North Richland Hills Stopped Waiting for Restaurants to Find It

Most cities let restaurants show up wherever the rent is cheap and the traffic count looks right. North Richland Hills did something different this year. It picked a corner, built a case for it, and told two fast-expanding burger and taco concepts exactly why they should show up there instead of somewhere else in the Mid-Cities.

That corner sits at the northwest intersection of Davis Boulevard and Lola Drive, and by the time you read this, Jakes Burgers and Tacos & Avocados should be closing in on their fall 2026 opening. The city broke ground on the site back in December with Mad Concepts Group and Blue Plate Network, the hospitality companies behind both brands, and the language everyone involved used to describe the project tells you more about what's happening in NRH than any menu preview would.

The Deal Behind the Burgers

This wasn't a developer quietly leasing a vacant pad site. The city of North Richland Hills put money into it, and city officials were specific about where that money came from: not property taxes, but a targeted contribution meant to convert what they called an underutilized property into something residents had already been asking for. Mayor Jack McCarty framed it as purposeful redevelopment rather than a routine commercial lease.

That distinction matters if you live near Davis and Lola. A landlord filling an empty building is background noise. A city treating that same building as an economic development lever, then measuring success in future sales and property tax revenue rather than the burger count, is a different kind of signal. The stated goal wasn't just two restaurants. It was a one-acre shared yard designed to function as a gathering space year-round, the kind of thing Blue Plate Network's founder Carter Wilson described as more useful than a standalone park because it stays activated every day instead of a few days a year.

Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only read the press release: this isn't the first time Mad Concepts Group has run this exact playbook. They're doing a near-identical Jakes and Tacos & Avocados pairing in Brenbrook, and a Jakes paired with Split Rail Steakhouse & Grill in Saginaw. North Richland Hills didn't get picked because it's uniquely appealing. It got picked because the city built a deal attractive enough to compete for a template that's currently being deployed across several North Texas suburbs at once.

The Corridor That Got There First

The Davis and Lola project is the headline, but it's landing on top of a year that already reshaped where people in NRH eat without any public money involved.

Line these up on a map and a pattern shows up fast. Barrel & Bones and Blue Goose both landed near Precinct Line Road and Grapevine Highway, an established retail stretch that didn't need a subsidy to attract tenants. Barrel & Bones came in as the Tarrant County debut for a smokehouse chain with locations in North Dallas, The Colony, and Carrollton, and it leaned into something rare for the suburbs: weekend brunch alongside late-night hours most restaurants out here don't bother keeping. Blue Goose Cantina, a Dallas fajita institution since 1984, chose a spot near Precinct Line and Davis that had cycled through Enchiladas Ole and, before that, a Slim Chickens.

The Spark Indian & Nepali Cuisine tells a smaller but equally local story. It's owned by Jyoti Kandel and chef Shreeram Sapkota, and Kandel already runs Aroma Grill and Bar in Keller. He picked North Richland Hills specifically because its location gives him easy reach into Fort Worth, Colleyville, Southlake, and Keller diners, all from one lease. That's a business owner reading the map the same way the city did with Davis and Lola: the address matters because of who can get there, not just who lives next door.

Smalls Sliders, still a year out, is chasing the same logic at scale. The franchisee behind the North Richland Hills location is already eyeing Keller, Grapevine, and Fort Worth for follow-on sites, which means NRH is functioning as his first foothold in North Texas rather than an isolated bet.

Why the Underutilized Corner Mattered More Than the Busy One

Here's the actual thesis worth sitting with: the organic openings proved the corridor works. The subsidized one proved the city wanted to control where the next wave landed, rather than leaving it to whichever landlord had an empty pad site.

Precinct Line Road and Grapevine Highway didn't need help. Restaurants were already choosing those addresses because the traffic and the demographics penciled out on their own. Davis and Lola was a different case: a site the city itself described as underused, sitting on a corridor it wanted to revitalize rather than simply fill. Instead of waiting for that stretch to catch up organically, the city put a small, non-property-tax contribution behind it and recruited two brands with proven track records elsewhere in North Texas.

That's a more active hand than most residents assume their city takes in something as everyday as where the new burger place opens. It also explains why the site is being built around a shared yard instead of two standalone restaurant boxes. A city measuring success in long-term sales tax revenue wants a destination people return to on a random Tuesday, not just a drive-through option they hit once.

The Same Logic Shows Up in the Parks

If you want to see this pattern outside of restaurants, look at NRH2O and Fossil Creek Park. NRH2O opened Nitro Blast, its new dueling water coaster, on June 27, 2026, with city council and the Parks & Recreation Board on hand for the ribbon cutting. Fossil Creek Park, on Onyx Drive South, has its own recent addition in a Bicycle Playground and Pump Track built in partnership with the Fort Worth Mountain Bikers' Association, adding to the roughly five miles of mountain bike trail already there.

Both projects run on the same funding logic as the restaurant park: North Richland Hills' parks and trails system, all 800-plus acres and 30 miles of hike and bike trails, is funded through a voter-approved half-cent sales tax rather than a hit to homeowners' property tax bills. Whether it's a water coaster or a taco stand, the city keeps reaching for the same tool: dedicated revenue streams that let it build first and let the tax base grow around the investment, instead of asking residents to fund it directly.

What This Means If You Already Live Here

None of this requires you to do anything. You don't need to drive to Davis and Lola the week it opens, and you don't need to track franchise filings the way a commercial broker would. But it's worth knowing that the restaurant options showing up near you this year aren't random. Some of them, like Barrel & Bones and Blue Goose, arrived because the numbers already worked on Precinct Line and Grapevine Highway. Others, like the Jakes and Tacos & Avocados pairing, exist because the city decided a corner it wasn't happy with deserved a push, and it was willing to put money behind that push in order to get the district it wanted rather than the district it had.

That's a different story than "NRH got some new restaurants this year." It's a city treating its underused real estate the way a developer would, with a specific outcome in mind and a funding structure built to protect residents from carrying the cost directly. Keep an eye on Davis and Lola this fall. If the shared yard works the way Mad Concepts Group is betting it will, don't be surprised if it becomes the template the city reaches for the next time it finds another corner it wants to change its mind about.

If you're curious how these kinds of local shifts tend to show up in home values and buyer interest around North Richland Hills, that's exactly the sort of question Maggie Love spends her time tracking. Let's Connect if you want a read on what's happening on your specific street.