Northlake's Late Summer 2026: What Actually Opened, and What Just Quietly Closed

Drive past the Children's Health StarCenter Multisport on Chadwick Parkway right now and you will see cars in the lot for the Shark Club at nine on a Tuesday night. Check the facility's own website, and as of this writing it still says the restaurant is "planned to open in July." That gap between what the internet says and what is actually happening at that intersection is the story of Northlake this summer, and it runs in both directions. The town's biggest, most-announced amenity took nearly a year longer than expected to fully open. Meanwhile, one of Harvest's most beloved small businesses closed and got replaced in about six weeks, with almost no lead time at all.

If you have been going off anything published before mid-August, you are behind on both.

The Shark Club Finally Opened, and the Paperwork Hasn't Caught Up

Shark Club Sports Bar & Grill opened its doors inside the StarCenter on Friday, August 7, with a ribbon cutting hosted by the Metroport Chamber of Commerce starting at 4 p.m. That date matters because nearly every official source you would have checked before that Friday said something different. The Dallas Stars' own grand opening press release in March described the restaurant as "scheduled to open in June." The StarCenter's website, as of this writing, still lists it as planned for July. The actual opening landed in August, which means the town spent an entire summer with a restaurant that existed in name and construction fencing before it existed in barstools and a menu.

This is only the second Shark Club location in the United States. The chain was founded in Vancouver in 1993 and only crossed into Texas with a Plano location before Northlake became its second American home. It is owned by Tom Gaglardi, who also owns the Dallas Stars and co-owns the restaurant chain Moxies. The Northlake menu runs from butter chicken and shishito peppers to a full weekend brunch, and the space includes an outdoor patio that looks directly over the StarCenter's pickleball courts, which is its own small piece of good timing.

The Courts Came Online Too, Just Ahead of the Restaurant

Those pickleball courts are their own quiet arrival. They opened August 1, less than a week before Shark Club, after months of the StarCenter's own marketing describing them as "coming soon." Between the two openings, the west side of the building went from mostly potential to mostly functioning inside of ten days. If you have been waiting to see whether this end of Northlake actually turned into a place you use rather than a place you drive past, the first week of August is when that answer arrived.

The Names on the Walls Tell You Who Actually Built This

The StarCenter itself opened back on March 31, and the naming inside the building is worth knowing if you are going to spend time there. One ice rink carries the name of Northlake Mayor Brian Montini, recognition for the work he put into bringing the facility to town. The other honors Joe Nieuwendyk, a former Dallas Stars player and general manager. On the court side, one gym is named for Rhyle McKinney, a legally deaf Argyle basketball player who made the state title game all four years of high school, won three championships, and went on to play at SMU and Texas Tech.

At the ribbon cutting in March, Montini put it plainly:

"Today is a milestone moment for the Town of Northlake. This is more than a world-class facility, it's a result of strong partnerships, a shared vision and a commitment to doing things the right way for our residents."

The point of naming a hockey rink after your mayor is not subtle, but it is honest about how this project got built. A public-private partnership between a hockey franchise and a small town does not move fast. That is exactly why the June-to-August slip on the restaurant is not really a surprise. Big civic amenities with this many moving pieces almost never land on the first announced date. What is more interesting is what happened on the other side of town, where nobody announced anything at all.

While the Big Building Was Still Finishing, the Farmhouse Changed Hands in Weeks

Farmhouse Coffee & Treasures had operated inside the historic yellow farmhouse at the center of the Harvest community for nine years, the kind of neighborhood fixture where regulars did not need to read a menu. It moved out in mid-July. There was no drawn-out construction timeline and no series of press releases walking residents through the process the way the StarCenter's opening was covered for the better part of a year. One month the coffee shop was there. The next month it was not.

A new tenant was already lined up. Denton County Brewing Co., the independent craft brewery that has operated on East McKinney Street in downtown Denton since 2017, announced it will take over the same building this fall. Owner Seth Morgan said the brewery already had a working relationship with Harvest's developer, including neighborhood pop-up appearances and a special brew created for the nearby Landmark development, which is part of why the opportunity came together as quickly as it did. The plan for the new location, likely to be called Denton County Brewing Company at the Farmhouse, is to run coffee service in the morning, grab-and-go lunch through the day, and beer and artisanal pizza in the evening. Morgan has said serving coffee and pizza alongside beer is something the brewery wanted to do from its very first year in Denton and simply never had the space for until now.

That is a genuinely different business rhythm than the StarCenter's. A regional sports facility with an NHL franchise attached takes a year of construction, misses its own announced restaurant date by two months, and gets covered every step of the way. A single-building neighborhood coffee shop can close and get a successor lined up inside of six weeks with almost no public notice until the deal is already done. If you only track the big civic openings, you will miss the small ones entirely, and the small ones are often the more useful piece of daily-life information for anyone who actually lives in Harvest.

What's Actually Running Versus What's Still a Sign

For anyone trying to keep a mental map of the corridor without checking three different websites, here is where things stand as of late August:

None of this touches the dining cluster that has been quietly working the whole time. Burgers & Curries has been pairing American burgers with Indian curries and tandoori long enough to become the restaurant locals mention most often when someone new asks where to eat. Northlake Café, run by owners Fadil and Shpresa Memedi, has been the neighborhood's breakfast and lunch anchor without needing a grand opening or a press release. That corridor was never part of the "coming soon" problem. It just opened, stayed open, and built a following the ordinary way.

The Pattern Worth Remembering

Northlake right now is really two different clocks running at once. The big, heavily financed civic projects move on public-private timelines that slip by months and still get treated as news when they finally land, which is why the Shark Club's slide from a June announcement to an August opening barely registered as a delay. The small, independently owned spaces move fast and quietly, with almost no warning between closing and reopening. If you live here, the useful habit is not checking one source and assuming it is current. It is knowing which kind of business you are tracking, because the two operate on entirely different calendars.

If you are watching Northlake for reasons that go beyond where to eat tonight, whether that is a move within the area or a question about what a specific street or community is really like day to day, Julie Gray has spent years paying attention to exactly this kind of detail across Southlake, Westlake, Keller, and the surrounding North Texas communities. Let's Connect.