What’s Next for Town Center Plaza Restaurants in Leawood
Drive past 119th and Roe this month and you will see chain-link fencing where a steakhouse used to be and an empty concrete pad where a casual American grill spent three decades taking reservations. Both corners of Town Center Plaza have sat vacant or mid-renovation through most of 2026. Neither will stay that way much longer, and what replaces them says something specific about how this corner of Leawood wants to be used from here on.
For almost thirty years, the north and south ends of Town Center Plaza belonged to two restaurants built for a certain kind of night out. Hereford House opened on the north side in November 1996, with private dining rooms that could hold anywhere from 20 to 100 guests and a weekly Rotary Club meeting on the books. Houlihan's held down the south side facing 119th Street, wedged between Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware, doing the same steady work of birthdays, business lunches, and post-movie dinners for a comparable stretch of years. These were the restaurants you booked ahead for, not the ones you wandered into on a Tuesday.
Both are gone now. Hereford House closed in August 2024 after a former kitchen employee was caught deliberately contaminating food, a case that ended in more than a decade of prison time and enough lawsuits that the Leawood location could not recover financially, even as its sister locations across the metro stayed open. Houlihan's closed on its own timeline sometime before early 2026, quietly enough that no single closing date made headlines the way Hereford House's did.
What is filling those two footprints is not a pair of replacement steakhouses. It is a smaller-format, walk-in restaurant scene, and the shift is worth understanding if you eat anywhere near 119th and Roe with any regularity.
The Hereford House building is not being torn down. Brooksider Re Holdings bought it and is turning the same 12,228-square-foot, two-story shell into the second-ever location of Brooksider Sportsbar & Grill, a Brookside neighborhood fixture that has been serving the same corner of Kansas City for decades. Father-son owners Chuck and Jack Naylor, who have run the original Brookside Plaza location for about 14 years, took possession of the Leawood building in early 2026 and have been gutting it since.
"We're gutting the building," Jack Naylor told The Kansas City Star, describing the shift from a steakhouse to a sports bar with an event space upstairs. The plans on file with the city bear that out. The building's footprint stays the same, but the patio grows by 746 square feet, with an additional 897-square-foot turfed area that includes yard games and a television screen facing the seating. The menu moving in looks nothing like Hereford House's prime rib and wine list. Expect Nashville hot chicken sandwiches, BBQ pulled pork nachos, burgers, and mac and cheese with a rotating list of add-ons, the same lineup that has kept the Brookside original busy for years.
The Naylors are targeting a fall opening, which puts this one on the calendar right now rather than sometime in the vague future. If you have been wondering when the fenced-off building at 5001 Town Center Drive comes back to life, this season is the answer.
The Houlihan's site is taking a different shape entirely. Drake Development is demolishing the old building and putting up two new one-story buildings in its place, an $18 million project the company has named French Corner. The west building runs 10,217 square feet and the east building 6,484 square feet, and each is designed to hold two separate restaurant tenants rather than one large dining room. That is the real shift buried in the square footage: one 1990s-era anchor restaurant is being replaced by four smaller, distinct food and drink concepts sharing a much tighter footprint.
As of this spring, Drake had not named the tenants publicly, but the company described the largest space, about 6,500 square feet in the west building, as an upscale sit-down American bistro with sister locations in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Del Mar and Orange County, California. Construction was tentatively set to start in May 2026, with the first grand openings expected in spring 2027, which means this corner should be an active job site right now rather than a distant plan.
Leawood's planning commission chair, David Coleman, summed up what approving five new restaurants in one evening meant for the shopping center: "It's almost like Town Center is now the hot place for restaurants." That is a notable thing to hear about a corner that had spent close to two years with its two biggest anchor restaurants sitting empty.
Here is the part that tells you this is not a small tenant swap. In April 2026, the Leawood City Council voted 6 to 2 to create a Community Improvement District covering the two new French Corner buildings. Diners eating there will pay an extra 1 percent sales tax on top of the usual rate, and that revenue is capped at $4.3 million over the district's 22-year life, covering roughly 23 percent of the total project cost. City officials project the development will generate about $9.1 million in city revenue, mostly through sales tax collections and increased property value.
Council members pointed out during the debate that the tax falls on whoever eats there, not just Leawood residents, which matters given how much of Town Center Plaza's traffic already comes from outside city limits. The corner is being financed as a regional draw, not a neighborhood convenience, which lines up with what happened to the shopping center's ownership the year before. Federal Realty Investment Trust bought both Town Center Plaza and Town Center Crossing in July 2025, its first Midwest acquisition after decades of coastal-only holdings, and told the city council it plans to hold and reinvest in the property indefinitely rather than flip it. The restaurant rebuild reads like the first visible piece of that reinvestment.
While the two anchor corners get rebuilt, a third piece of this shift has already opened. Local Lime Tacos and Margaritas took over the space on the plaza's north side that Bravo! Italian Kitchen occupied for roughly 20 years before closing in March 2023. The Arkansas-based chain, owned by Yellow Rocket Concepts, picked Leawood for its fourth location overall and its first anywhere in the Kansas City metro, citing years of requests from Kansas City transplants who knew the brand from back home. The opening created more than 80 new jobs in the area, and the company has said it is already looking at additional Johnson County locations.
Local Lime is built around counter-style energy and a Cali-Mex menu of fried fish, verde veggie, and curry fried shrimp tacos alongside birria quesadillas and craft margaritas, nothing close to the linen-and-wine-list format that used to occupy the same building.
If you are trying to keep the timeline straight, here is where things stand as of this fall:
The math is simple once you line it up. Two large, reservation-driven restaurants are becoming one sports bar and four smaller restaurant concepts, a net gain in options and a net loss in the kind of formal, book-ahead dining room this corner used to be known for. If you want the private dining room for a milestone birthday, that used to be Hereford House's job and now belongs to whoever else in the area still offers one. If you want to walk in on a Wednesday with no plan and find a seat, a TV, and a plate of nachos, that job now belongs to this corner too.
Town Center Plaza is not disappearing as a dining destination. It is becoming a different kind of one, built around walking in rather than calling ahead, and that is worth knowing whether you eat there twice a month or twice a year.
If you are curious how shifts like this one show up in property values or buyer interest around Leawood, or you just want a local perspective grounded in what is actually happening on the ground, Capri Swanson covers this stretch of Johnson County closely. Let's Connect whenever you are ready to talk.
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