Why New Restaurants in Laredo 2026 Favor Two Areas

Drive San Dario Avenue this summer and you will lose count of the orange cones. A gutted storefront that used to be Hooters is becoming a Bubba's 33. Down the block, Johnny Carino's reopened in March with a redesigned dining room and a patio full of fire pits, nearly three years after a fire shut the original down. A few miles over on McPherson Road, a building permit is turning an empty suite into Laredo's first Salata.

Now drive somewhere else entirely. In May, a ribbon-cutting brought out family and employees for the new Gorilla Smoke and Grill location in South Laredo. Downtown on Matamoros Street, a restaurant called Nonna's 1120 has been quietly building a following inside a building that used to be a patio bar.

Laredo isn't having a single restaurant boom in 2026. It's seeing two patterns of restaurant openings, on opposite sides of town.

The Corridor Where Every Chain Wants In

There's a stretch of Laredo, roughly the San Dario Avenue and McPherson Road corridor near Mall del Norte and Bob Bullock Loop, where national and regional chains keep landing on top of each other. Look at what's already there before you even count what's new: two Olive Gardens sit less than a couple of miles apart, one at 5319 San Dario Ave and a second added in 2024 at 1902 NE Bob Bullock Loop. Those addresses are one visible feature of the corridor's restaurant mix.

That's one way to read the pattern of this year's openings in the same zone. Johnny Carino's picked its old spot at 7605 San Dario Ave, reopening March 25 with one of the brand's new prototype layouts: an open kitchen, a bar anchoring the dining room, private event space, and a patio built around fire pits. Salata is spending $325,000 to convert 2,167 square feet at 7815 McPherson Road, Suite 101, into its first Laredo salad and wrap bar, with construction wrapping by the end of summer and doors expected to open this fall. Bubba's 33 is taking the former Hooters space off San Dario for a sports bar.

These new locations share a corridor with Mall del Norte and two Olive Gardens. Mall del Norte itself added a new anchor in this same stretch last year when Huddle House opened its first Laredo location, a sign that the corridor's pull works for breakfast diners just as well as it does for casual Italian.

If you want the version of Laredo dining that feels the least risky to open and the least surprising to eat at, this is where it's concentrating. That's not a criticism. It's just what the addresses tell you when you line them up.

The Independent Bet: Downtown and South Laredo

Some recent independent openings are outside that same corridor.

Nonna's 1120 opened in mid-2025 inside a historic red-brick building on Matamoros Street that used to house 1120 Patio Bar, and it kept that name and that partnership, serving Northern Italian food with cocktail pairings built around the bar next door. It's downtown, not on a retail loop, and it's staying there. A few blocks off the San Bernardo strip, Bravo Italia opened around the same time from the ownership group behind Danny's, a name Laredo diners already trust, with a menu built on lasagna, rigatoni alla vodka, and shrimp scampi, and an interior of oak tables and emerald booths that reads nothing like a chain buildout. Coverage of Laredo's dining scene earlier this year described this cluster as a genuine Italian food revival, separate from the border-town Mexican staples the city is usually known for, and it's still the thing locals bring up when the topic comes up in 2026.

South Laredo tells a similar story with a different cuisine. In May, Gorilla Smoke and Grill celebrated the grand opening of its new south side location, and the detail that matters here isn't the barbecue. It's that this was the first property the Garza family has ever owned outright, after years of building the brand elsewhere. Ramiro and Cynthia Garza moved to Laredo from Monterrey as children and built Gorilla Smoke and Grill from nothing.

What The Map Shows About Laredo's Restaurant Scene

Put those two patterns side by side and the split makes sense. A second Olive Garden and a Bubba's 33 add to the corridor's mix of chain restaurants.

The independent restaurants in this post are located outside that corridor. Nonna's 1120 is a downtown restaurant in a building with history attached to it. Gorilla Smoke and Grill's new South Laredo location is the Garza family's first owned property.

That's the story behind Laredo's 2026 dining headlines: two different patterns of restaurant locations across the city.

Where To Go and What's Coming

If you want the corridor where the chains are betting big:

• Johnny Carino's, 7605 San Dario Ave, for the new prototype dining room and the fire pit patio
• Bubba's 33, taking over the former Hooters space off San Dario, for the sports bar crowd
• Salata, 7815 McPherson Road, once it opens this fall

If you'd rather see what Laredo's own owners are building for themselves:

• Nonna's 1120, 1120 Matamoros St downtown, for Northern Italian food and cocktail pairings with the bar next door
• Bravo Italia, near the San Bernardo strip, from the team behind Danny's
• Gorilla Smoke and Grill South, the Garza family's first owned location, on the south side

Both lists are worth a drive. Knowing whether you're headed for an established chain corridor or an independent neighborhood spot gives the addresses a little more context.

Laredo's neighborhoods change in small, specific ways like this all the time, long before any of it shows up in a listing description. If you're ever curious what a shift like this means for home values on your particular side of town, Cindy E. Cantu has spent 19 years tracking exactly that. Reach out anytime, or get your free home valuation to see where your street stands today.