, with rocking chairs on the porch and a full-service coffee bar inside.
The restaurant is named for Reid's late son Kevin, who was diagnosed with leukemia as a young child and treated for years at Texas Children's Hospital. Every dollar of profit goes toward helping other families cover chemotherapy, radiation, and the everyday costs that pile up during pediatric cancer treatment, the same model Reid built at Little Matt's, a similar restaurant he opened in Houston in 2009. According to reporting in the Cross Timbers Gazette, the restaurant hit its three-year sales goal within ten months of opening. The Town of Argyle awarded Little Joe's a $100,000 grant in July 2025 to help fund site improvements and The Scoop, the ice cream counter that opened that same month.
A breast cancer benefit hosted at Little Joe's in April 2025 raised $250,000 for five women's treatments. That's not a marketing angle attached after the fact. It's the entire reason the building has a second life instead of a demolition permit.
What's Actually New This Month
There's a third name worth knowing if you haven't already found it. Quandary Kitchen & Market opened in November 2025 at 429 US-377, the former home of Kimzey's Coffee, according to the Denton Record-Chronicle. Between Quandary, Hurtado, and Little Joe's, the stretch of 377 through Argyle's Central Business District has added three sit-down concepts in under two years, none of them chains, all of them run by people who either live in town or built their reputation somewhere else and chose to bring it home.
That's the part worth sitting with. Chuy's opening this month is a real milestone, and the corner at I-35W and FM 407 will keep filling in with names you already recognize from other suburbs. But the restaurants that will define what eating in Argyle actually feels like five years from now already opened. They're not waiting on a construction schedule. You can get a table tonight.
If watching Argyle's commercial corridors fill in has you thinking about what your own property here is actually worth in this market, or what buying into a specific side of town might mean for resale down the road, Ryan Stoddard is happy to walk through it with you. Schedule a free consultation.
