Chuy’s, a Tex-Mex restaurant that opened on Dallas’ McKinney Avenue in 1993, has been bulldozed. Crews knocked down the building near Knox Street this week to make way for a 12-story tower.
The demolition was expected, and Chuy’s ceased operations at that address in spring 2025. The operators took the restaurant’s iconic Elvis statue with them and relocated to Greenville Avenue. By Cinco de Mayo last year, the new Chuy’s was serving margaritas, queso and enchiladas in East Dallas.
In 2025, Elvis left the building at the Chuy’s Tex-Mex on McKinney Avenue and moved to the new location on Greenville Avenue. “We knew, at some point, they were going vertical,” said Travis Hudson, vice president of operations for Chuy’s, about the McKinney Avenue restaurant in 2025. (Jason Janik/Special Contributor)
What’s now a pile of bricks near Dallas’ Knox Street will eventually be a building so tall, it’ll be visible from Central Expressway. Dallas Morning News business reporters Nick Wooten and Neal Franklin report that the coming-soon structure, called Knox & McKinney, is expected to be finished in 2028.
Crews demolished Chuy’s Tex-Mex restaurant on McKinney Avenue near Knox Street in Dallas on April 1, 2026. The restaurant moved last year to a new Dallas location. (Juan Figueroa/The Dallas Morning News)
The plan is financed in part by Dell founder Michael Dell. The project is a joint venture with BDT & MSD Partners, Trammell Crow Company, the owners of Highland Park Village and The Retail Connection.
The real estate groups bought 13 acres around Knox Street, The News reported in 2025.
Work on the former Chuy’s site comes after the partnership recently topped out the Knox Hotel and Residences nearby.
The Katy Trail is the heartbeat of the reinvented area, Dallas developer Ray Washburne told us last year. Washburne remembers being a kid biking to Ashburn’s Ice Cream, which was on the same block as current-day Knox Street staples Toulouse and Taverna. A shop long known as Highland Park Pharmacy and later called Highland Park Soda Fountain was open nearby for 106 years before its closure nearly a decade ago. Today that plot is high-end restaurant Mister Charles, with a new tower above it.
Apple, Yeti, Lululemon and others opened in the Knox area while family-owned custard place Wild About Harry’s moved, then closed, dodging new development.
“Knox is on fire,” Washburne said in 2025. “The Katy Trail is Dallas’ oceanfront property.”
Do you recognize this block? This is Knox Street in Dallas in 1924. What a difference 100 years makes. (DMN file photo)