Friday evening, September 25, North Tennessee Street smelled like bratwurst and sounded like a brass band. The 19th Annual McKinney Oktoberfest opened at 2 p.m. and ran until 11, part of a three-day run that turned 14 blocks of the historic square into a beer garden, with a keg tapping ceremony at 6 p.m. and roughly 70,000 visitors expected across the weekend. It's the kind of scene the square has hosted for nearly two decades, familiar enough that longtime downtown regulars could probably map the vendor rows from memory.
Three miles south on El Dorado Parkway, something newer was happening the same weekend. On September 26, KFC opened a restaurant called Open House, its first of this kind anywhere in the country. Out of more than 3,500 U.S. locations, the company chose a corner near Custer Road in McKinney to test table service, touchscreen kiosks, breakfast, boba drinks, dual drive-through lanes, and a mobile pickup lane, with a public celebration the next morning from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. It is, by KFC's own description, a testing ground for ideas the chain might eventually roll out everywhere.
That's the pattern worth paying attention to this year. McKinney's downtown core isn't just picking up new restaurants and venues. It's becoming the place where restaurant groups and national brands choose to run their most ambitious idea first, not their tenth location.
Two Willow Bend Neighbors Chose Downtown Over a Second Suburb
Brian Dunne owns Mexican Bar Company in Plano. George Stergios owns Knife Steakhouse in Plano and previously ran food and beverage at the Highland Dallas hotel, where the original Knife opened. The two spent more than six years as literal neighbors in the restaurant district at The Shops at Willow Bend before deciding to open something together. They picked McKinney.
Centro on the Square opened at 112 E. Louisiana St., across from the McKinney Performing Arts Center, with a menu built around handmade pastas, house-crafted meatballs, locally sourced steaks, and Gulf seafood, finished with an amaro old fashioned or housemade limoncello. Two operators with established Plano restaurants and years of proximity to each other didn't need McKinney to build a business. They chose it anyway for their joint concept, which says something about where they saw the better opening.
A Self-Pour Tap Wall Picked McKinney for Its First Texas Stop
Oak & Stone made its Texas debut on May 19, 2026, at 8575 W. University Dr., in the same development as Kura Revolving Sushi Bar, Paciugo Gelato Caffe, and Velvet Taco. The space runs 6,000 square feet with seating for 200 and a tech-driven tap wall that lets guests pour their own pints.
A concept picking its first Texas location isn't choosing between neighborhoods on convenience. It's choosing on foot traffic and staying power, betting that a market can sustain a format built around volume and repeat visits. West University now has enough density around it, with Velvet Taco and Kura already anchoring the same strip, that a party who can't get a table at Centro has a real fifteen-minute alternative instead of driving to Plano or Frisco. That kind of backup option didn't really exist at this scale before this spring.
A Century-Old Bank Vault Became a Hot Dog Counter
Bryan and Angela McVay are McKinney residents who signed a lease on one of downtown's oldest buildings, a structure that once housed First National Bank, dating to the late 1800s. After roughly $750,000 in renovations, they opened Shorty's Coneys and Cocktails at 109 N. Kentucky St. on March 16, 2026.
The menu leans into hot dogs, smash burgers, and sandwiches, with a nod to McVay's childhood in the Original Coney, topped with mustard, diced onion, hot dog sauce, and chili, for $6. The chili itself traces back roughly 130 years to the San Antonio Chili Queens tradition, adapted into what the menu calls Haley's Killer Chili, named after McVay's daughter found a version online that included beans.
"People in Texas will die if you put beans in the chili."
That was the chef's verdict, according to McVay, which is how the dish got its name instead of the beans. The menu also includes a Sonoran hot dog, topped with mayo, ketchup, and fresno peppers, inspired by Angela McVay's roots in the Southwest. Before the restaurant opened, McVay ran a scavenger hunt around town, and by his own account he kept it going after opening day just to see who would still bring in what they found.
A century-old bank building sitting empty is a familiar story in small-city downtowns. A couple willing to put three-quarters of a million dollars into bringing it back, on a menu built around $6 hot dogs rather than a concept requiring higher check averages to justify the investment, is a bet on foot traffic being the return, not markup.
Why El Dorado Parkway Made Sense to a National Chain
KFC moved its U.S. headquarters from Kentucky to Plano in 2025. That detail matters more than it looks. A corner in McKinney sits close enough to headquarters that executives can walk through the format in person, watch how guests use the Celebration Booth photo experience or the Swag Bar, and adjust before deciding what travels to the rest of the country. Testing a flagship concept 25 minutes from your own building is a different kind of bet than testing it somewhere you'll only see on a quarterly report.
The choice lines up with everything else happening a few blocks north. Centro's owners had an existing base in Plano and chose McKinney anyway. Oak & Stone picked McKinney for its first Texas seat. KFC picked a McKinney corner for its first Open House anywhere. None of these were location decisions driven by lack of better options elsewhere in North Texas. Each one was a choice to put the newest version of something here first.
Not every signal downtown points the same direction. Netrio, the McKinney-based IT firm headquartered at 116 N. Tennessee St., announced it's relocating its headquarters to Craig Ranch. That's a reminder that the daytime office economy downtown isn't what's driving this particular wave of investment. The restaurants, the event venues, and the weekend calendar are.
That event side has its own new entry. Gather on the Square opened in June as a rentable venue in Historic Downtown McKinney, owned and operated by the McKinney Chamber of Commerce, with capacity for roughly 200 depending on setup. A chamber of commerce taking a physical downtown lease for events is its own kind of vote of confidence, separate from any single restaurant's bet.
What's Next on the Same Blocks
Oktoberfest's Sunday hours ran from noon to 5 p.m., the shortest window of the three-day run and the one most likely to feel like a neighborhood afternoon rather than a citywide event. For anyone who wants another reason to walk the same stretch of the square before the year turns colder, the calendar already has three dates locked in:
- First Friday Market & Music at District 121, October 2, 6:30 to 9:30 p.m.
- Good Ol' Days Fest, October 18, starting at 11 a.m. at The Stix Icehouse
- McKinney Fall Fest, October 24, starting at 9 a.m. on West University Drive
None of these require driving to Frisco or Plano to see something new. The newest ideas from a Plano restaurant group, a national beer concept, and a company that just moved its headquarters up the road all landed within walking distance of the same courthouse square this year.
If you're the kind of person who notices when a block starts filling in like this and wonders what it would mean to actually live inside walking distance of it, that's a conversation Torelli Properties Group has with McKinney buyers pretty often. Reach out when you're ready to talk through what that looks like on a specific street.
