Drive down Skillman past Mockingbird and you'll pass the building everyone in Lakewood has an opinion about. The windows at 1904 Skillman are dark. The parking lot sits empty most days. If you've lived here longer than a couple of years, you remember when that address meant Matt's Rancho Martinez, the Tex-Mex spot that fed this neighborhood for nearly 35 years before it closed. Since then, the building has been a construction site, a rumor, and a running joke about how long a restaurant can stay "coming soon."
Here's what the wait has obscured. While Lakewood's biggest, most publicized restaurant project kept missing its own deadlines, the rest of the corridor filled in without it. New tenants took the smaller spaces. A national retailer claimed a box that had sat vacant for over a year. A family opened the doors on a concept two decades in the making. None of it depended on the building everyone was watching.
That's the actual story here, and it says something about how this neighborhood works that a simple opening date never could.
The Timeline Nobody Asked For, But Everyone Tracked Anyway
The project is called Serritella, named for co-owner Jason Gorsuch's grandmother, an Italian-Catholic matriarch whose maiden name gives the restaurant its title. The plan: a 250-seat Italian steakhouse, a grab-and-go market, and a speakeasy called Cosa tucked behind a hidden entrance, all inside the old Matt's Rancho Martinez and Chip's Old Fashioned Hamburgers footprint.
Here's how the opening date has actually moved:
| Announced | Projected opening | Source |
|---|---|---|
| September 2024 | Spring 2025 | Dallas Morning News |
| October 2025 | First quarter 2026 | Dallas Morning News |
| May 2026 | No confirmed date | reporting citing Dallas Morning News |
Gorsuch has stayed on the record through each delay. In October 2025 he told the Dallas Morning News the project was still moving, blaming a building that needed more work than the team expected, including the roof, plumbing, and air conditioning. "We're moving forward, absolutely," he said. "We've had some hurdles to clear." As of the most recent reporting available, no new opening date has been confirmed.
For context on why anyone cares this much about a construction timeline: the buildout is 16,000 square feet with room for 250 seats, a scale this stretch of Skillman doesn't normally see. The kitchen is set to be run by chef Ryan Ferguson, who spent close to a decade as executive chef at Nonna and Fachini, two of the more respected Italian kitchens Dallas has had. Gorsuch has said the place is meant to be personal. "It's a place about the community, about Lakewood," he told the Dallas Morning News when the project was announced.
What Actually Opened While Everyone Was Watching the Wrong Address
The interesting part isn't the delay. It's what didn't wait for it.
A few blocks over on Gaston Avenue, a restaurant with almost the opposite backstory quietly opened its doors. My Dream Latin Cuisine took over 7260 Gaston Ave, a space that most recently held Las Favela and, before that, Andrea's Italian for more than a decade. The concept comes from Salvador Gamón, who has lived in Dallas since 1992 and spent three decades working his way up through local kitchens, starting as a dishwasher and later working as a server and kitchen manager at Matt's Rancho Martinez, Mattito's, Truluck's, and Hugo's Invitados. He opened the restaurant with his brother Hugo and his niece Ivette Ipina, building a Latin American menu shaped by his own family's cooking. No multi-year delay. No construction saga. It just opened.
Further west on Mockingbird, a different kind of gap finally got filled. Total Wine & More confirmed a Thursday, August 20 opening at 6330 E Mockingbird Lane, the address that had sat dark since the old Joann Fabrics closed there in early 2025. The store spans more than 15,000 square feet with thousands of wines and spirits on the shelves. For a corner that had been vacant long enough that neighbors stopped noticing it, that's a fast turnaround by comparison.
And Maman, the New York City bakery and cafe known for its chocolate chip cookies, confirmed Lakewood as one of its next Dallas locations after opening its first Dallas shop at Preston Road and Northwest Highway, according to the Dallas Morning News. The company is expanding across the metro through 2026 and 2027, with Lakewood named specifically as one of the next stops.
Three storefronts. Three different timelines. Only one of them involved a building that sat empty for over a year while the neighborhood waited on somebody else's construction schedule.
Why the Dark Building Still Matters, Even Dark
None of this means Serritella doesn't matter. The corridor around it already anchors Mot Hai Ba, Lakewood Landing, and The Wine Therapist within a few blocks, which is exactly the kind of density that makes a 250-seat investment make sense in the first place. A project this size doesn't get built on a corner nobody already goes to.
What the delay actually reveals is how little the neighborhood's day-to-day depends on any single opening landing on schedule. Matt's closed and sat empty for more than a year before Serritella was even announced, and neighbors were already whispering about what would come next well before Gorsuch had a lease signed. The corner has been a topic of conversation for longer than most Lakewood restaurants stay open. That's not a sign the project failed. It's a sign the address itself has weight, whether or not the lights are on.
The Rest of the Calendar Didn't Wait Either
The restaurant wave wasn't the only thing happening in Lakewood this year. White Rock Lake, five miles northeast of downtown and covering roughly 1,015 acres, ran its own summer calendar regardless of what was or wasn't open on Skillman. The White Rock Boat Club, a volunteer-run club that has operated since 1961 out of 340 E. Lawther Drive, held an open house in July to introduce newcomers to sailing and kayaking on the lake. That event has already come and gone, but the club runs sailing classes and membership programs year-round for residents who want to be on the water rather than just near it.
The lower-key version of that same civic rhythm keeps going without any promotion at all. For the Love of the Lake, the volunteer group that has run Second Saturday shoreline cleanups at White Rock for decades, still meets every second Saturday of the month. It's the least flashy item on any list of what's happening in Lakewood, and it's often the first thing longtime residents bring up when they talk about what actually holds the neighborhood together.
The Takeaway for Anyone Who Lives Here
If you've been waiting on Serritella to feel like Lakewood's dining scene is finally complete, that's the wrong way to measure it. The neighborhood didn't pause for the building on Skillman. It kept adding names while that project worked through its roof, its plumbing, and its air conditioning. Whenever Serritella does open, it will be one more addition to a corridor that already proved it doesn't need any single opening to function. That's a better sign for the neighborhood than a ribbon-cutting would have been.
If you're curious how these shifts on Gaston, Skillman, and Mockingbird connect to what's happening with home values on your own block, Jenny Capritta tracks Lakewood block by block and would be glad to talk through it. Get your free home valuation whenever you're ready to see where your address fits into all of this.
