Celina TX Costco Opening and Downtown Restaurants in 2026

Two things are happening in Celina within the same six weeks, and on paper they should be working against each other. A 158,000-square-foot Costco is opening on the south end of town, the kind of big-box arrival that usually makes people worry about what happens to the small downtown square a few miles north. Instead, that square just landed the largest private investment in its history. Not despite the warehouse. Alongside it.

If you live here, you've probably heard about the Costco. You may not have connected it to what's happening on Louisiana Drive, because the two projects were announced by different people, in different press releases, for what look like unrelated reasons. They aren't unrelated. They're solving two different problems that have nothing to do with each other, which is exactly why both can grow at once.

Two Openings, Same Six Weeks

On July 14, the City of Celina and the Celina Economic Development Corporation announced Trackside Junction, a $15 million public-private development anchoring the historic square. On August 26, Costco opens its doors at Preston Road and Ownsby Parkway, with a 7:30 a.m. ribbon-cutting and shoppers in by 8. Six weeks apart, both aimed at a city whose population has now surged past 50,000.

That timing isn't a coincidence so much as a sign of where Celina actually is right now: big enough to support a warehouse club, still small enough that a single downtown announcement counts as a milestone.

What's Actually Opening on Preston Road

The Costco itself is a full-service build: a pharmacy, an optical center, a hearing aid clinic, and a 15,000-square-foot fuel station with ten pump stacks. It sits inside The Village at Ownsby Farms, a 40-acre retail district that forms the western half of a larger commercial push on Celina's south side, paired with The Crossing at Moore Farm next door, which is leaning toward home improvement and fitness tenants.

For families north of Highway 380, this closes a drive that's been a fact of life for years. The practical answer to "where do I get a Costco run in" has been Frisco, Allen, or McKinney, and for a lot of households that drive was long enough that they just skipped it and ordered online. That math changes on August 26.

The Square Wasn't Waiting on Costco

Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only follow the warehouse news. Trackside Junction is going into the ground with real financing behind it, not just a ribbon-cutting and a press release. The project is the first to draw on Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone No. 11, a financing tool the city set up back in 2017 that lets a portion of the property tax value created by new downtown development get reinvested straight back into downtown. It's a mechanism built specifically to make sure growth on the square pays for more growth on the square, rather than just adding tax revenue to the general fund.

The development itself will add 15,000 square feet of retail, restaurant, office, event, and residential space, built by Nack Development, the same firm behind projects in Frisco's Rail District, Old Town Lewisville, and Downtown Mansfield. It's designed to physically connect the historic square to Celina's growing Entertainment District, closing a gap that's existed for years between the old downtown core and the newer development around it.

"Great downtowns don't happen overnight."

That's Clint Bissett, president of the Celina EDC board, describing why the city treated this as a long-term financing decision rather than a one-time deal.

Local-First, By Design

Trackside Junction isn't downtown's only recent addition. Celina Station, an 18-acre mixed-use project a few steps from the square, is built around a stated preference for local operators over national chains. Its anchors are Fourteen Eighteen Coffee and MSB Aquatics, and it has a rooftop restaurant in the works, a 3,000-square-foot space designed to overlook the district's central park and the downtown skyline.

Farther out at the corner of the Dallas North Tollway and Frontier Parkway, The Creeks at Celina takes a similar approach for a different part of town. It's a boutique 28,000-square-foot dining and lifestyle destination built around a six-acre pond, anchored by Haraz Coffee House and Capo's Pizza & Pasta, and positioned as the daily-needs hub for the Light Farms and Sutton Fields neighborhoods, half a mile from the new H-E-B.

None of these three projects is competing with Costco for the same trip. They're competing with each other for a different kind of visit entirely, the one where you're choosing where to eat on a Friday, not where to stock up on paper towels.

Two Corridors, Two Jobs

Line up the map and the split becomes obvious. Preston Road and Ownsby Parkway, on the south side, is turning into the errand corridor: warehouse retail, fuel, pharmacy, the practical weekly stuff. The historic square and Louisiana Drive corridor, closer to the center of town, is turning into the evening-out corridor: dining, drinks, live music, the reason you'd actually get dressed and leave the house.

That's not an accident of geography. It's two different parts of Celina answering two different questions residents ask every week, one about where to buy groceries and one about where to spend a Friday night, and it means growth in one corridor doesn't cannibalize the other.

What's Already Working on the Square

None of this downtown momentum is starting from zero. The square has had a working evening scene for a while now, and it's worth knowing what's already there before the new projects even open their doors:

• Celina Friday Night Market, a monthly open-air market on the square founded in 2014 by Celina Ladies & Friends, with local food vendors, artisans, and a rotating live music lineup that changes performers every month
• Silos in Celina, an upscale restaurant and event space built inside a set of century-old grain silos, with a menu from Chef Tony Sanchez, seven semi-private dining bays, and a cigar lounge
• Lucy's on the Square and other sit-down spots that have made the square a real dinner destination rather than a pass-through
• Celina Cajun Fest, Splash & Blast, Beware! of the Square, and Christmas on the Square, the city's four anchor seasonal events that run from a spring crawfish boil through a summer fireworks show to Halloween and holiday lights

Downtown Celina earned Main Street America accreditation back in 1996 and has spent more than a century as the town's gathering point. What's changing isn't the identity. It's the amount of money now attached to keeping that identity intact as the rest of the city grows around it.

The Practical Read

If you've lived here through the last few years of construction, you already know the feeling of infrastructure lagging behind the subdivisions. That gap is closing from two directions at once this fall, not one. The errand side gets easier on August 26. The evening-out side keeps getting better funded, project by project, on a timeline that started well before Costco broke ground and isn't stopping because it opened.

Neither one replaces the other. That's the part worth remembering the next time someone tells you a warehouse club moving in means a downtown is about to lose its character.

If you're watching how Celina's growth is reshaping which parts of town hold their value and why, that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground read Linda Baker tracks day to day. Reach out anytime you want a local, straight answer on what's actually happening here, not just what the press release says.