Demolition planned for former restaurant in Fort Worth Stockyards
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- Developers plan to replace a 110-year-old Stockyards warehouse with a hotel.
- The Urban Stillhouse project includes a 120-room hotel and whiskey venue.
- Developers aim to salvage materials to preserve historic site characteristics.
A 110-year-old former cold-storage warehouse in the Stockyards that once housed a landmark restaurant is now facing demolition, according to a city permit application.
Plans for an Urban Stillhouse restaurant and whiskey tasting room at the cavernous D. Hart and Sons Livestock Co. building, 2629 N. Main St., have been expanded to include a 120-room hotel, spokeswoman Meredith Koko said.
The historic building, the former Los Vaqueros, is “not structurally sound” for the project, Koko said.
“We love the building. We’re crazy about the building. ... We are going to find out what we can save, what we can salvage,” she said by phone.
Owners of The Urban Stillhouse, a St. Petersburg, Fla., restaurant and tasting room for Kentucky-based Horse Soldier Bourbon, hope to reuse materials and contents to retain the property’s historic “character and appearance,” she said.
The foundation would remain, according to the application filed Aug. 28.
City Council member Carlos Flores said in a text message that the permit is under review. According to city records, the property is designated a Historic and Cultural Landmark, but has not been protected from demolition.
Los Vaqueros moved one block south to 2513 Rodeo Plaza.
The Koko family bought the property from the Los Vaqueros owners, the Cisneros family, in September 2024. The demolition application lists Los Vaqueros as the owner, but Vicki Cisneros said that is not correct.
“I do know that Meredith Koko and John Koko are committed to preserving what can be preserved,” she wrote by email.
The Stockyards location is a towering, two-story, 11,416-square-foot brick cold-storage warehouse and meat locker that opened in the heyday of the Fort Worth Stockyards cattle market and nearby meat packinghouses.
The Swift & Co. meat packinghouse closed in 1971, and the last weekly Stockyards cattle sale was in 1992.
The area had already changed to an entertainment district with the 1981 opening of the Billy Bob’s Texas nightclub across North Main Street.
The building had been occupied the last 41 years by Los Vaqueros, which started in a smaller location nearby.
The Urban Stillhouse would be the newest development in a Stockyards already busy with a planned $630 million expansion of Mule Alley.
Nearby, “Yellowstone” producer Taylor Sheridan and partners spent $3 million to remodel Cattlemen’s, 2458 N. Main St.
Horse Soldier Bourbon, founded in 2015 by 5th Special Forces Group veteran John Koko and former U.S. Army Green Berets from the Afghanistan War, has also opened a restaurant in a planned $200 million development at Somerset, Kentucky.
Horse Soldier’s investors include California-based Gallo, the largest wine producer in the world.
Some of the original co-founders were Special Forces soldiers who entered Afghanistan on horseback after the 9-11 terror attacks in 2001, as featured in the 2018 movie “12 Strong.”
The first Urban Stillhouse restaurant and tasting room opened in 2020 in St. Petersburg.
The restaurant, measuring at 16,000 square feet, is praised for hazelnut-crusted lamb chops, a bourbon-butter bison filet, osso buco and Sunday brunch.
This story was originally published September 3, 2025 at 4:50 AM.
