Memorial's Restaurant Scene Just Outgrew the Mall, in Two Directions at Once
"State Fare wasn't just a restaurant, it was an experience." That's how Culinary Khancepts' Omar Khan described the Gateway Memorial City location of State Fare Kitchen & Bar after it shut its doors following service on Sunday, May 31. The restaurant had been part of that stretch of Memorial since May 2016, long enough to become a habit for people who lived nearby, and its closing after ten years felt like the end of something.
It wasn't. While State Fare was winding down, two entirely different projects a few miles apart were already moving, each backed by more capital than the restaurant that just left. One is finishing this fall. The other broke ground on construction this month. Neither is replacing State Fare directly, and that's the point: Memorial's restaurant growth isn't filling in one location anymore. It's stretching along the corridor in two directions at once, and the oldest tenant in the middle of it just ran out of runway.
Everything below sits along the same general stretch of Memorial's Katy Freeway and Gessner Road corridor, but the two biggest projects underway right now are pulling apart from each other geographically, not converging on one center.
| Project | Location | Timing | Scale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Greenside (Pizzana anchor) | 1085 Gessner Road | Opening this fall | 35,000 square feet across a one-acre green space |
| JOEY CityCentre | 920 Town & Country Blvd | Construction underway since early September, opening targeted for spring 2027 | 7,700 square feet, $9 million buildout |
| The Burger Joint | 1016 Gessner Road | Opened February 26 | 4,300 square feet plus a 1,500-square-foot patio |
| State Fare Kitchen & Bar | Gateway Memorial City | Closed May 31 | Ten-year anchor tenant |
Read the addresses and the pattern shows up on its own. Gessner Road, just north of the mall, is where the newest infill is landing. CityCentre, a separate mixed-use node south along the same corridor, is where the bigger single-tenant bet just got made. The mall's own retail plaza, where State Fare sat for a decade, lost its longest-running tenant in the same season.
Greenside is not a mall expansion in the traditional sense. It's a reimagining of former warehouse space on Gessner Road, designed by Michael Hsu Office of Architecture, and it marks the first time MetroNational, which owns Memorial City Mall, has partnered with Radom Capital, the developer behind Montrose Collective and Heights Mercantile. Radom also worked with Triten Real Estate on M-K-T, the Heights project that converted old warehouses into retail and office space. Greenside applies that same adaptive-reuse formula to Memorial for the first time.
The finished project will include string lights, plant-covered trellises, outdoor seating, and a children's play area, along with new pedestrian walkways connecting Gessner Road to Mathewson Lane. Pizzana, the Michelin-recognized pizzeria, will anchor it. This will be Pizzana's second Houston location, following its 2024 debut in River Oaks, and its ninth overall alongside outposts in Dallas and Los Angeles. Co-founder Candace Nelson said the goal was a space that feels "open, inviting, and rooted in the joy of being together." Fast-casual eateries and wellness brands round out the rest of the confirmed tenant list.
What makes Greenside worth watching isn't the pizza. It's that Memorial's own mall landlord chose to bring in an outside developer known for adaptive reuse rather than build another traditional retail wing. That's a different kind of investment than anything the corridor has seen before.
CityCentre is getting its own commitment, and it's a large one. JOEY, the Calgary-founded restaurant chain with its first Houston location in the Galleria area since 2021, is opening a second Houston-area outpost at CityCentre 6, the office tower at 920 Town & Country Boulevard. Permit filings put the construction cost at $9 million for a 7,700-square-foot, one-story restaurant and commercial kitchen. Work broke ground in early September and is expected to finish by the end of April 2027.
That timeline matters for anyone tracking the corridor right now. This isn't a fall opening. It's a spring 2027 project, which means CityCentre's newest restaurant is a next-year plan, not a this-season one. But the size of the investment, nearly double what The Burger Joint spent on its new Gessner Road location, signals that JOEY sees CityCentre as a market distinct from Memorial City Mall itself, worth its own standalone build rather than a smaller footprint closer to the mall's existing restaurant row.
State Fare's run at Gateway Memorial City started in May 2016 under Cherry Pie Hospitality and won Best New Restaurant honors at the 2017 CultureMap Tastemaker Awards before Culinary Khancepts acquired the brand in 2018. The company expanded to Sugar Land in 2020, though that location closed earlier this year, and opened a Woodlands location in 2022 inside Hughes Landing that remains open today. So the brand isn't gone. What's gone is the original flagship, the one that opened first and anchored Gateway Memorial City the longest.
That same retail pocket, Gateway and the adjacent McKinley development, has turned over almost entirely since 2024. Haywire, Credence, Sidebar, and Bar Bludorn all arrived there within roughly the same two-year window. State Fare was the last of the pre-2024 restaurants still standing in that specific location, and now it's the one that's left. The corridor isn't shrinking. It's just no longer holding onto everything that built it.
If you're deciding where to eat around Memorial over the next few months, here's roughly how the timeline breaks down:
For years, eating out in Memorial meant going to the mall, or going somewhere else entirely. That's no longer quite true. The corridor now stretches from Gessner Road's new infill projects down to CityCentre's standalone investment, with the original mall-adjacent restaurant row in between quietly cycling out its oldest tenant. None of this required new land or a bigger mall footprint. It required two different developers deciding that Memorial's existing buildings, whether a former warehouse or an office tower's ground floor, were worth a second look.
If you've lived here a while, this is probably the season you stop thinking of "eating in Memorial" as one trip to one place and start thinking of it as a longer stretch worth exploring in both directions.
Caroline Bean has spent her career paying attention to exactly this kind of shift, the small changes in a neighborhood's daily rhythm that tell you more than a headline ever could. If you're curious about what a changing corridor like this means for a specific street or a specific home in Memorial, Caroline Bean would love to talk it through. Let's Connect.
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