Drive north out of the Mira Vista gate, hop on Chisholm Trail Parkway at Altamesa, and you have two exits that decide most weeknight dinners. Arborlawn drops you at Waterside. Bryant Irvin, one interchange up, funnels you into The Shops at Clearfork. For a decade, those two centers have operated as a matched set for residents on this side of the Trinity: groceries and REI at one, luxury retail and a movie at the other, a chef-owned Italian dining room at Waterside anchoring the middle. That set is about to come apart.
This post is not a roundup. The thesis is narrower: the chef-owned anchor that gave Waterside its identity as a dining destination is moving a mile east this November, and the ripple effects, from a new office building at Marathon and Ozona to a fresh wave of retail signings, are quietly re-centering the Mira Vista resident's daily-life radius toward Clearfork for the first time since 2017.
The Piattello Move Is the Whole Story
Fort Worth chef Marcus Paslay is moving Piattello Italian Kitchen from its longtime spot at Waterside to The Shops at Clearfork this fall, opening in a new three-story mixed-use building called The Offices at Clearfork at the corner of Marathon Avenue and Ozona Boulevard, scheduled to open in November 2026. That is the sentence. Everything else is downstream of it.
Two details matter for anyone already living inside the gate. First, the footprint expands. The new location will offer 5,620 square feet with about 160 indoor seats plus a 40-seat patio, and it will add lunch service, allowing the restaurant to serve guests for both lunch and dinner seven days a week. A dinner-only Italian room becomes a seven-day operation, which changes what Wednesday lunch after a doctor's appointment on Bryant Irvin looks like.
Second, Piattello is not joining a peer group. The addition is notable for Clearfork, whose restaurant lineup has largely consisted of national and regional brands. Piattello will become the development's first locally owned Fort Worth restaurant. For a resident who has spent nine years watching Clearfork fill in with capable but portable concepts (Grimaldi's, Doc B's, City Works, Malai Kitchen), that is a meaningful shift in the character of the center.
Paslay's own framing, given to Candy's Dirt in June, was blunt about the reason: "It really boils down to co-tenancy and the energy there." A chef moving toward foot traffic is a data point about where the foot traffic is.
What Actually Stays at Waterside
Nothing about Piattello's departure hollows out Waterside for a Mira Vista household. Waterside is a 157,000 square foot Class "A" neighborhood retail center located along Bryant Irvin Road at the Arborlawn Drive exit from Chisholm Trail Parkway, anchored by the only Whole Foods in Fort Worth and REI and featuring a roster of fast-casual and sit-down restaurants, health and wellness providers, national bank branches, and specialty shops. The grocery run, the trail gear stop, the pharmacy, the dry cleaner: all unchanged.
The Grove, the green space behind Whole Foods and Piattello, keeps its role too. Bocce, public restrooms, free wifi, and public art still sit there, and Georgetown Company, which acquired the asset in February 2025, has held it at roughly 98 percent leased. What Waterside loses in November is a signature dinner reservation, not a functional errand loop.
The relocation is designed to be gentle at the seam. Piattello will be the first locally owned Fort Worth restaurant to join Clearfork, and the Waterside location will stay open as long as possible to minimize any gap between the two. Residents who like the current dining room have a runway through the fall to use it.
The Building That Explains Why Any of This Is Happening
The relocation makes more sense once you look at the address it is moving into.
- The Offices at Clearfork is a three-story, 70,000-square-foot building with two floors and 50,000 square feet of modern Class A office space plus 22,000 square feet of ground floor retail and restaurant space, the third office building at the center.
- Wells Fargo is the anchor office tenant, relocating from its downtown Fort Worth office to lease the top floor and a portion of the second floor.
- The newly announced office project, set to be completed in the second quarter of 2026, features a dedicated boutique office lobby and free parking for tenants, sitting within a five-minute drive of I-20, I-30 and I-35.
