Henderson Avenue has always been a good street. What’s happening to it right now might make it a great one.
Salt & Straw opened this past weekend at 2323 N. Henderson, the Portland ice cream company’s first Texas location. PopUp Bagels has a second Dallas location confirmed for the same block. Cranes are up on the eastern end of the corridor where a 161,000-square-foot development is going vertical. And Tristan Simon — the man who built Henderson into what it is in the first place — is coming back to do it again.
To understand what’s happening now, it helps to remember what happened before. Simon spent the early 2000s opening restaurants on Henderson when nobody was paying much attention to it. Hibiscus. The Porch. Fireside Pies. Victor Tangos. One after another, he turned a forgettable stretch of asphalt between Knox Street and lower Greenville into a destination. Then he pivoted to real estate, and Henderson kept going without him.
In 2022, New York-based Acadia Realty Trust acquired more than a dozen properties along the corridor. Two years later, in October 2024, Acadia and Simon’s development firm Ignite-Rebees broke ground on a quarter-mile stretch between Glencoe Street and McMillan Avenue that had been sitting vacant for decades. The plan: 10 architecturally distinct buildings, 12,000 square feet of restaurant space, 75,000 square feet of retail, 74,000 square feet of office space, 500 subgrade parking spaces, landscaped walkways, buried utility lines, and decorative crosswalks. Designed by Dallas firm GFF, built by Balfour Beatty, scheduled for completion in November 2026.
The first restaurant confirmed for the development is Romy, Simon’s own concept, opening in December 2026 at 2110 N. Henderson. He’s doing it with longtime business partner Taryn Anderson and chef Matt Ford, who runs Billy Can Can. Romy will operate as an elevated bakery-café during the day — pastries, seasonal dishes, coffee — and shift into a full dinner restaurant at night with handmade pastas, wood-roasted meats, and a wine program. The room is being designed by Kate Murphy, the same person behind Billy Can Can, using oak, marble, brass, and hand-finished plaster. Simon named it after Anderson’s oldest daughter.
“Henderson Avenue was where I first learned how restaurants could reshape and define a neighborhood,” Simon said when the project was announced. He’s not wrong, and he knows it better than anyone.
The existing block has been quietly filling in on its own. Gemma has been at 2323 N. Henderson since 2013, chef Stephen Rogers and Allison Yoder running one of the more consistent restaurants in Dallas for over a decade — Michelin Bib Gourmand, James Beard finalist recognition for hospitality, still packed on a Tuesday. Shell Shack has been at 2326 Henderson since 2018. The block already had a foundation before any of this started.
What the development adds is density and intention. Salt & Straw moving into the space next to Gemma wasn’t random — the whole block between Gemma and Lip Lab is being activated deliberately, with PopUp Bagels taking a spot there as well once their Henderson location opens. The eastern end, where the cranes are now, adds the scale. When Romy opens at the end of the year alongside two other yet-to-be-announced restaurant concepts, Henderson will have something it’s never quite had before: a genuine beginning, middle, and end.
Acadia’s CEO Ken Bernstein called Henderson “the connective tissue between the Park Cities and burgeoning East Dallas” when the project broke ground. That description is accurate, and it’s also the reason this works. The street connects money to energy, and that combination tends to produce good restaurants.
November is when the development is supposed to be done. December is when Romy opens. Between now and then, Salt & Straw is open daily from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. at 2323 N. Henderson Ave., and Gemma is still taking reservations Tuesday through Saturday starting at 5 p.m. at gemmadallas.com. The street is worth the drive right now. By next year it’ll be worth a special trip.
