If you've walked over to Kirby Ice House on a Friday night, or grabbed tacos at Torchy's before catching a movie, you've already stood next to the story. Three low industrial buildings sit just past that cluster, on the north side of I-10 at 1085 Gessner, and for most of the last year they've been mid-renovation: stripped down, scaffolded, waiting. That wait is ending in pieces, not all at once, and knowing which piece lands when is the difference between planning a fall dinner and planning one for next spring.
The project is called Greenside, a joint effort between MetroNational, the company that has owned and built out Memorial City since 1959, and Radom Capital, the developer behind Montrose Collective and M-K-T Heights. Michael Hsu Office of Architecture, the same firm behind both of those Radom projects, is handling the redesign here too, which tells you something about the design register this is aiming for before a single tenant sign goes up. What it's replacing is three former warehouses totaling 35,000 square feet. What it's becoming is a mixed retail and restaurant hub organized around a one-acre lawn, with string lighting overhead, canopy trellises for shade, and a children's play structure near the seating.
What's Actually Landing This Fall
The tenant most people will recognize first is Pizzana, a Michelin-recognized pizzeria opening its second Houston location at Greenside this fall. It is the first sit-down restaurant confirmed for Greenside, and it arrives with a Michelin-recognized kitchen. Alongside it, Honest Mary's is finishing out a 2,235-square-foot space designed by Cedar Street Creative, with counter service running from 10:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. once it opens this fall. Both restaurants are being built with the lawn as part of the layout, not an afterthought outside it. Honest Mary's plan includes shared outdoor seating near the open green space, a breezeway, and a private patio.
The wellness and fitness side of the tenant roster was announced earlier in the year and is further along. Leemoo, a health bar known for smoothies and fresh-pressed juices with an existing location inside Montrose Collective, picked Greenside as part of its next Houston expansion. Hiatus, a day spa with a location in Tanglewood, is opening a second one here. [solidcore] rounds out the fitness lineup. None of these are unfamiliar names if you've spent time near Montrose Collective or Tanglewood. What's different is that they're now a few minutes' walk from Spring Branch West front doors instead of a drive across town.
A Permit Filed Two Weeks Ago Isn't a Grand Opening
Here's where the timeline actually matters. In mid-September, Hudson House, the Dallas-based restaurant chain known for its cocktail program, filed a permit with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation for a new location inside Greenside. The filing puts renovation work starting in mid-November, with completion targeted for April 2027, at a project cost of roughly $2 million. At 6,095 square feet, it will be Hudson House's largest Houston location, bigger than its existing spots in River Oaks and Rice Village.
That's a good problem for the neighborhood to have, but it's not a fall opening. A permit filing is the start of a construction timeline, not the end of one. If you see a headline about Hudson House "coming to Memorial City" and picture a reservation this winter, the paperwork says otherwise. Pizzana and Honest Mary's are the tenants actually finishing buildouts right now. Hudson House is still roughly seven months out from its own stated completion date, which means the practical way to think about Greenside isn't as a single opening but as two separate ones: a fall wave that's essentially here, and a spring 2027 wave that's still under construction.
What Three Old Warehouses Are Turning Into
The physical plan is worth walking through, because it changes how the corridor functions, not just what's in it. The central lawn is being built with native plantings and casual seating arranged around it, plus new pedestrian walkways connecting Gessner Road to Mathewson Lane. That link matters for anyone who currently drives the half mile between the Kirby Ice House cluster and the rest of Memorial City's north-of-freeway retail. Greenside's footprint is also designed to tie into an existing jogging trail and detention pond nearby, which means the green space isn't isolated. It's meant to connect to infrastructure that's already there.
The scale is bigger than it might sound from a single project name. Fifteen small retail spaces were part of the original leasing plan, focused on wellness, beauty, and service-oriented businesses that hadn't had a first-to-market Houston location before. Add the restaurant tenants on top of that, and Greenside isn't a single new address so much as a second commercial spine on the resident side of the freeway, distinct from the mall-facing dining strip inside Memorial City Mall itself.
"Greenside is being thoughtfully designed as a place where people can gather and enjoy the best of what Houston has to offer every day of the week."
That's how MetroNational's Vice President of Leasing described the intent behind the project. Whether it delivers on that depends less on the rendering and more on whether the walkways actually get built and used, which is the kind of thing you can check for yourself by driving past 1085 Gessner this fall.
Six Years at Three Names
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you weren't paying attention to this corridor before. Kirby Ice House, Mia's Table, and Torchy's Tacos all opened as part of a MetroNational expansion announced in 2019, extending Memorial City's retail footprint to the north side of I-10 for the first time. For roughly six years, that expansion topped out at those three names. If you lived in Spring Branch West and wanted something walkable on your side of the freeway rather than a drive into the mall itself, that was the entire list.
Greenside doesn't add a fourth name to that list. It adds somewhere between six and fifteen, depending on how the remaining retail spaces lease out, on a footprint that's roughly ten times the combined square footage of what's been there since 2019. That's the actual shift worth understanding here: not that a new restaurant is opening, because new restaurants open in Houston every month, but that the walkable side of I-10 has been effectively frozen in place since 2019 and is now expanding all at once, just not on a single calendar date.
If you're timing a visit around a specific tenant, Pizzana and Honest Mary's are the ones to watch for over the next few months. Hudson House is worth knowing about, but not worth waiting on until closer to spring.
For homeowners in Spring Branch West who want a clearer read on how projects like Greenside tend to affect what a house on this side of the freeway is actually worth, CB Realty Team tracks these changes as they happen, not after they've already shown up in a comp sheet.
