Drive past CityCentre Six on Town & Country Boulevard this month and you will see orange construction fencing where a parking apron used to be, wrapped around a patch of ground that, as of this spring, was still just landscaping between office towers. There is no sign yet announcing what is coming. There does not need to be. The permit filed with the state tells you everything: a Canadian restaurant chain called JOEY is about to spend $9 million building a restaurant from the foundation up, on land at 920 Town & Country Blvd that has never held a restaurant before.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. For the past decade, almost everything new at CityCentre has been a name moving into a box someone else already built. JOEY's own first Houston location did exactly that in 2023, taking over the Galleria address that Yauatcha had vacated. This time is different. The permit calls for construction of "a new one-story full-service restaurant and commercial kitchen," about 7,700 square feet, with a build timeline that puts completion around spring 2027. Houston's westside anchor property, sitting inside zip code 77024 at the interchange of I-10 and Beltway 8, is not just filling storefronts anymore. It is pouring foundations.
The permit that reads differently from the others
JOEY Restaurant Group has been in Texas since 2023, when it opened its first Houston restaurant in the former Yauatcha space on Westheimer, an 8,434-square-foot interior with a temperature-controlled patio, one of the group's largest footprints anywhere. That was a lease into an existing shell. The CityCentre project, by contrast, shows up in county permit filings as new one-story construction, architected by TRM Architects, the same firm that has designed builds for the Cheesecake Factory and the Grand Lux Cafe. A restaurant chain does not commission a from-scratch building unless it expects to be there for a long time.
It also tells you something about how JOEY reads the CityCentre customer versus the Galleria customer. This is the company's second Houston address, not its first, and it chose to build rather than lease. That is a bigger bet on 77024 specifically than a simple regional expansion would require.
The theater already went through the same shift
CityCentre residents do not have to wait until 2027 to see what a full rebuild looks like. The property's movie theater already went through one. For fifteen years, Studio Movie Grill operated the second-floor cinema above Starbucks and Nike. In 2024, the Houston-based hospitality group Culinary Khancepts, the company behind State Fare Kitchen & Bar and Liberty Kitchen, took over the lease and gutted the space rather than simply rebranding the marquee.
Omar Khan, president of Culinary Khancepts, described the move this way when the takeover was announced:
Our luxury cinema brand perfectly complements the exceptional atmosphere of CityCentre.
The renovated Star Cinema Grill reopened with heated recliners, privacy pods with blankets, and seat massagers that the chain says exist at no other one of its locations, a detail worth knowing if you are choosing a theater for a night out rather than just checking showtimes. Studio Movie Grill's CEO, in his own statement on the way out, thanked the property for fifteen wonderful years before the company shifted its Houston-area footprint elsewhere. Culinary Khancepts was mid-renovation on the historic River Oaks Theatre at the same time it took over the CityCentre screen, which tells you this was not a company testing the water. It was a company already spending money on Houston movie houses and choosing to put more of it here.
What got leased and what got built
Lay the last three years of CityCentre tenant news side by side and the pattern becomes obvious in a way that no single announcement shows on its own.
| Tenant | Timing | What actually happened | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| North Italia | Opened February 2024 | Leased into an existing 12,000-square-foot retail space with two patios | Third Houston-area location, later used as the reference point for a fourth in Katy |
| Star Cinema Grill | Reopened by April 2024 | Gut renovation of the existing theater shell | Replaced a 15-year tenant with new-build interior finishes and exclusive amenities |
| JOEY | Permit filed spring 2026, construction expected to run through spring 2027 | Ground-up new construction, $9 million, about 7,700 square feet | Second Houston address, first to be purpose-built rather than leased |
Read top to bottom, the property is moving from renovation to real construction. That shift usually follows a change in ownership, and CityCentre had one: in 2025, Houston developer MetroNational bought the retail portion of the property from original developer Midway and brought in Radom Capital, the firm behind Montrose Collective and the Tower Theater buildings on lower Westheimer, to reshape the retail mix going forward. New capital tends to build rather than just re-lease, and the JOEY permit is the clearest evidence yet of that appetite showing up on the ground.
Why CityCentre keeps being the second stop, not the first
There is a reason both of the property's most notable recent additions arrived as second locations rather than first ones. North Italia opened at CityCentre in 2024 as its third Houston-area restaurant, after Uptown's BLVD Place and The Woodlands. When the chain announced a fourth location at Katy's LaCenterra at Cinco Ranch this year, local coverage described CityCentre, not the Galleria or Uptown, as the nearest existing North Italia to that new Katy address. CityCentre had become the reference point, the store other stores get measured against when a company decides where to expand next.
JOEY is following the same logic in reverse. Its first Houston restaurant went into the highest-visibility retail corridor in the city. Its second is going into an office-tower ground floor eight miles west, in a zip code with a different daily population of commuters, families, and Energy Corridor and Memorial-area professionals passing through on I-10. Choosing to build rather than lease there is JOEY betting that CityCentre's audience is different enough from the Galleria's to be worth its own permanent address, not just an overflow location.
What's actually open right now
If you live near CityCentre and want to know what's real today versus what's still behind fencing, here is the difference:
- Open now: North Italia's dining room and patios, running since February 2024
- Open now: Star Cinema Grill, with the heated recliners and privacy pods already installed
- Still under construction: the JOEY building at CityCentre Six, with completion expected around spring 2027
- Ongoing: the property's Live Music in the Plaza series, which continues to bring evening programming to the central green space between the shops and restaurants
The theater and the Italian restaurant are the version of CityCentre that already reflects the rebuild. The JOEY site is the one still behind fencing, and it is the one that will tell you the most about where the property is headed once the framing goes up.
The next twelve months
None of this changes what CityCentre already does well. The dining and retail mix along Town & Country Boulevard is not going anywhere, and residents who already treat the plaza as a Friday-night default will keep doing exactly that. What is changing is the kind of investment showing up underneath the names. A tenant that leases an existing box can leave in five years without much trace. A tenant that pours a foundation and builds its own kitchen is telling the neighborhood something about how long it plans to stay. Watch that fencing on Town & Country Boulevard this fall. What comes out of the ground there next spring will say more about CityCentre's direction than any single restaurant opening could on its own.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood's commercial investment says about its residential value, that's exactly the kind of read Jaime Fallon brings to every listing conversation in this corridor. Request a complimentary consultation and home valuation to talk through what's actually happening on the ground near you.
