Most neighborhood roundups treat "new" as a synonym for "someone unfamiliar just arrived." That reading misses what has actually happened around Midway Hollow this year. The biggest changes on your block are returns. A restaurant family that left in 2023 is back on the same shopping strip under a different name. A trail that ended at Preston Road for years now runs 8.5 miles and finally connects to the network it was drawn against in the 1990s. If you have lived here a while, the story of 2026 is less about strangers and more about familiar things closing a loop.
The Bugatti block, rewritten
If you drove past 3850 W. Northwest Highway last spring and did a double take, you were reading the sign correctly. Trattoria Bugatti opened Monday, April 20, at 3850 W. Northwest Highway in the Midway Hollow area. The address is a few doors from where the original Bugatti Ristorante sat for four decades. The original Bugatti's opened in the '80s and earned a reputation for northern Italian cuisine with home-crafted recipes and attentive service. After 40 years, they closed in 2023 to relocate to the Mercer Boardwalk development at I-635 and Luna Road in Farmers Branch, where they re-opened in early 2025.
So the family did not exit the neighborhood. They doubled it. The Farmers Branch location stayed. Then Trattoria Bugatti, located mere steps from the original, opened as a collaboration between the Bugatti family and Odeh Restaurant Group, with founders Michael and Zee Bugatti describing it as a "more modern expression of the brand."
What that actually looks like on a plate is worth knowing before you book:
- Kitchen leadership. Chef Erin Willis, a James Beard Award nominee and former owner and executive chef of RM 12:20 Bistro, a French bistro in Lake Highlands that closed in 2023, leads the kitchen.
- Sourcing. Locally-sourced ingredients include dough from Lubbies Bagels for sourdough pizza and focaccia, gelato from Botolino, and pasta from Fresh Pasta Delights.
- Menu signatures. Cacio e Pepe Wings (pepper-brined chicken wings with cacio e pepe béchamel dipping sauce) and Testaroli (semolina pancakes with pecorino and basil pesto) sit alongside Italian Alfredo, shrimp scampi, and lasagna "rotta" with meatballs, ricotta, Pecorino, and broken sheet noodle.
- The bar. Chris Henley, founder of Dallas-based mixology consultancy Betty Cocktail, developed the cocktail program, featuring Italian-inspired creations like the Italian Margarita, Limoncello Daisy, and Style Icon with vodka, Cocchi Americano, Roxor gin, and atomized hopped grapefruit bitters.
- The room. The 4,425-square-foot restaurant is a modern concept with a welcoming, neighborhood feel, with seating for 120 in the dining room and 15 at the bar. The white tablecloths of the original are gone.
The interesting nuance for anyone weighing where to send out-of-town guests is that Trattoria Bugatti is not trying to be the old Bugatti. The dining room no longer features white tablecloths, opting instead for more contemporary design elements to create a genuinely warm, inviting aesthetic. The lunch menu, with a focaccia sandwich stuffed with mortadella, pepperoni, salami, ricotta, giardiniera, and arugula in red wine vinaigrette, is a lighter proposition than dinner at the original ever was.
The Northaven Trail finally does what it was drawn to do
For most of the last decade, the Northaven Trail was a 2.5-mile straight shot along the Oncor easement between Northaven Road and Royal Lane, ending at Preston Road on one side and Central Expressway on the other. It was pleasant. It was also, functionally, a driveway to nowhere.
That has changed. The 8.5-mile Northaven trail is located in an overhead utility corridor in north central Dallas, extending from Monroe Dr. in Northwest Dallas with a pedestrian bridge over US 75 connecting the trail to the 'Low Five,' the intersection of the White Rock Creek Trail, Cottonwood Creek Trail, SoPac Trail and Northaven Trail. Dedicated bike lanes connect the west terminus of the trail at Monroe Drive to the Walnut Hill/Denton Drive DART Station.
