Ask a longtime McKinney resident what the Square is for and you will likely hear some version of the same answer: dinner on a Friday, maybe a stroll past the shops on a Saturday morning, live music if there is a band booked. That has been true for years. It is no longer the whole story.
Three restaurants have opened along the Square in roughly the past fourteen months. A semi-pro soccer team just wrapped its second season a short walk away. A brewery built a soccer pitch. None of this happened in a coordinated push, but taken together it has quietly moved the Square from a place you visit on weekends to a place that has something worth doing most days of the week. That is the shift worth noticing, not the restaurant count itself.
Three Openings, One Stretch Of Sidewalk
Centro on the Square was first. It opened in June 2025 at 112 E. Louisiana Street, in the space that used to hold Harvest Seasonal Kitchen before that restaurant relocated and rebranded as Harvest at the Masonic. The concept came from Brian Dunne, owner of Mexican Bar Company, and George Stergios, owner of Knife Steakhouse, two restaurateurs who spent years as neighbors at The Shops at Willow Bend before deciding to build something together downtown. The menu leans Italian-American, with handmade pasta rolled daily and a glass window in the back where diners can watch it happen. The drink list runs deep, with 22 bourbon options topping out at a $60 pour of 18-year Elijah Craig, and a private dining room that seats 40 for the rehearsal dinners and holiday parties that have become a regular part of its business.
"The Square is truly unique and has a pulse of its own."
That is how Dunne and Stergios described their reason for choosing downtown McKinney over a more predictable retail corridor, and a year in, the bet has held. Reviews through the summer of 2026 keep circling back to the same details: the burrata, the calamari, the pasta window, and a dining room that fills up fast enough that dinner reservations are genuinely hard to land some nights.
Oak & Stone followed in May, opening its Texas debut on May 19, 2026 at 8575 W. University Drive, a development that already includes Kura Revolving Sushi Bar, Paciugo Gelato Caffe, and Velvet Taco. The Florida import brought something the Square did not previously have: a 6,000-square-foot, self-serve tap wall built for 200 diners, open for lunch, dinner, and weekend brunch. It is a different register than Centro's white-tablecloth energy, closer to a social hangout than a special-occasion dinner.
Then came Shorty's, which announced plans for North Kentucky Street back in February and aimed for a spring opening. Owners Bryan and Angela McVay built the concept around hot dogs, smash burgers, and cocktails, but the detail that says the most about how this couple thinks about the Square is what they have been collecting for months: early photographs and video footage of downtown McKinney, meant to be displayed inside the restaurant once it opened. It is a small gesture, but it fits a pattern. Every new operator on the Square this year has talked about it as a place with its own identity worth preserving, not a blank slot to fill.
The Real Change Is What Time Of Day You'd Go
Here is the part that matters more than the opening count. Centro did not just open for dinner and stop there. Starting July 28, 2025, it added lunch and happy hour service, a decision that turned a restaurant with a 9 p.m. weeknight close and lines out the door by 5 o'clock into something a downtown office worker or a retiree running errands could actually use on a Tuesday afternoon. Oak & Stone built weekend brunch into its concept from day one. Between the two, the Square picked up daytime and midweek options it genuinely lacked before, on top of the dinner crowd it already had.
That distinction is not cosmetic. A restaurant that only works for a Friday reservation asks something different of a neighborhood than one that works for a Tuesday lunch. The first is a destination you plan around. The second is a habit you fold into an ordinary week. Downtown McKinney picked up more of the second kind of place this year than it has in a while, and that is the change worth clocking, not just the new addresses.
A Soccer Season That Just Wrapped, And What It Left Behind
The McKinney Chupacabras played their second full season this year, and by most measures it went well. The USL League Two club fields a roster mixing aspiring pros with college players from McKinney and the surrounding area, many of whom come home each summer specifically to play. Home matches run at Ron Poe Stadium, a roughly 4,000-capacity venue a short walk from the Square, and the regular season ran May through July this year with playoffs pushing into early August. That means the 2026 season has just closed out as of this writing, which is worth knowing if you were planning around a home match this month. There will not be one until next May.
What the club leaves behind between seasons is more interesting than the schedule itself. In partnership with TUPPS Brewery, the Chupacabras built a small-sided mini soccer pitch on TUPPS' downtown-adjacent property in the Mill District, meant for pickup games and youth programs year-round, not just on match days. That is a second data point pointing the same direction as the restaurant additions: the institutions anchoring downtown McKinney are building for daily use, not just peak weekend traffic.
What Is Still Coming This Fall
The Square's calendar does not go quiet once the soccer season ends. A few things worth knowing about if you have not already circled them:
- Oktoberfest returns to 111 N. Tennessee Street the weekend of September 26 through 28, with local food and beverage vendors, including several area breweries, and free admission.
- Live jazz at Centro happens every Thursday, filling the dining room for the evening.
- The Nitty Gritty Jazz Band plays the Celt Irish Pub on August 29, a smaller, recurring kind of night that rarely makes anyone's must-do list but adds up over a year of Thursdays and Fridays.
None of these are singular events. They are the texture of an ordinary season downtown, which is a different thing to point to than a grand opening.
The Square Isn't Busier, It's Differently Useful
It would be easy to write this as a simple growth story: more restaurants, more foot traffic, more reasons to visit. That is not quite what happened. The Square was already busy on weekends before any of this. What changed is the range of things a person who already lives nearby can do there on a random Tuesday, whether that is a lunch reservation at Centro, a self-poured beer at Oak & Stone, or a pickup game on TUPPS' small-sided pitch built specifically for the days when there is no scheduled match.
That is a quieter kind of change than a headline restaurant opening, but it is the one that actually reshapes how a neighborhood gets used day to day. Downtown McKinney did not get bigger this year. It got more available.
If you already call McKinney home and want a closer read on how the Square, or any of the neighborhoods around it, fits where your life is headed next, Krista Cheatham is always glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.
