Scilla Opens on Douglas Avenue: What the New Preston Center Restaurant Says About a Corner Ten Years in the Making

For anyone who lives within walking distance of Snider Plaza or drives Douglas Avenue on the way home, the block between Colgate and the church has been a construction site for so long it started to feel permanent. The scaffolding is down. The valet stand is out. On Friday, July 17, the first restaurant in the 8111 Douglas tower opened its doors, and the corner finally reads like a neighborhood again.

The restaurant is Scilla, a coastal Italian room from Duro Hospitality. If the name Duro registers, it is probably because of The Charles or Mister Charles or El Carlos Elegante down in the Design District. Scilla is the group's first restaurant this close to Preston Center, and it is worth understanding as more than another opening. It is the moment a ten-year civic argument about a piece of church-owned land became something you can eat dinner in.

A Corner That Took a Decade to Answer

The land under Scilla belongs to Saint Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church. The idea of building something on it dates back to 2016, when Dallas Morning News columnist Robert Wilonsky broke the news that the church planned an office tower and parking garage on a vacant piece adjacent to Preston Center. What followed was years of task force meetings, neighborhood pushback about traffic and commercial encroachment, and a rezoning application that the City of Dallas approved in February 2020.

Construction finally started in the spring of 2021. Lincoln Property Company began building in 2021 after a five-year effort to secure entitlements, and the project was ready for occupancy in 2023. The finished development is bigger than most residents realize from the street: 225,000 square feet of Class-A office, 128 luxury multifamily units, a penthouse meeting space, indoor and outdoor fitness spaces, an amenity deck with pickleball and bocce courts and a putting green, plus a ground-floor restaurant and more than 1.3 acres of outdoor green space. The multifamily portion sits inside the Highland Park Independent School District.

The anchor tenants are names that already move a lot of cars through this corner every morning. Sewell Automotive Companies moved its corporate office to the campus as an anchor tenant, and Lincoln Property Company's commercial division took the largest office footprint. Which is to say: the tower was built to host thousands of daily lunches long before anyone was cooking them.

Why a Restaurant Was Always the Missing Piece

Read the developer materials from 2021 and the ground-floor restaurant is treated as an amenity. Read the block from a resident's perspective and it is the whole point. Office towers do not activate sidewalks. Restaurants do. That gap between shell and street life is what Duro walked into.

Despite the company's reputation for restaurants serving the Dallas elite, Scilla is Duro's first restaurant this close to Preston Center. "We've wanted this neighborhood for a while," partner Benji Homsey said. Chas Martin, the group's other founding partner, framed the appeal in terms of density: the surrounding neighborhood, residential density, and business community created an opportunity for something they felt was missing, a place where guests can enjoy a business lunch, meet for an afternoon aperitivo, or settle in for dinner several times a week.

That is a specific pitch. Not another destination room. An everyday one. Scilla is the first lunch-to-late-night concept for Duro Hospitality, whose other North Texas restaurants like Norman's Japanese Grill, The Chumley House, and Sister are only open for dinner, while Cafe Duro closes at 9 pm. That change of pace matters more for a resident of University Park than any menu detail. It means a table you can walk to on a Tuesday.

Inside the Room

The design was handled in-house. Ross and Corbin See of Sees Design are co-owners of Duro Hospitality; the brothers and their team designed Scilla and all of the Duro restaurants. The floor plan splits Scilla into two connected dining rooms sharing one central bar. One side is louder and more theatrical, the other quieter, tied together by upholstered walls and hand-painted murals. From outside, there is little sign of what is inside, which is apparently the point.

The first thing you see once you are past the double doors is the bar itself. A grand, backlit, pink marble bar so heavy that steel beams hold it up from behind, anchoring the bottom of a 13-story tower near the Dallas North Tollway and Preston Center. One of the two dining rooms has mermaids painted on the ceiling. The name is doing work everywhere.

About that name. Scilla is a seaside village in Calabria, Italy, perched along the Costa Viola overlooking the Strait of Messina, and its connection to Greek mythology, where Scylla was said to have guarded one side of the strait opposite Charybdis, helped shape the restaurant's identity. There is also a family story tucked inside it. Scilla was what Martin's father called his mother, Priscilla.

What to Order the First Time

The kitchen is led by chef J Chastain, an alum of the Mansion on Turtle Creek and Stephan Pyles, with executive chef Brendan Frankel running the line. The menu reads as coastal Italian with a wider Mediterranean edge, built to be shared across a long table.

A short orientation for a first visit:

• Small plates. Gnocco fritto, lobster arancini, boquerones on toast, and the Ossetra caviar pizza that arrives finished with generous spoonfuls at the table.
• Raw and chilled. The hamachi crudo with meyer lemon kosho, finger lime, and bergamot limoncello vinaigrette, chutoro crudo, and a seasonal seafood tower.
• Pastas. Rigatoni alla Zozzona, made with pancetta ragù and Carbonara espuma, alongside the house-made rotation.
• Wood grill. Whole red snapper, branzino with artichokes and muhammara pesto, a grass-fed Wagyu ribeye, and za'atar lamb kabobs.
• The showpiece drink. The Sicilian Shaved Ice, made with Duro Socorro Joven Tequila, blood orange, and pineapple morita, finished tableside with fire.

The wine list changes daily and pulls from Italy, France, and Napa. If you have been to Mister Charles, the visual grammar and the pacing will feel familiar. If you have not, know that Duro's habit is to build a room that photographs like a set and cooks like a kitchen with something to prove.

How This Changes the Rhythm Around Preston Center

Snider Plaza and Lovers Lane have been carrying the neighborhood dinner load for a long time. Il Bracco, Hudson House on Lovers, Kuby's, Café Pacific inside Highland Park Village, R+D Kitchen at Preston Center. All of them still there, all of them still worth the walk. What Scilla adds is a different shape of evening: a lunch-to-late option inside a tower that is already generating its own foot traffic from Sewell's and Lincoln's offices upstairs and the 128 apartments next door.

There is also the private club piece, which is worth noting for anyone tracking how Preston Center is repositioning itself. Those who want to really make it feel like home can join the private club, not yet open. Duro has not put a date on that, but the fact that a members' component is being built into a ground-floor restaurant at Preston Center is itself a signal about who the group thinks lives and works within a five-block radius.

For families along Colgate, Preston Road, and the streets running west toward Bluffview, the practical change is smaller and more welcome. The corner has lights on at night. The sidewalk is finished. The parking situation is manageable. The restaurant launched with dinner service, running 4:30 to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 4:30 to 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, with lunch to follow soon and complimentary valet on offer.

A Few Notes for Your First Visit

• Where. 8111 Douglas Avenue, on the ground floor of the office tower facing Preston Center.
• When. Dinner nightly starting July 17, 2026. Lunch service to follow.
• How to book. Scilla's own site at scilla-coastal.com.
• What to expect at the door. Complimentary valet. Two dining rooms. One central pink marble bar. Ask for the room with the mermaids if you are bringing someone who has not been.

The most useful way to think about Scilla is not as a restaurant review. It is as the visible moment when a piece of neighborhood infrastructure the Preston Center Task Force spent years arguing about turned into a place your neighbors will meet on a Wednesday. Ten years of hearings, one dinner service. That is a fair exchange rate.

If you have been watching the block change from your kitchen window and want to talk about what these kinds of shifts mean for the streets around Preston Center, the Park Cities, and the homes along Douglas, Darla Chapman Ripley knows this corner in both directions, from the church parking lot to the front door of the tower. Let's connect.