Four o'clock on August 7th, the Metroport Chamber cut a ribbon in the parking lot at 13850 Chadwick Parkway, and Northlake got its newest bar. Not on a street. Not next to a coffee shop and a boutique. Inside a hockey rink.
Shark Club, the sports bar and grill owned by Dallas Stars owner Tom Gaglardi, opened its second U.S. location that afternoon, built into the Children's Health StarCenter Multisport complex. If you have driven past that stretch of SH 114 in the last few months, you already know the building. Two ice sheets, hard courts that convert between basketball and volleyball, outdoor pickleball. What you might not have clocked yet is that the restaurant now anchoring one corner of it did not choose Northlake because of foot traffic on a sidewalk. It chose Northlake because the facility next door already draws the crowd.
That is not a small detail. It is the pattern.
The Address Is a Rink, Not a Storefront
Shark Club started in Vancouver in 1993. Gaglardi, who also co-owns the restaurant chain Moxies and has a new Craft Restaurant and Beer Market coming to Dallas's Preston Center, picked Northlake for the brand's second American outpost after a first location in Plano. The CW33 report on the opening lays out the hours plainly: 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday through Thursday, midnight close on Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Sundays. Happy hour runs twice a day on weekdays, 3 to 7 p.m. and again from 10 p.m. to close. The menu leans global before it leans American, shishito peppers and butter chicken sitting next to wings and burgers, with a weekend brunch built around chicken and waffles and breakfast tacos.
None of that reads like a neighborhood bar that grew organically out of local demand. It reads like a venue that was built to serve whoever is already inside the building for a tournament, a skate session, or a birthday party on the turf courts. The restaurant did not create the foot traffic. The rink did.
The Hotel Two Miles Away Ran the Same Play
This is not a one-off. Follow SH 114 a little further and you hit the Cambria Hotel and Northlake Conference Center at 4450 Dale Earnhardt Way, the town's first full-service hotel and conference center. It opened to the public on October 24, 2025, and the Metroport Chamber held its ribbon-cutting the following spring, on April 28, 2026. Inside is Speedway Bar and Grill, a full restaurant serving breakfast, dinner, and happy hour, positioned within walking distance of Texas Motor Speedway and the Tanger Outlets in Fort Worth.
Same structure. A destination building goes up first, sized for events and visitors who were already coming to the area for something else. A restaurant gets built into it rather than next to it. Nobody is waiting on a developer to fill a strip center with tenants one lease at a time. The dining option arrives already staffed, already branded, already open, the day the anchor building does.
If you have been wondering why Northlake still does not feel like it has a Main Street the way Roanoke does with its Oak Street corridor of independent restaurants, this is the answer. It is not that Northlake is behind. It is that Northlake is building a different shape entirely, one where the restaurant is a tenant inside someone else's grand opening rather than the reason for its own.
Where That Model Breaks
It does not hold everywhere in town, and that is worth knowing too. A few miles south, at the corner of FM 407 and Cleveland-Gibbs Road, Hashtag India has filed plans for a freestanding restaurant with the state. This will be the Indian restaurant chain's eighth Texas location, joining outposts in Irving, Aubrey, and McKinney. Construction is scheduled to start in December 2026 with completion targeted for December 2027, according to reporting from Cross Timbers Gazette. No sports complex attached. No hotel lobby next door. Just a chain betting on the corridor's population growth the old-fashioned way, one storefront at a time.
And Harvest, the master-planned community off FM 407, has its own version of a town center in Northlake Commons, a square built to hold retail, restaurants, services, and municipal offices together in one walkable block. That is closer to a traditional downtown than anything happening along SH 114.
So Northlake right now is really running three different experiments on where a restaurant goes. Bolted to an anchor building near the Speedway and the rink. Freestanding along FM 407 where population density alone can support a chain. Clustered into a planned square inside Harvest. If you live here and have been trying to guess where the next opening will land, the honest answer is: it depends which of the three models you are standing in.
What a Weekend Near StarCenter Actually Looks Like Now
For residents close to the SH 114 corridor, here is what changed in the last three weeks:
- Friday evening now has a happy hour option inside the rink complex itself, running 3 to 7 p.m. and again after 10, timed for parents waiting out a late skate session or a league game.
- Saturday can run late. Shark Club's midnight close on Saturdays matches up with tournament schedules that regularly run into the evening at a 225,000 square foot facility built with two ice sheets and configurable hard courts.
- Sunday brunch is now a real option two miles from the Speedway, whether you are staying at Cambria for a conference or just driving over for chicken and waffles after a morning game.
None of this required a new strip center. It required two buildings that were already going to be built for other reasons, and restaurant tenants who saw the built-in crowd before anyone else did.
The Read
Northlake's growth has always been described in terms of what is coming: new middle school opening this fall, mixed-use development planned around StarCenter, retail components built into every master-planned community as they come online. What the last few months show is that the coming has started, and it is not showing up as a downtown. It is showing up as restaurants that ride in on the back of bigger buildings, tenant to the hotel, tenant to the sports complex, alongside a slower, more traditional wave of freestanding chains filling gaps along FM 407.
If you already live here, that means paying attention to what gets built next, not just what opens next. A new hotel or sports facility announcement is now a leading indicator for where the next restaurant will land, sometimes months before a sign goes up.
I track these openings because they tell me how the map of Northlake is actually filling in, corridor by corridor, and that kind of read matters whether you are watching your own neighborhood change or thinking ahead about where you might want to be next. If you want to talk through what any of this means for your own plans in Northlake or the surrounding towns, reach out to Ryan Stoddard and schedule a free consultation.
