Walk down Merrick Street this month and you will find the windows of Roy Pope Grocery dark for the first time in five years. The store that has fed the west side since 1943 closed its doors on May 31, and the sign out front says nothing about what comes next. A mile away on Camp Bowie Boulevard, the space that once held the city's most talked-about new steakhouse sits quiet too. Meanwhile, a few blocks in either direction, Hudson House still has a wait on Friday nights and The Meat Board just marked six years slicing ribeyes out of a strip center in Ridglea Hills.
Four restaurants, two very different outcomes. The obvious read is bad luck, or rents, or the same tired story about Fort Worth's dining scene moving too fast for anyone to keep up. The actual pattern is more specific than that, and it says something about how a neighborhood restaurant survives that has nothing to do with how good the food is.
What Happened on Merrick Street
Roy Pope has closed before. Founded by Roy and Rose Pope in 1943, the grocery ran for decades as a west-side fixture until declining sales forced a closure in 2020. A group of local investors, including chef Lou Lambert and operator Chris Reale, bought the building and reopened it with an expanded kitchen, a wine and coffee bar, and a patio. That version ran until 2024, when Lambert and Reale exited the partnership, though they stayed on with owner Mark Harris at Fort Worth's other landmark diner, Paris Coffee Shop.
This spring, Harris and his remaining partners made the call to close the grocery for good rather than keep running it as-is. What comes next is not another grocery. Westland Hospitality Group, the Fort Worth restaurant company run by Gigi Howell, is taking over the Merrick Street building and turning it into a full restaurant. Howell has said the new concept will keep the Roy Pope name as a tribute to the original, even though the format is changing entirely.
"Our restaurant will humbly bear the name Roy Pope as an homage to what once was."
Westland is not a single operator opening a single restaurant. The company already runs JD's Hamburgers, Pulido's Kitchen & Cantina, Margie's Italian Gardens, Curly's Frozen Custard, Magdalena's Catering & Events, West Side Cafe, Westland Gardens, and Westland Bar Co. Chef Juan Rodriguez is developing the new Roy Pope menu alongside Levi Gardner, who already serves as executive chef at Margie's and works across Westland's other kitchens. Howell has said the new restaurant could open in seven to eight months, which points toward late this year or early 2027.
That is the first half of the pattern: a building that failed as a standalone operation is being absorbed into a company with eight other kitchens already running, shared staff to draw from, and a chef who can move between concepts. Roy Pope did not survive because it was beloved. It survived because someone with more than one restaurant decided it was worth folding into the operation.
Two Doors Down, a Different Ending
The Fitzgerald opened at 6115 Camp Bowie Boulevard in the winter of 2021, in the space that had previously housed Blu Crab. Chef Ben Merritt, a 2019 Chopped winner already known locally for Fixture on Magnolia Avenue, built it as a steak-and-seafood concept with grilled oysters, black garlic butter, and a back lounge he called the Regal Room. By early 2022, it was one of the hardest reservations on the west side. One report from that January described a dining room so full that even guests with reservations were told to wait.
As of this summer, Yelp lists The Fitzgerald as closed. There has been no announcement of a new concept for the space, and nothing in local coverage explains the closure directly. What is worth noticing is that this is not the first time a Ben Merritt restaurant has folded. His previous venture, Ben's Triple B, closed during the pandemic after the business could not keep the restaurant staffed. Fixture is still running on Magnolia. The Fitzgerald is not.
Merritt is one of the more talented chefs to come out of Fort Worth in the last decade. That talent was never the variable. What changed between his surviving restaurant and the ones that didn't is whether the business had anything to lean on besides nightly covers at a single address.
The Restaurants That Didn't Blink
A few blocks down the same boulevard from where the Fitzgerald sat, the picture looks different. The Meat Board, at 6314 Camp Bowie Boulevard in Ridglea Hills, opened in early 2020 as a standalone butcher shop and café run by a pair of beef industry professionals, and this year it hit six years in business and its own Tastemaker nomination. The Meat Board is not part of a restaurant group. What it has instead is a business model that does not depend entirely on dinner reservations. Customers buy a ribeye to cook at home while grabbing lunch at the counter, and the shop runs a monthly butcher club box that brings in revenue whether or not anyone eats there that week.
Off Camp Bowie, on Dexter Avenue, Hudson House tells a similar story from a different angle. It opened in 2023 in the former Into the Garden and Celebration space at 4600 Dexter Ave, just blocks from River Crest Country Club, and has stayed busy enough to draw regulars from both Crestline and Arlington Heights. This spring it was one of ten restaurants named a finalist for CultureMap's 2026 Neighborhood Restaurant of the Year. It is run by Vandelay Hospitality Group, not a solo chef-owner, which means the marketing, the staffing pipeline, and the lease negotiation all sit inside a company that operates more than one dining room.
Here is the comparison laid out plainly:
| Restaurant | Address | Status as of Summer 2026 | What's Behind It |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roy Pope Grocery | 2300 Merrick St | Closed May 31; reopening under new ownership | Westland Hospitality Group (8 concepts) |
| The Fitzgerald | 6115 Camp Bowie Blvd | Closed | Independent, chef-owned |
| Hudson House | 4600 Dexter Ave | Open, 2026 Tastemaker finalist | Vandelay Hospitality Group |
| The Meat Board | 6314 Camp Bowie Blvd | Open, marking six years | Independent, retail-hybrid model |
The Mechanism, Not the Coincidence
Put those four side by side and the story stops being about rents or luck. Roy Pope survives because it is being absorbed by a group with eight other kitchens to draw resources from. The Meat Board holds steady because its revenue does not evaporate on a slow Tuesday, since the butcher counter and the subscription boxes keep moving regardless of how full the dining room is. Hudson House thrives because it was never a single restaurant to begin with, it was one location inside a company built to run several. The Fitzgerald, for all its early buzz, was one talented chef and one dining room with no second business line to catch it when covers slowed down.
None of this means the food at The Fitzgerald or the earlier Roy Pope was worse than what's coming next. It means the businesses that keep their lights on around here are the ones that built in a second way to make money before the first one had a bad quarter.
What This Looks Like From Crestline Road
For anyone who walks or bikes this stretch regularly, the practical read is straightforward. River Crest Country Club, which has anchored the neighborhood since it opened in the spring of 1911, is untouched by any of this. It operates on membership dues, not walk-in traffic, which is its own version of the same insulation that's keeping Hudson House and The Meat Board open. The restaurants along Camp Bowie and Merrick, on the other hand, are worth watching a little more closely than usual over the next several months. If Westland's timeline holds, the new Roy Pope restaurant should have a soft opening sometime around the end of the year, and it will be worth seeing whether the name is the only thing that survives the transition or whether the new kitchen finds a way to keep some of what made the old counter worth stopping at.
In the meantime, the corner at 6115 Camp Bowie sits empty, and it will be the next data point in whichever direction this pattern keeps pointing.
If you're curious what any of this means for property values or timing on Crestline Road specifically, the team at Duwe-Olsen Group tracks these shifts as closely as the restaurant scene itself. Request a private consultation with our Fort Worth luxury specialists, or browse our Rivercrest neighborhood guide for a closer look at what makes this stretch of the city hold its value the way it does.
