El Molino is opening a second Dallas location, and this one comes with more room to work with. Vandelay Companies opens the new restaurant in Preston Royal Shopping Center on Monday, August 10, a little over a year after the original debuted in Snider Plaza.
The new spot sits at 6025 Royal Lane, Suite 250, taking over the roughly 6,000-square-foot space that formerly housed Vandelay’s own Anchor Sushi Bar. That’s a real jump in size from the Snider Plaza original, and it’s intentional. Vandelay CEO Hunter Pond said the company opened Anchor Bar in two different footprints specifically to test which format worked best for each concept, and concluded Anchor belongs in a smaller, more intimate room while El Molino’s high-energy Tex-Mex style needed the bigger stage Preston Royal offers.
The menu centers on El Molino’s fajita program, built around USDA Prime tenderloin butchered in-house and cooked over wood-fired smokers, alongside grilled chicken, jumbo tiger shrimp, and marinated prime ribeye, most of it built for sharing. The wider menu adds queso, an elote corn chowder, and fresh tuna nachos to start, with tacos, enchiladas, and entrées including the Las Vegas ribeye, a crispy shrimp brochette, filet mignon famosa, and grilled Sonora quail rounding out the dinner side.
Drinks are as much a part of El Molino’s identity as the food. The Flaming Margarita is the house signature, backed up by rare sipping tequilas and frozen margaritas in flavors like passion fruit, pineapple jalapeño, cherry vanilla, and mango. The new location adds a daily happy hour from 3 to 6 p.m. at the bar, with $9 frozen Flaming Margaritas, sangria, and house margaritas served frozen or on the rocks.
Hours run Sunday through Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Thursday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., open daily for lunch and dinner starting on opening day. The design leans into the same Mexico City-meets-old-world-European aesthetic that defined the original, dressed up for a bigger room.
El Molino’s expansion is part of a bigger build-out for Vandelay Companies, which now runs twelve restaurant brands across 31 locations nationwide and has been on an acquisition run of its own lately, picking up established Dallas names Tei An and Ten Ramen in addition to growing its in-house concepts. Preston Royal is the next stop in that growth, and if the response to the Snider Plaza original is any indication, it won’t be the last.
