Drive down Main Street on a Saturday and you'll pass a hand-lettered "coming soon" banner on a building that's looked exactly the same for two years, then turn the corner and find a line out the door of a restaurant that didn't exist last spring. If you've wondered why downtown Midlothian feels like it's simultaneously finished and half-built, you're not imagining it. What locals call "the downtown revitalization" isn't one project on one clock. It's three separate development efforts, run by three separate groups of people, each operating on a completely different timeline, plus one restaurant caught in between all of them.
Knowing which project you're standing in front of is the difference between wondering if something ever opened and knowing exactly when to expect it.
Founders Row Moves One House at a Time
Founders Row, the collection of restored historic homes along East Avenue F, is the slowest of the three by design. Developer Stephen Hidlebaugh, who has been investing in Midlothian since 1997, built the project around a simple but labor-intensive idea: rescue century-old houses from demolition, physically relocate them to one block downtown, and restore each one before it opens. That's why the project has grown in single-building increments rather than all at once.
The Porch Pour wine bar and Wilson's Seafood & Grill anchor the block today, alongside Copper Rose boutique, Relic + Root home decor, and House of Aesthetics. The most recent addition to the row is the Anderson House, a historic home moved to the site in 2024 that's being converted into an event space with a coffee shop inside for Soco Coffee. As of the last public development update, that building was still under construction, and one more lot at 323 East Avenue G remains earmarked for a small retail or bakery tenant that hasn't been announced yet.
If you're waiting on Soco Coffee to open, the holdup isn't neglect. It's the nature of restoring a hundred-year-old house instead of building new.
The Lawson District Opened Like a Light Switch
Compare that to the Lawson District, the reactivated commercial building at the corner of Main Street and North 7th Street. This project didn't trickle open one storefront at a time. It reopened as a batch. The building had sat vacant for years, covering more than 50,000 square feet of downtown real estate that generated no foot traffic and no tax revenue. Once the public-private redevelopment was finished, three tenants opened together in the third quarter of 2025: Roma's Italian Bistro, The Dessert Bar, and O'Brien's Bookshop.
The anchor tenant followed not long after. Bearded Ax Brewery & Gathering Hall, a family-owned brewery and full-service restaurant at 301 West Main Street, is now open with a year-round, climate-controlled patio and its own dog menu. It closes at a reasonable hour and doesn't serve liquor, which makes it more of a family gathering spot than a late-night bar, a distinction the owners are upfront about on their own site.
The lesson here is the opposite of Founders Row. When a single large building gets renovated as one package, it tends to open as one package. You don't get a slow trickle. You get a light switch.
Main Street Towne Crossing Skipped the Renovation Problem Entirely
The fastest-moving of the three isn't downtown at all in the historic sense. Main Street Towne Crossing is new construction on open land, which means it never had to deal with a hundred-year-old house or a vacant commercial shell. Mo' Bettahs, the Hawaiian-style restaurant chain, opened its first Midlothian location at 201 Nicolette Creek Road on June 26, 2026, complete with a ribbon-cutting and a Friends and Ohana soft opening the day before. As of the city's most recent public development update, a Lowe's Home Improvement store nearby already had its exterior walls up, with crews breaking ground for a Chick-fil-A on the same site.
New construction on a clear lot will almost always beat historic restoration or building reactivation to the finish line. There's no facade to preserve and no old bones to work around. That's the tradeoff locals are watching play out in real time: the newest part of downtown's food scene is arriving the fastest, precisely because it isn't really "downtown" in the century-old sense at all.
Why El Primo's Still Isn't Open
Then there's El Primo's Mexican Grill & Cantina, which doesn't fit cleanly into any of the three projects above and has become something of a running joke among people who've lived here through the whole saga. Midlothian City Council approved the restaurant's exterior facade back in October 2022, and owner Todd Tonore, who also owns the popular original location in Mansfield, planned to convert a 17,000 square foot abandoned warehouse into the second location.
The renovation was supposed to run somewhere around three million dollars and wrap up by fall 2025, according to a filing with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation. But the project hit a snag that had nothing to do with construction speed. As Tonore put it at the time, the city changed some parking requirements, which forced the team to redo their architectural plans from scratch. He's been candid about what the finished building means for downtown's tax base too.
"We're going to take something that's generated zero tax revenue for Midlothian and, at buildout, this building will be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of about $6 million."
As of this writing, the doors still haven't opened, nearly four years after that council vote. It's a reminder that even a well-funded, well-connected restaurateur can get stuck when a project sits at the intersection of historic renovation and a moving regulatory target. If you've been checking that warehouse every few months hoping to see lights on, you're not alone, and there's no shame in giving up the guessing game until an actual date gets posted.
Where to Actually Go This Fall
If you're trying to sort what's real from what's still a rendering, here's the state of downtown Midlothian as it stands right now.
| Development | What It Is | Open Now | Still Coming |
|---|---|---|---|
| Founders Row | Relocated, restored historic homes | The Porch Pour, Wilson's Seafood & Grill, Copper Rose, Relic + Root, House of Aesthetics | Soco Coffee (inside the moved Anderson House), one unannounced retail/bakery lot |
| Lawson District | Reactivated 50,000+ sq ft vacant building | Roma's Italian Bistro, The Dessert Bar, O'Brien's Bookshop, Bearded Ax Brewery & Gathering Hall | A handful of additional tenants the city has said are preparing to open |
| Main Street Towne Crossing | New ground-up construction | Mo' Bettahs | Lowe's Home Improvement, Chick-fil-A |
| El Primo's (standalone) | Historic warehouse conversion | Not open | No confirmed date |
Downtown's pull has grown enough that the Midlothian Chamber of Commerce's annual spring festival, MidloFest, now draws a Chamber-estimated 10,000 or more attendees to these same blocks, up from a festival that used to be a smaller, wine-focused event before its recent rebrand. That kind of foot traffic doesn't happen by accident. It happens because there's finally somewhere to walk to.
The next time you're deciding where to grab dinner or coffee downtown, the fastest way to guess whether something's actually open is to ask which of the three projects it belongs to. New construction moves fast. A single reactivated building opens in a batch. A row of historic homes opens one restoration at a time. And anything caught between renovation and a permitting change might take a while longer than anyone expected.
If you're a longtime Midlothian resident who's watched this stretch of Main Street change shape over the past few years, you already know the feeling of driving past a building and wondering what finally happened to it. That curiosity, multiplied across a whole neighborhood, is exactly the kind of local knowledge that matters whenever someone you know starts asking what it's actually like to live here. When that conversation comes up, or when your own plans start to shift, the Krissy Mireles Team would be glad to talk it through with you.
