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Food

Development woes at Wade Park force healthful Frisco restaurant to close

Seven months after Start Restaurant opened in Frisco, it stopped serving customers.

Co-owner Erin McKool says the stop-and-start construction of Frisco's $2 billion Wade Park development affected their ability to reach customers. She and her husband and business partner purchased the property where Start operated on Lebanon Road, just east of the Dallas North Tollway.

When construction on Wade Park halted, "we had already bought it and were under construction," McKool says. "We just hoped that it would be OK."

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Wade Park is a "troubled real estate development," explains Dallas Morning News real estate editor Steve Brown. The project is still uncompleted and changed ownership in February. It's been "threatened with foreclosure for the past year," Brown writes. It has had plans to house a Whole Foods Market — which McKool notes is a good match for Start customers — as well as a hotel, offices and restaurants.

The family closed Start's doors in Frisco on March 12.

The original Start is located on Greenville Avenue in Dallas. Each restaurant offers...
The original Start is located on Greenville Avenue in Dallas. Each restaurant offers order-at-the-counter service or drive-thru.

The existing Start restaurants in Dallas, at 4814 Greenville Ave. (near E. University Boulevard) and 4023 Lemmon Ave. (near Oak Lawn Avenue), remain open. The restaurant is a fast-casual and a drive-thru, where they serve breakfast, lunch and dinner from a scratch kitchen with a better-for-you motto. Many ingredients are organic and they strive to purchase meat from humanely-raised animals.

As for the property in Frisco, McKool says they plan to sell or lease it. There's also a chance they might reopen Start in the future — but the development would have to pick up. And Start would have to establish itself as a brand in Frisco, she says.

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"The people in Frisco were lovely," McKool says. "I hated to leave."

Community Impact first noted the closure.