Downtown McKinney's Square Doesn't Change Often. This Year, It Did Twice.
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
Bryan McVay spent four years looking for a storefront on the McKinney square before he found one.
That detail got buried under the menu coverage when Shorty's Coneys & Cocktails opened at 109 N. Kentucky Street this spring. Every write-up mentioned the Detroit-style Coney dog dressed with chili and chopped white onion, the King Smash burger, the fried pickle chips built for sharing. Fewer people asked why it took McVay, a food and beverage veteran who spent years in hospitality finance before betting on his own concept, the better part of half a decade to land a lease on a square that measures a few blocks in any direction.
The answer explains more about how downtown McKinney actually works than another list of new restaurants ever could.
Most retail corridors turn over the way strip centers do: a lease ends, a new tenant signs, a sign changes six weeks later. The McKinney square doesn't work that way, and the reason isn't zoning red tape or a shortage of interested operators. It's the buildings themselves. Many storefronts on the square date back roughly 150 years, and retrofitting one for a modern kitchen means running new ventilation and grease traps through walls and floors that were never built to hold them. McVay found that out firsthand when he took over the space last occupied by Snug on the Square, a coffeehouse that closed during the pandemic, itself preceded by an antique store, a rug shop, and a bakery.
He also had to work with the Texas Historical Society to preserve the facade, and even the sign took multiple tries before the city signed off on it. McVay's team found an old photograph of the building from decades ago showing a neon sign that read "drinks & lunches." They recreated it in the same style, same blown glass, same shape, just with new words: "Coneys & Cocktails." That's not branding for branding's sake. It's what it actually takes to open something new on a square where most of the real estate has been standing since before indoor plumbing was standard.
Once you understand that constraint, two openings in the same year stop looking like a coincidence and start looking like a signal.
The second data point is Centro on the Square, which opened at 112 E. Louisiana Street, directly across from the McKinney Performing Arts Center. The people behind it aren't first-time operators testing the market. Brian Dunne owns Mexican Bar Company in Plano. George Stergios owns Knife Steakhouse in Plano and previously ran food and beverage at the Highland Dallas hotel, where the original Knife concept launched. The two spent more than six years as neighbors in the established restaurant district at The Shops at Willow Bend before deciding to leave that built-in foot traffic behind and open something new together, on the square, in a building more than a century old.
They didn't make that call blind. In their own words, watching the steady foot traffic and activity on the square during construction reinforced the decision. That's a restaurant team with a proven track record choosing an unfinished storefront on a historic block over a known retail anchor with an established customer base. People who evaluate restaurant real estate for a living don't make that trade unless they see something durable in the numbers.
Here's the part that matters if you already live here and couldn't care less about restaurant real estate trends: for most of its recent history, the square has functioned as an event destination. You went for Oktoberfest, for Home for the Holidays, for a Saturday afternoon of antique shopping. On an ordinary Tuesday, your dinner options thinned out fast.
Two full-service concepts opening in the same stretch of buildings, on a square that adds new full-time restaurants roughly as often as its buildings change hands, is a different kind of event. Shorty's was built specifically to work both ends of the day: a quick coney or smash burger during lunch, then a shift into a pre-date-night cocktail spot once the sun goes down. McVay said as much directly, noting that downtown already had plenty of nice sit-down restaurants but nothing quite like what he wanted to bring. Centro fills a different gap entirely, an upscale option a few doors down from the Performing Arts Center for anyone catching a show or just wanting a proper dinner without driving to Willow Bend.
Put those next to the square's older fixtures, TUPPS Brewery among them, and the square now supports a rotation that didn't exist eighteen months ago. That's the actual news buried inside two restaurant openings that read, on the surface, like routine dining coverage.
None of that replaces the square's identity as an event destination. It adds to it. McKinney Oktoberfest returns September 25 through 27, its 19th year running, presented by Tomes Auto Group with free admission. It's the kind of weekend where the square's slow-changing buildings become the backdrop for something loud and specific:
If Oktoberfest is the square's loudest weekend, the Saturday farmers market at Chestnut Square Heritage Village is its quietest habit. It runs every Saturday, rain or shine, a few blocks from the square's restaurant row, and it's been part of the neighborhood's rhythm long before any of this year's new storefronts opened. That contrast, between a three-day festival that pulls people in from across North Texas and a weekly market that just serves the people who already live here, is the same contrast running through everything else on this list. The square is adding daily-use options for residents while holding onto the big annual draws that make it recognizable in the first place.
What ties a four-year lease search to a restaurant team leaving an established district to a brat-eating competition sponsored by a local auto group is this: downtown McKinney changes rarely, and when it does, the people making that change tend to have thought about it longer and harder than a typical retail opening would require. That's not a knock on the square. It's the reason the buildings look the way they do and the reason a new restaurant opening here means something a little different than a new restaurant opening in a shopping center off the highway.
If you live near the square, you already know the rhythm: quiet most weeknights, busy for a handful of marquee weekends, and now, for the first time in a while, worth checking on a random Tuesday too.
Shawn Keefe covers North Texas real estate, land, and neighborhood trends across McKinney, Plano, and the surrounding communities where he lives and works. If you're thinking about what's next for your home, your land, or your next move in this part of Texas, Let's Connect.
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