If you have not been east of Central since the bridge opened, here is what that 201-foot span actually stitches together from your Midway Hollow doorstep:
| From Midway Hollow, heading east | You can now reach without a car |
|---|---|
| Northaven Trail, past Preston | White Rock Creek Trail |
| Bridge over US 75 | Cottonwood Creek Trail |
| Low Five interchange | SoPac Trail toward White Rock Lake |
| Westward | Walnut Hill/Denton DART Station |
The 201-foot span, designed by HNTB, weighs more than 800,000 pounds and was pieced together in a nearby parking lot several months before the big move. The highly choreographed move was executed flawlessly over 20 hours one weekend. That was November 2023. Two years of on-the-ground usage later, it has changed what a Saturday morning walk can look like. You can put in from the Freda Stern respite and be at White Rock Lake in a single ride without touching Central.
Two things the trail people would rather you know than not:
- The wildflower stretch is real, not marketing. The Friends of Northaven Trail commissioned Kevin Sloan Studio to design a rewilding plan. The Studio plans to integrate stands of Blackland prairie grasses and wildflowers, with garden sections to specifically attract butterflies, pollinators, hummingbirds, and migrating songbirds. The carefully curated landscape of native plants and ornaments will resemble flowing slices of the original North Texas Blackland prairie, punctuated by ornamental gardens.
- They run programming worth putting on the calendar. The annual Rhythm & Blooms fundraiser is the flagship event, and volunteer workdays alternate between the meadow near St Michael's Drive and Royal Park Meadow Garden, typically Saturday mornings.
The one Sunday your neighborhood turns into a home tour
There is a resident tradition worth flagging even if you have no intention of moving. The Midway Hollow Spring Tour, which took place Sunday, May 17, 2026, invited 19 agents representing 28 luxury listings priced above $1 million to participate in the exclusive one-day-only event. It is, in effect, the closest thing Midway Hollow has to a public architectural walking tour, because the homes are actually open.
The reason it works as a resident event is baked into what has been happening on these lots. In the past decade, Midway Hollow has rapidly become one of Dallas' go-to neighborhoods for new luxury spec homes, with styles ranging from architecture that pays homage to Tudor and Colonial Revival to Modern Farmhouse, Transitional, and Contemporary. If you have watched three teardowns go up within two blocks of your house and wondered what a Jessica Koltun or Avant Group interior looks like on the inside, that Sunday afternoon is your low-friction answer.
Mark it for next May. The tour has been running long enough to be predictable, and it pairs naturally with a late lunch.
A short list residents actually use
Not everything worth doing is new. The neighborhood's steady anchors, the ones that hold up over five and ten and fifteen years of living here:
- Bachman Lake Park, a short walk or bike from the west side of the neighborhood.
- Frontiers of Flight Museum at Love Field. Being so close to Dallas Love Field Airport means easy access to the Frontiers of Flight Museum, and Bachman Lake is also nearby.
- Nicholson-Hardie for garden supplies you can carry home in a sedan.
- North Haven Gardens, the plant nursery just off the eastern half of the Northaven Trail. Several elementary and high schools are accessible from NHT, as is the Jewish Community Center and the popular North Haven Gardens plant nursery and gardening center.
- NorthPark Center, close enough that residents treat it as a neighborhood mall rather than a destination. It's about 14 minutes away from Love Field Airport and NorthPark Center.
None of these are hidden. What makes them worth listing together is the point on the map. Stand on the Northaven Trail near Preston, and every one of those anchors is inside a 15-minute radius. That is the actual definition of a central neighborhood, and it is why so much of the 2026 news has quietly reinforced what already worked here rather than reinvented it.
The through-line
If the Bugatti family had moved to Frisco and stayed there, the story would be one of departure. Instead they run two rooms, one in Farmers Branch and one back on the block they built. If the Northaven Trail had stopped at Preston, it would be a pleasant local amenity. Instead the bridge over US 75 folded it into a citywide network. The most interesting thing happening around Midway Hollow this year is not the arrival of anything unfamiliar. It is the closing of loops that were left open a long time ago.
That is also the reason so many people who bought here in 2016 or 2018 are still here. The neighborhood keeps rewarding the decision to stay.
If you want to talk through what any of this means for your own house, whether you are ten years in and curious about how the block has shifted, or five years in and thinking about a remodel versus a move, Hunter Realty Group is happy to meet you at Trattoria Bugatti or anywhere else on the map above. Let's Get a Coffee.