Read those three points together and the Piattello move stops looking like a restaurant decision and starts looking like a lunch-service decision. A bank floor worth of downtown employees is showing up on Marathon Avenue in 2026, and the ground-floor tenant with the strongest lunch instincts in Fort Worth is meeting them there. For Mira Vista residents, that means the weekday character of the corner changes: more suit traffic at noon, quieter dinner service by design.
The Retail Layer Is Reshuffling in the Same Direction
The Clearfork tenant list has been in motion all year, and it is worth reading the signings as a set rather than one at a time. From the January and June announcements:
- Suitsupply is set to offer tailored clothing with a Summer 2026 opening.
- Design Within Reach, a modern furniture retailer, is now open.
- A first-generation build-out of 2,953 square feet is planned for Rye 51 at 5163 Monahans Ave., Suite C220, within The Shops at Clearfork, with a completion date targeted for September 2026.
- Grown Brilliance, a lab-grown diamond brand, is joining the lineup.
The through line is menswear, tailoring, and home. That is a specific customer profile, and it is a Mira Vista-adjacent one. It also sits alongside the existing anchors that already give the center its identity: Neiman Marcus plus Burberry, Tiffany & Co., Gucci, Saint Laurent, Louis Vuitton, and Design Within Reach, along with market-exclusive brands such as Tory Burch, Tommy Bahama, and TUMI.
The larger frame is worth naming once. According to the development's website, Clearfork is a multi-phase project that eventually will include two million square feet of office space, 1.2 million square feet of retail, dining, and entertainment, and 2,500 residential units, with additional multifamily and retail space, along with senior living spaces and a hotel, planned. The center is nine years old and, by its own account, midstride. Piattello arriving in November is the sort of signing that tends to draw other locally owned operators toward the same address.
The Parkway Itself Is Not Sitting Still
The road that connects the gate to both centers is also under a long construction cycle, though not at the stretch Mira Vista residents drive daily. The North Texas Tollway Authority is widening the southern parkway from FM 1187 down to US 67 in Cleburne. The project will widen CTP to two lanes in each direction from FM 1187 in Tarrant County to US 67 in Johnson County, approximately 13 miles. In May 2025 the NTTA Board approved contracts for construction, and construction began in September 2025. The North Texas Tollway Authority is currently designing the project expected to be completed by late 2028.
For a resident whose typical trip is Altamesa to Arborlawn or Bryant Irvin, that construction is south of the exit and largely invisible day to day. What it signals, though, is that the region's planners are treating the corridor south of Mira Vista as one that needs more capacity, not less. The southbound trip to a Cleburne warehouse job, or the northbound trip a Cleburne resident takes to dine at Clearfork, both get easier by the end of the decade.
A Practical Fall Calendar From Inside the Gate
For a household mapping the season, the sequence looks something like this:
- Through October. Waterside dinners at Piattello remain the standing reservation. Whole Foods and REI keep the errand rhythm. The Grove is still the pause between the two.
- November. Piattello opens at The Offices at Clearfork. The corner of Marathon and Ozona becomes the address to remember, and lunch enters the weekly menu for the first time.
- Late 2026 into 2027. Wells Fargo populates the upper floors. Suitsupply and Rye 51 fill in the menswear corner. Foot traffic patterns at Clearfork shift toward weekday midday, which is worth knowing if you prefer the center on weekend mornings.
None of this changes what makes Mira Vista itself feel the way it does. Mira Vista Country Club is the only 24-hour gated golf course community in the Fort Worth area, and the 700-acre par 71 layout, the racquet facility, and the pool calendar are still the reasons the front gate matters. What changes is the map beyond it. For nine years, Waterside and Clearfork have functioned as complementary halves of one radius. Starting in November, the center of gravity moves a mile east.
If you are thinking about how any of this reshapes what your home is worth inside the gate, or you would like a quiet conversation about the resale implications of a locally owned anchor arriving at Clearfork, John Zimmerman and the Mira Vista team are ready when you are. Work With Us.
