If you drove past The Star this summer looking for Cow Tipping Creamery, you probably circled the parking lot twice before giving up. The ice cream shop that anchored a corner of the Cowboys' Frisco headquarters for years is gone, and by early September a 25-to-30-seat cocktail lounge called The Imperial Room will be pouring drinks in its place. A few doors down, City Works closed too, and construction fencing now surrounds the site of a nearly 13,000-square-foot Moxies set to open there next spring.
Two storefronts. Same block. Same twelve-month stretch. And neither is a story about The Star adding restaurants. Both are stories about The Star recasting them.
That distinction matters if you live in Frisco and treat The Star as a regular stop, not a tourist attraction. The district isn't expanding the way it did a few years ago, when new buildings kept opening with new tenants inside them. What's happening now is turnover inside a footprint that's basically built out, and the pattern of who's leaving and who's replacing them tells you something about where Frisco's restaurant growth is actually headed next.
What's already open and staying open
Start with the one addition to The Star that isn't a replacement. Musume, from Dallas-based Rock Libations Restaurant Group, opened on the second floor at 3625 The Star Boulevard, Suite 315, in September 2025. It's a full-service Japanese and sushi concept running lunch, happy hour, and dinner across roughly 6,000 square feet, and the operator has described its sake and Japanese whisky list as the largest in the region. A year later, it's still there, still open, and still the most ambitious single addition The Star has made in recent memory.
Musume matters here because it's the control case. It opened into a genuinely new footprint rather than backfilling a vacated one, and it's had a full year to prove itself. Everything else on this list is a swap.
The ground floor is turning over
The Imperial Room, opening in early September 2026 at 3685 The Star Boulevard, is the more interesting of the two swaps because of what it's replacing and how small it's choosing to be. Cow Tipping Creamery was built for foot traffic and quick transactions. The Imperial Room, from PILF Restaurant Group, is doing the opposite on purpose: a tight 25-to-30-seat cocktail lounge in a district built around big game-day crowds. Founder Jay Jerrier put it plainly when the concept was announced, saying the space gives the group room to build something completely different from what's around it.
That's not a small detail. The Star was designed around volume: tailgate energy, group tables, restaurants that can turn over a lot of covers before and after Cowboys events. A 30-seat lounge is a bet that there's now enough non-game-day traffic at The Star, people showing up on a random Tuesday for a drink, not a crowd, to support a format that doesn't scale the way its predecessor did.
The other swap is less about downsizing and more about a straight like-for-like replacement. Moxies, a Canadian bar-and-grill brand already operating in Southlake and Plano, is building out the former City Works space at 3680 The Star Boulevard. A Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation filing puts construction at roughly $800,000 for the nearly 13,000-square-foot buildout, with completion now estimated for spring 2027. City Works was itself a high-volume beer hall concept, so this isn't a shift in scale. It's a straight tenant change: one big bar-and-grill brand out, another one in, same address, same square footage.
Put the two together and a pattern shows up. The Star isn't adding net-new restaurant space. It's recycling the space it already has, and the recycling is happening on a faster clock than most residents probably assume, two anchor tenants turning over inside about eighteen months on the same short stretch of boulevard.
Where the actual growth is happening instead
If The Star's footprint is essentially full, the real evidence of Frisco's restaurant expansion is showing up just outside it. Chubby Skewers, a Chinese barbecue concept specializing in interactive tableside cooking of skewered meats and seafood, chose Frisco for its first Texas location entirely, and it's landing at 9180 Warren Parkway, the same corridor The Star sits on, but in a roughly 4,000-square-foot space that didn't exist as a restaurant before. That's genuinely new square footage, not a backfill, with an opening planned for 2027.
The same thing is happening a few miles away at HALL Park, where Headington Companies, the group behind The Joule hotel in downtown Dallas, is bringing second locations of Tango Room and Commissary to 3101 Gaylord Parkway this fall. Neither is replacing anything. They're occupying ground-level retail space beneath The Monarch, a newly completed apartment building, which means HALL Park is still in its adding-space phase while The Star has moved into its swapping-tenants phase.
For a resident, that split is useful in a very practical way. If you want to watch what Frisco's dining scene looks like next, The Star isn't where the new stuff shows up anymore. It's where the same square footage keeps getting handed to a different operator. The new stuff, the genuinely new construction, is happening a short drive away on Warren Parkway and at HALL Park.
What this means for your next few weekends
If you've been planning around what used to be there, a few things are worth updating. Cow Tipping Creamery is closed for good, not on a summer hiatus. City Works is gone too, and the space will sit under construction through the rest of this year and into early 2027, so don't plan around it reopening on its old timeline. If you want a quiet drink rather than a game-day crowd, The Imperial Room's small footprint is worth watching for its early September opening, since a 25-to-30-seat room will likely need reservations or an early arrival once word gets around.
If Musume has been on your list and you haven't tried it yet, it's the one Star tenant with a full year of track record behind it, which is more than can be said for anything opening this fall or next spring.
And if you're the type who likes to get somewhere before it's crowded, Warren Parkway is worth keeping an eye on. Chubby Skewers landing there as a first-in-Texas location says something about how far Frisco's dining reputation has traveled. It used to mean driving to Plano or Carrollton for a concept like that. Increasingly, it debuts here first.
For more on what daily life actually looks like in Frisco beyond the restaurant openings, our guide to family life, schools, and weekends in Frisco rounds up the rest of what makes the city tick, and our Frisco neighborhood guide is a good starting point if you're helping a friend or family member figure out where in the city they'd actually want to live.
Frisco's food scene changes fast enough that even people who live here miss the turnover until they show up at the wrong address. If you want a second set of eyes on what's actually happening in the neighborhoods you're watching, whether that's a restaurant lease or a housing market shift, Darna Real Estate Group pays attention to this stuff for a living. Book a meeting with our team and we'll tell you what we're actually seeing on the ground.
