7 Restaurants in one Dallas Hot Spot: Hudson House CEO Invests Big in Snider Plaza

Slider and Blues, the kid-friendly arcade bar from the ’90s, is coming back to Dallas.

Just over a year from now, Snider Plaza and the street that runs alongside it, Hillcrest Avenue in University Park, will be flush with seven restaurants from one Dallas restaurant owner. Hunter Pond, the 35-year-old restaurateur who created Hudson House, says there’s a “strong emotional element” to the new concepts he’s opening a short bike ride away from the street where he grew up.

It’s the strongest concentration of restaurants in a small area, from one owner, that we’ve seen in Dallas-Fort Worth recently.

Snider Plaza is a treasure trove of Dallas food history, where stalwarts like Kuby’s Sausage House and European Market, Bubba’s Cooks Country and Burger House, combined, have been in business for more than 170 years. Those operators have watched new restaurants and retail stores move in and out, making for an eclectic mix of old and new.

Of the seven restaurants Pond will operate in this area, two are already open: Chicago-style bar and pizza spot D.L. Mack’s on Hillcrest Avenue, which opened in mid-2021; and East Hampton Sandwich Co., a Snider Plaza shop that Pond opened more than a decade ago, when he was 24 years old.

The other five are coming soon, fast and furious, even as Pond’s company Vandelay Hospitality expands its restaurants to other parts of Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and California. (One local example: Anchor Bar will open on Dallas’ bustling Knox Street, and a sequel of it will open in Preston-Royal. Anchor Bar will serve sushi, oysters and ice-cold martinis, and both are expected to open in 2023.)

But let’s get back to University Park, to the area near Southern Methodist University where Pond is making moves.

Pond says he used to ride his bike to Snider Plaza with his best friend since kindergarten. They’d buy Christmas presents for their siblings. Three decades later, he wants to take his own kids to the shopping center.

Remember Slider and Blues from the '90s and 2000s? This kid-friendly arcade bar will return to Dallas, from a University Park restaurateur who grew up going there and wants to revive the brand.=(Courtesy of Vandelay Hospitality)

First up is a Slider and Blues arcade bar in a side-by-side space on Hillcrest that’s a former Lucky’s Hot Chicken and a former frozen yogurt shop. (Lucky’s Hot Chicken, also a Vandelay restaurant, closed on Hillcrest Avenue and is moving to a former Einstein’s Bagels space on Lemmon, near Oak Lawn.)

Longtime Dallasites likely will remember Slider and Blues as a kid-friendly pizza and wings hangout with games. It originated at Hillcrest and Northwest Highway but spread to corners of D-FW, including in North Dallas, Plano and Colleyville.

“The owner had a picture of my little girl’s soccer team up since the first day they opened,” said Jerry Washam, a longtime property manager at Snider Plaza. Washam’s grandfather helped develop Snider Plaza in the 1920s.

“I loved Slider and Blues,” Washam said of the ’90s- and 2000s-era restaurant that originated up the street. “I hope they emulate it.”

Pond remembers going to Slider and Blues in the ’90s, too. They’re all closed now.

“Somehow, we’ve lost all the places to take young kids,” Pond said. He’s got three. “So that’s what I want to bring back to the neighborhood.”

Pond’s new Slider and Blues will use that old name — he purchased the federal trademark — and it will have a Sandlot theme, with sports games such as Pop-A-Shot. An early look at the menu shows Lil Leaguers and Big Leaguers — their versions of sliders — in addition to a Chicago hot dog. Kid-friendly items abound, like pepperoni pizzas, chicken tenders and tater tots.

Slider and Blues is expected to open by the end of 2022.

When Brentwood opens in University Park, the restaurant will be at 6833 Snider Plaza. This rendering shows its corner spot on Rankin Avenue.(Jesse Neargarder at Foxcroft Studio)

Vandelay will also open a Brentwood restaurant near the center of Snider Plaza, in place of three retail shops, now gone. Brentwood first opened in Addison, where 40-year-old famous restaurant Houston’s was, on Belt Line Road. Pond said he expects to open several Brentwoods in the coming years.

Brentwood is an American restaurant with dishes such as oysters Rockefeller, a French dip, burgers, prime rib and crab cakes. It’s expected to open in Snider Plaza in 2023.

Restaurant No. 5 in this neighborhood, for those counting, will be a 1,200-square-foot concept in the bottom of a two-story red brick building off Milton Avenue in Snider Plaza. Vandelay will move its corporate headquarters to the second floor. The Urgent Care clinic below it will stay, and this as-yet-unnamed spot will be around the corner in the same building, taking the place of an upscale secondhand store called Luxury Garage Sale, or LGS.

Pond couldn’t yet estimate when this 1,200-square-foot “something” — Vandelay’s smallest footprint — will open.

The patchwork style of architecture throughout Snider Plaza makes it homey yet challenging: Dozens of people own buildings throughout the complex. Because of that, Snider Plaza possibly will never have a uniform look, like, say, Highland Park Village nearby.

“I like the fragmented buildings. I think it lends some character,” Pond said of Snider Plaza.

The company’s two most high-profile restaurants will open last, on the ground floor of a new three-story, $12 million structure in Snider Plaza. You know the place: This is the former Peggy Sue BBQ and a handful of other structures that developer Jim Strode’s team bulldozed to make way for a new building with restaurants on the first floor and offices above.

Where Peggy Sue BBQ was, Vandelay Hospitality plans to open two restaurants on the ground floor of a new office building. One of the restaurants will take up the corner spot, in the center of this rendering. The second will be smaller and is seen in the left corner of this rendering. (Richmond Group)

Pond wouldn’t announce the plan for these yet. He says neither restaurant will be a replica of what is already in Vandelay’s portfolio. So it’s not a Hudson House American grill, not a Drake’s steakhouse and lounge, and not a D.L. Mack’s, a Brentwood, an Anchor Bar or an East Hampton.

It likely will be an American restaurant of some kind. Pond’s restaurants tend to follow that model, designed with that I’ve-been-here kind of style.

“I want to make sure there’s connective tissue between all of our concepts,” he said.

These last two restaurants in Snider Plaza are expected to open in 2024.

The five coming-soon restaurants will be: Slider and Blues at 6309 Hillcrest Ave.; Brentwood at 6833 Snider Plaza; a coming-soon 1,200-square-foot concept at 6805 Snider Plaza; and two separate restaurants on the bottom floor of a soon-to-be constructed three-story building in place of Peggy Sue BBQ, near 6600 Snider Plaza.

The company already operates two restaurants in the neighborhood: D.L. Mack’s at 6501 Hillcrest Ave.; and East Hampton Sandwich Co. at 6912 Snider Plaza. Hudson House — an eighth restaurant in the neighborhood, for those still counting — is also in University Park, but not in this concentrated area. Hudson House is at 4448 Lovers Lane, Dallas.