Frankie Nuccio spent years away from the pizza business. His original shop, once known as Pizza by Marco and later renamed My Family's Pizza, was a Preston Hollow fixture until a 2019 tornado tore through the building and ended that chapter without much warning. This August, he reopened on the Lake Highlands side of the boundary, under a new name: Ghost Pizza. The shop serves St. Louis-style slices, a nod to the disaster that displaced him.
A mile or so away, on Skillman Street, a different kind of reopening had happened earlier that summer. Charlie's Tavern & Kitchen held its grand opening on June 27, 2026, inside the Lake Highlands Town Center, the master-planned retail project that broke ground after a 2005 tax increment financing district and more than $86 million in infrastructure spending. Charlie's is the fourth restaurant concept to try that same storefront since the project got moving. Its owner, Justin Newton, brought free drinks for the first hundred guests, a World Cup watch party, and a name borrowed from his pet conure.
Both openings add to the range of dining options in the neighborhood.
A Restaurant Space in Transition
The Town Center was supposed to be the answer to a longstanding complaint: Lake Highlands didn't have enough places to shop or eat, and the empty land along Skillman between Abrams Road and I-635 was the obvious place to fix that. The Skillman Corridor TIF, created under then-council member Bill Blaydes, was designed to subsidize denser housing and retail around a planned DART rail stop. Sprouts eventually anchored the grocery side at 7110 Skillman, which is the one piece of the original plan most residents can point to and say, that's what we were promised.
The restaurant storefront next door has hosted four concepts, including Charlie's Tavern & Kitchen.
Restaurants Around the Town Center
Outside the Town Center's formal footprint, the corridor includes a range of restaurants and food businesses:
| Place | Location | Opened | What it's built on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cane Rosso | 7150 Skillman St | Established, no formal launch event | Wood-fired pizza, built a following before Town Center openings gave the corridor a second wind |
| Resident Taqueria | Skillman corridor | Established | Chef Andrew Savoie, whose résumé runs through Bouchon and Jean Georges before landing on tacos |
| Strouderosa BBQ | 9090 Skillman St, Ste 174A | May 24, 2023 | A catering side hustle that grew into a storefront |
| Goldie's | 9850 Walnut Hill Ln #305 | Spring 2024 | Reused the space RM 12:20 Bistro left vacant when it closed in February 2023 |
| Unimarket | 7215 Skillman St | Early 2026 | First U.S. location for a Colombian-founded Latin American market and grill, in a former tanning salon |
| Lochland's Food & Spirits | 8518 Plano Road at Northwest Highway | February 2020 | Peter and Cheryl Kenny's Irish pub, built inside a vacant veterinary clinic they bought outright |
| Ghost Pizza | Lake Highlands | August 2026 | Frankie Nuccio's tornado-displaced return, years after the 2019 storm closed his original shop |
Business Stories Along the Corridor
The businesses along the corridor have distinct origins. Strouderosa grew from a catering operation into a storefront. Unimarket is a Latin American market and grill founded by two brothers from Colombia; its Skillman location, in a former tanning salon, is their first U.S. store, and they already run locations in Calgary. Lochland's is the Kennys' Irish pub in Lake Highlands; they already ran two other Dallas pubs. Ghost Pizza marks Frankie Nuccio's return to the restaurant business after the 2019 tornado.
The Town Center includes Sprouts on the grocery side and Charlie's Tavern & Kitchen in its restaurant space. Other restaurants operate along the corridor.
What's New Right Now
If you haven't been down Skillman in a few weeks, three things are worth knowing about:
- Ghost Pizza is now open and slinging St. Louis-style pies, a direct continuation of the shop the 2019 tornado took out.
- Charlie's Tavern & Kitchen is a couple of months into its run, still finding its footing as the fourth attempt in that same Town Center storefront.
- Unimarket, which soft-opened earlier in the year with hours running 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., has been working toward extending to 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. for its official grand opening, a sign the Colombian grocery and grill concept found more demand than a soft launch accounted for.
Skillman Corridor Infrastructure Projects
The TIF was intended to support denser housing and retail around a planned DART rail stop. The Lake Highlands and North Lake Highlands Public Improvement Districts are currently working with the City of Dallas and TxDOT on a Skillman Corridor Master Plan that includes safety and median upgrades along Skillman from Church Road down to Sedgwick, a planned mural under the Walnut Hill Lane bridge at Watercrest Park, and intersection safety improvements at Forest Lane and Audelia Road. The corridor also includes Cane Rosso, Strouderosa, and Resident Taqueria.
The Town Center and the Skillman Corridor continue to change as businesses open and public improvement projects move forward.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
There's no fixed schedule to any of this, which is sort of the point. If you want something new this month, the tornado-displaced pizza spot and the barbecue counter are both open now, both a few minutes from wherever you already are in Lake Highlands. Charlie's Tavern & Kitchen is the latest restaurant concept in the Town Center space, alongside other dining businesses in the corridor.
If you're the kind of person who notices when a corridor like this shifts, whether that's a new restaurant taking over a long-vacant space or a public improvement district funding a project residents asked for years ago, you're also the kind of person who tends to have good instincts about where a neighborhood is headed next. Clinton Asalu keeps an eye on Lake Highlands and the rest of Dallas County for exactly that reason. If you're ever curious how any of this shows up in home values nearby, that's a conversation worth having.
