A Fort Worth Stockyards favorite restaurant is shutting down Sunday
The La Playa Maya Stockyards restaurant on North Main Street, the first prominent Fort Worth restaurant to feature coastal seafood from Mexico, will close Sunday, according to workers.
Three other La Playa Maya locations remain open in south and west Fort Worth and in suburban Hudson Oaks.
The North Main location is located in a majestic old north side landmark, a two-story red-orange brick building built in 1913 as a Fort Worth police substation.
The building later also housed the Texas Department of Public Safety regional headquarters, other agencies and, after 1940, the North Side Lions Club.
The restaurants are owned by the family of late founder Lupe Ayala, a native of Pesqueria near Monterrey, Mexico.
The first La Playa opened in 1988 as a tiny beach-style Mexican seafood restaurant nearby on West Central Avenue. It was one of the first Fort Worth restaurants to serve ceviche, shrimp coctel and fish tacos.
In 1994, the family opened La Playa Maya on Hemphill Street.
The northside restaurant moved from Central to the current North Main Street building in 1998.
The move to North Main Street brought more Stockyards visitors and cowboys headed to Billy Bob’s Texas or the coliseum rodeos.
Instead of seafood, they ordered beef fajitas, brisket tacos and fajita enchiladas, and those became La Playa Maya favorites.
The restaurants are also rated highly for their traditional chile relleno and for the distinctive fish or shrimp tacos with chipotle sauce and mango pico de gallo.
The restaurant is the second within a month to close near the busy 1500 block of North Main Street. Restaurante Cabrito Nuevo León closed a block away on Ellis Avenue when the founding Gonzalez family retired.
