Hereford House and Houlihan's Are Gone From Town Center Plaza. Here's What Fills the Corner Next
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
Drive past 119th and Roe on a Tuesday evening and the plaza still hums the way it always has. Cars circle for spots near Macy's. Someone is walking out of Crate & Barrel with a box under one arm. But turn toward either end of Town Center Plaza and you hit a gap. On the north side, the building that housed Hereford House for nearly three decades sits behind a construction plan waiting on renovation crews. On the south side, near Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware, the space where Houlihan's poured happy hour beers since the mid-1990s should already be a demolition site by now, since the developer told the city that clearing the building could start "as early as May."
Both restaurants are gone within months of each other. That's the part worth sitting with if you live here and haven't been tracking it closely: the two anchors that framed Town Center Plaza for a generation didn't fade out one at a time. They left in the same stretch of 2026, which means the corner you used to default to for a Friday dinner reservation is currently a construction zone on both ends, and what replaces them will reshape which direction you drive when someone asks where to eat.
Hereford House closed in August 2024, ending a run that started when the building went up in 1996. Houlihan's held on longer, but its closure date is specific: March 27, 2026, after operating on the plaza's south side since at least the mid-1990s. The company said at the time it was working to shift staff to its remaining Johnson County location near Oak Park Mall and to a Lee's Summit restaurant.
Leawood's planning commission didn't waste time deciding what comes next. In April 2026, commissioners unanimously approved plans for both sites in a single evening, a pace that prompted commission chair David Coleman to note the city was "revitalizing Town Center, which is our premier shopping area," adding that it was "almost like Town Center is now the hot place for restaurants."
The two projects are not mirror images of each other. The old Hereford House building isn't being torn down. Under plans from Clockwork Architecture for owner Brooksider Re Holdings, the 12,228 square foot structure keeps its footprint and becomes the second location of Brookside's Brooksider Sportsbar & Grill, with the patio extended by 746 square feet and a new turfed area of 897 square feet built for yard games and a television screen facing the seating.
The Houlihan's site is a different kind of project. That building is coming down entirely. Drake Development's Dave Olson told planning commissioners the two-building replacement will hold four restaurants total, calling them "high-end restaurants, new to the area" without naming names. Demolition was projected to start in May, which puts the site somewhere between freshly cleared and mid-construction by the time you read this, depending on how closely the actual timeline tracked that projection.
That's five new restaurants replacing two, on paper. Whether the corner nets out as more crowded or more spread out will depend on how those four Houlihan's-site tenants get announced, and nothing public has named them yet.
While the two anchor sites work through permitting and construction, the smaller storefronts around them kept turning over on a much faster clock. Town Center Plaza and Town Center Crossing changed ownership in July 2025, when Federal Realty Investment Trust bought both properties, its first Midwest acquisition after a portfolio built entirely on the coasts. The leasing pace since then has been active enough that a February 2026 tenant roundup read almost like a different mall than the one from a year earlier.
A few of the changes worth knowing if you shop there regularly:
None of these are the kind of thing that shows up in a market report. They're the kind of thing you notice when you're actually parked there on a Saturday, which is exactly the point. The plaza's retail mix is shifting toward fitness, fast-casual, and specialty categories even as its restaurant identity sits in limbo.
If Town Center Plaza's dinner options are temporarily thinner, Park Place at 117th and Nall has been the beneficiary. In June 2026, AR's Breakfast and Brunch announced plans to open in the space that most recently held Mother Clucker, a hot chicken spot that closed at the end of 2025, and before that housed a Florida-based BurgerFi. Owner Oscar Romero said the Leawood location would carry the same menu found at AR's other spots, including breakfast tacos, chilaquiles, horchata waffles, and nutella and banana crepes, plus some Leawood-specific lunch additions like sandwiches and wraps. Renovations were already underway when the announcement went out, which means the Park Place location has likely been open and serving brunch cocktails for a good part of the summer.
Romero, who opened the original AR's in downtown Overland Park in 2023 before expanding to Olathe, Kansas City's Westport neighborhood, and now Leawood, said Park Place reminded him of where the brand started, calling it "beautiful" and noting the resemblance to downtown Overland Park.
The practical effect is that Leawood's two commercial nodes are behaving differently right now. Town Center Plaza is mid-rebuild on its two biggest dining anchors while its retail lineup keeps expanding. Park Place, a mile north, has been quietly absorbing the restaurant traffic that might otherwise have defaulted south, one new tenant at a time.
If you want a single night to see the current state of Leawood's dining scene in one place, it's September 12. That's when the Leawood Chamber's Taste of Leawood returns to Park Place, an unlimited tasting event pulling from participating restaurants across the city, open to guests 21 and up. Early bird pricing ran from June 1 through the end of that month, so by now you're looking at standard pricing, and the event has a track record of selling out before the date arrives. If you've been meaning to figure out which of the newer restaurants around town are actually worth a second visit, this is the fastest way to do it without booking five separate reservations.
Town Center Plaza will get its restaurant anchors back eventually. The Brooksider Sportsbar & Grill and whatever ends up on the old Houlihan's site will fill in the corners that have felt empty since spring. Until then, the honest answer to "where do we eat tonight" in Leawood is more mile-marker than habit: check what's open at the plaza, and if it's still under construction, drive north.
Paulson / Dow tracks these shifts because they matter to more than dinner plans. A shopping center's tenant mix, its ownership changes, and where the foot traffic moves are the kind of neighborhood-level detail that shapes how a block feels to live near, long before it shows up in any sale price. If you're curious about how Leawood's commercial corners connect to its residential streets, our Leawood neighborhood guide goes deeper on what makes different pockets of the city function the way they do. And if you're ready to talk specifics about a home search or sale here, Paulson / Dow is glad to start with a conversation, not a pitch.
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