When did the parking lot outside the Sheraton start filling up on a Tuesday night that wasn't a hotel conference?
If you drive through Westport Plaza a few times a month, you've probably clocked the shift without naming it. The office traffic that used to clear out by 6 p.m. now hangs around. There are strollers near the green space in the middle of the plaza. Someone's dog is off-leash near the turf. None of this used to happen here, not this consistently, and the reason isn't a single ribbon-cutting. It's the order things happened in.
The Order Everything Usually Goes In
Most mixed-use redevelopments follow a script. Restaurants and retail open first, foot traffic builds, and only once a developer can point to full patios and lines out the door do they greenlight the apartments next door. The housing is the reward for proving demand, not the bet that creates it.
Westport Plaza ran that sequence in reverse. The Porter, the plaza's first residential building, went up in 2025 and started leasing before the current restaurant lineup existed in anything close to its finished form. Two hundred fifty-five units, five stories, a pool courtyard and a dog park, sitting inside a commercial complex that was still mid-renovation. That's a strange bet to make. It's also the reason the plaza feels different this year than it did two years ago.
Housing Went In Before the Restaurants Did
The Porter opened at 50 West Port Plaza Drive with studio, one-, and two-bedroom units, and by the summer of 2026 it was actively leasing across that range, with listed units running from roughly $1,530 for a one-bedroom up to $2,730 for a two-bedroom two-bath layout. That's not a building sitting half-empty waiting for the neighborhood to catch up. People are living there now, walking distance from restaurants that, in some cases, opened after they signed their lease.
The city's own announcement of the project called it out plainly. Mike Zeek, the city's Director of Community Development, said building would "make their property a true mixed use development and drive future improvement to this quintessential part of Maryland Heights." That's a bet on sequence, not just square footage: put people in first, and the demand for a Tuesday-night dinner spot follows naturally, because the demand is now walking distance instead of hypothetical.
Then the Restaurants Caught Up
They did, and fairly fast. If you haven't been to Westport Plaza since last year, here's what's actually new on the ground:
- Shorty's Diner opened April 4, 2026, at 12004 Lackland, a former Hardee's rebuilt into a 1950s-themed diner with a working vintage payphone and a jukebox that belonged to the owner's father. It's the first Missouri location for a family chain that traces back to a 1948 diner in Ohio.
- Que Pique brought Mexican food into the plaza's restaurant row this year, joining the roster that already included Basso on the Plaza, the modern Italian bistro that mirrors its sister restaurant at the Cheshire Hotel.
- Millwoods Sports Bar & Grill is moving into the former Jimmy's Place Sports Bar & Grill space at 12068 Dorsett Road, bringing billiards, darts, and a private event space that can hold up to 100 people.
- The established anchors are still doing what they've always done: Westport Social's gaming lounge, the Funny Bone comedy club, Backstreet Jazz & Blues, and the Trainwreck Saloon for live music and dancing.
None of that was announced as one big package. It came in waves, restaurant by restaurant, over roughly eighteen months, filling in around a residential population that was already there to eat at them.
The Free Night Nobody Used to Plan Around
The clearest sign that this is now a neighborhood and not just a commercial park is the recurring event that didn't exist a few years ago. On the third Thursday of the month, from May through September, Westport Plaza hosts Parties on the Plaza, a free outdoor happy hour in the 10,000-square-foot turf green space built at the center of the property. Live bands, yard games, no admission charge, dogs welcome. The season's last one for 2026 lands on September 17.
That green space isn't single-purpose, either. The Maryland Heights Chamber and PARIC were set to host what they billed as the largest expo ever held in Maryland Heights on September 9 in that same renovated green space, a reminder that the space was built to flex between a Thursday happy hour and a few hundred people at a business event. A patch of turf that used to be an underused courtyard is now doing double duty as the plaza's living room.
Why the Sequence Actually Matters If You Live Nearby
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you're just tracking new restaurant names. Putting apartments into a commercial complex before the amenities are finished is usually a risk, because new residents can end up isolated in a half-built district with nothing to walk to. That's not what happened here, and the reason is that Westport Plaza never started from zero. Rawlings Sporting Goods had already relocated its global headquarters into the plaza, the Sheratons were already drawing conference traffic, and venues like Kobe Steakhouse, Drunken Fish, and Soda Fountain Express predated the renovation entirely. The Porter's first residents moved into a plaza that already had a pulse, just one that ran on nine-to-five hours. The new restaurants had a built-in customer base from day one, and the residents had somewhere to walk from the moment they got their keys.
That's the actual story behind the new tenant names: not a district building itself from scratch, but an existing commercial center absorbing housing and then filling in the gaps the housing created. It's a different order of operations than the standard playbook, and it's part of why the plaza feels less like a construction zone and more like a place people actually live now.
What to Do This Month If You're Nearby
If you're deciding how to spend an evening near the plaza before the weather turns, a few concrete options:
- Catch the last Parties on the Plaza of the season on September 17, in the turf green space at the center of the complex, free and dog friendly.
- Grab lunch at Shorty's Diner on Lackland and see the vintage payphone and jukebox for yourself.
- Walk or bike the Fee Fee Greenway, a paved 2.5 to 3-mile out-and-back connecting the Maryland Heights Community Center's Aquaport to Creve Coeur Lake Memorial Park, with restrooms and parking at both ends.
- Try one of the newer restaurant additions, whether that's Que Pique for Mexican food or Basso on the Plaza for Italian, and see how the lineup compares to whatever you remember from a couple of years back.
None of this required the plaza to finish anything. It's already usable, already lived in, and already changing month to month.
If you're weighing a move into this part of Maryland Heights, or you already live nearby and want a read on how a redevelopment like this tends to shape home values over time, the Laura Sanders Team knows this corridor block by block. Reach out for a free home valuation and a conversation grounded in what's actually happening on the ground here, not just what a listing sheet says.
