Explore Fort Worth's New Restaurants in Historic Buildings

The most striking seat in downtown Fort Worth this fall isn't a rooftop patio or a glass-walled dining room. It's a former bank vault, the round steel door still intact, tucked into the basement of a hundred-year-old building on Houston Street, as CultureMap reported. Diners will sit on sunken tatami seating under paper cranes, order omakase from a chef trained at Charlie Palmer's Aureole, and eat inside a room that used to hold cash for the Continental National Bank.

That room belongs to Musume, and its return is the centerpiece of a pattern playing out across Fort Worth right now. The restaurants generating the most anticipation this fall aren't new construction. They're old buildings that sat empty, damaged, or simply unused for years, now being reopened, repaired, or repurposed into some of the city's most talked-about tables.

What survived the blast

Musume closed on January 8, 2024, when a gas explosion tore through the basement and first floor of the Sandman Signature Hotel, injuring 21 people and gutting the space the restaurant had occupied for barely six months. The building itself, the 20-story W.T. Waggoner Building, was constructed in 1920 as a bank headquarters and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Musume's owners had built a private dining room inside the original bank vault when the restaurant first opened in 2023. That vault came through the explosion intact.

Nearly three years later, Musume is set to reopen in early November 2026 with a new executive chef, a rebuilt dining room, and the same vault repurposed once again as a tatami room. The restaurant will keep what made it distinctive the first time around, including fish flown in daily from Japan and what its owners describe as the largest combined sake and Japanese whiskey collection in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, more than 120 sake labels and 60 whiskey offerings. The Sandman Hotel itself is expected to reopen later this year, though no firm date has been announced.

Two blocks over, a basement that took longer than planned

A few blocks from the Waggoner Building, the historic Hogan Building at 901 Houston Street is getting its own new restaurant, and its timeline says almost as much as the food will. Beverley's Downtown, a subterranean Mexican concept from Jeff Payne and Jason Cross, the team behind Cousin's BBQ and The Mont, was first announced for a late 2025 opening. That date slipped to summer 2026, then to fall, and as of this writing it's still listed as opening soon rather than confirmed.

The delay isn't the story. The building is. Constructed in 1900 and given an Art Deco facelift in 1937, the Hogan Building sat through decades of tenant turnover before its current owners began a restoration in 2022. Payne and Cross are turning its basement into a space designed by Fort Worth interior designer Kellye Raughton, built around a sculptural bar and a menu that spans the earthy dishes of Northern Mexico and the brighter, citrus-forward cooking of the coasts. The restaurant's name comes from Payne's mother, Beverly Payne, who co-founded Cousin's BBQ with her husband in 1983. Once it opens, Beverley's plans to serve both lunch and dinner, which makes it a weekday downtown option as well as an evening one.

The train station's turn

A little further west, Fort Worth's T&P Station has taken on a similar assignment. The station, now 95 years old, spent decades as a rail stop and not much else in the public imagination. This year it became home to Station & Vine, a full-service restaurant serving a 14-ounce Prime New York strip, cast iron steak frites, braised short rib, and Gulf red snapper alongside the building's original architecture. It's the kind of menu that could work in any new build downtown. The fact that it's working inside a 95-year-old train station is the point.

Panther City BBQ is making a smaller version of the same bet. The barbecue spot known for its brisket and brisket elote is opening a second location in a historic building near the Stockyards, with an estimated winter 2026 opening. Like Station & Vine, it's a proven concept choosing an old address over a new one.

Why the old buildings are winning

None of this is coincidence. The Hogan Building sits inside a stretch of downtown that's absorbing more than $400 million in nearby investment, including an Omni Hotel expansion, work on the Fort Worth Convention Center, and a planned Texas A&M campus. That kind of activity changes what an old, awkward basement is worth to a restaurant group willing to renovate it. A building owner doesn't sink money into restoring a 1900s office block on spec. They do it because the block around it is already moving.

The same logic applies to the Waggoner Building. Rebuilding Musume's kitchen and dining room after an explosion is a harder, slower project than opening in a new hotel podium would have been. The owners did it anyway, and they kept the vault. That's not a decision you make unless you believe downtown Fort Worth is worth the wait.

For a city with plenty of open land to build on, choosing to gut-renovate a bank basement or restore a 1937 Art Deco storefront says something about what diners are actually looking for. New construction can replicate finishes, but it can't replicate a building that used to hold Fort Worth's money, or a train station that used to carry its freight. That history is doing marketing work no design budget can buy.

What's actually open, and what's next

For anyone keeping track of reservations rather than real estate:

If you're planning a fall evening downtown, Station & Vine is the only one on this list you can walk into tonight. The rest are worth putting on a calendar rather than a to-do list, because a bank vault and a hundred-year-old office building don't reopen twice.

Willoughby Agency keeps a close eye on what's happening inside Fort Worth's older buildings, because a city's restaurant scene and its real estate market tend to move for the same reasons. If you're curious what else is changing behind downtown's original facades, reach out and we'll walk you through it.