Leawood's Town Center Plaza Just Traded Two Restaurants for Five

Drive past 119th and Roe this month and you will notice two dark storefronts where dinner reservations used to be. The old Hereford House sign is gone. So is Houlihan's. Both spent roughly three decades as the kind of places you took visiting parents or ordered the same appetizer without looking at the menu. Now both addresses sit empty, mid-construction, waiting on permits.

What replaces them is the real story, and it is not what you would expect from a shopping center losing two anchor restaurants at once. Town Center Plaza is not backfilling those two spaces with two new ones. It is turning them into five.

Two Thirty-Year Institutions, Gone Within Two Years of Each Other

According to Johnson County Post, the Hereford House had operated at 5001 Town Center Drive on the plaza's north side since 1996, closing in 2024. Houlihan's sat on the south side, facing 119th Street between Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware, and closed more recently. Both buildings had been fixtures for about as long as Town Center Plaza itself has existed, which makes their back-to-back departures feel less like ordinary retail churn and more like the end of an era for the shopping center's original dining lineup.

Neither building is staying empty for long.

What's Moving Into Those Two Addresses

The old Hereford House space is becoming a second location for Brooksider Sportsbar & Grill, owned by father-son team Chuck and Jack Naylor, whose original spot has anchored Kansas City's Brookside neighborhood at 6330 Brookside Plaza for decades. The Leawood build-out keeps the building's 12,228-square-foot footprint but reworks it into a sports bar with an event space upstairs, according to the Naylors' own account of the renovation. Plans call for extending the existing patio by 746 square feet and adding a turfed area of nearly 900 square feet with a television screen and yard games. The menu carries over familiar Brooksider staples: Nashville hot chicken sandwiches, BBQ pulled pork nachos, burgers, and mac and cheese. An opening date depends on how quickly the city processes permits, but the owners are targeting this fall.

Across the plaza, the former Houlihan's building is being replaced entirely. Drake Development is building what it calls the French Corner, two one-story buildings, one at just over 10,000 square feet and a smaller one at roughly 6,500 square feet, designed to hold four restaurant tenants total. Developer Dave Olson has not named any of them publicly, only describing them as high-end concepts new to the Kansas City area. As of this spring's approval, demolition on the Houlihan's building was expected to begin as early as May. Both projects cleared Leawood's planning commission unanimously, and one commissioner put the mood plainly, as reported by Johnson County Post:

"It's very exciting that we're revitalizing Town Center, which is our premier shopping area. It's almost like Town Center is now the hot place for restaurants."

The Math That Explains What's Actually Happening

Here is the part that changes how you should read this. Two restaurants closed. Five are moving in to replace them, one at the old Hereford House and four at the rebuilt Houlihan's site. That is not a swap. It is a net gain of three sit-down dining spots on the same two parcels of land, and it is happening while the rest of the plaza is quietly adding even more food and drink options that have nothing to do with either closure.

Local Lime Tacos and Margaritas opened at Town Center Plaza this summer, its first Johnson County location for the Arkansas-based Yellow Rocket Concepts group, which also runs Big Orange, ZAZA, and Taco & Tamale Co. The company's chief marketing officer told Johnson County Post that Leawood felt like the right fit for the brand's family-oriented, active customer base, and that the company plans to keep expanding its Kansas City-area footprint after this opening. Local Lime took over a space that Italian Kitchen had occupied for roughly two decades before closing in March 2023.

A few miles south, Burg and Barrel celebrated the grand opening of its fourth location overall, and its second in Leawood, this spring at Ranch Mart North, near 95th Street and Mission Road, where Leawood, Prairie Village, and Overland Park all meet. At 4,200 square feet, it is the largest dining room the local chain has built yet, and it backs up to the public green space at Ranch Mart North that hosts concerts and other events. The restaurant runs regular specials, including full orders of chicken tenders for $10 and half-priced drinks on Tuesdays, and its spicy avocado burger has held the top spot on the menu for six years running.

None of these are first-time concepts betting on an unproven idea in an empty storefront. Brooksider already has a following in Brookside. Burg and Barrel already had one Leawood location before opening a second, larger one. Local Lime belongs to a company that already operates three other brands, giving it an established platform rather than the profile of a first-time operator. What is arriving in Leawood right now is proven demand expanding into a second or third address, not a startup rolling the dice on a first one.

The Retail Additions Follow the Same Logic

The pattern holds outside the restaurant category too. J.Crew already opened near Kendra Scott and Bluemercury, and Lululemon expanded its existing space at Town Center Crossing. LEGO opened its only Johnson County location this summer next to Tecovas, and a Coach Coffee Shop, one of only three in the entire country, landed next to EVEREVE. A new fitness studio called solidcore is settling in between Athleta and Gorjana, and Drybar has moved in beside Trader Joe's.

Every one of these is an established brand adding capacity in a market it already understands, not a new name testing the waters. Town Center Plaza is behaving less like a shopping center trying to fill vacancies and more like a proving ground that established regional and national concepts choose once they already have a read on how well Leawood performs.

What This Looks Like on an Actual Tuesday Night

If you are used to grabbing dinner near 119th and Roe, the next few months will still feel like a construction zone before they feel like an upgrade. The old Hereford House lot is mid-renovation with a fall target that depends on the city's permitting timeline. The Houlihan's site was slated for demolition beginning as early as this past May, and its four tenants remain unnamed in the most recent reporting available. In the meantime, Local Lime and the newer Burg and Barrel location are already open and taking walk-ins, and the retail additions around them have been filling in one storefront at a time.

The short version: this isn't a shopping center losing its dining identity. It's one doubling down on it, one proven concept at a time, and the next few months are simply the visible construction phase of that bet.

Watching how a neighborhood's businesses evolve tells you something real about how that neighborhood is doing, whether you're deciding where to grab dinner this week or just keeping an eye on the place you call home. If you're curious about what these kinds of shifts mean for your own corner of Leawood, or you're thinking about what might come next for your address, Sherry Lynn & Co would love to talk it through. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready.