For years, a McKinney summer meant one direction: east, toward the courthouse square, where the parade lines up and the patios fill by five. That is still true. What has changed, and what most local write-ups have not caught up to yet, is that the map now has a second pole. Head west on University Drive and you will find a stretch of new restaurants that opened this year or are about to, most of them making their Texas debut in McKinney rather than Frisco or Plano. If you live here, your July calendar is no longer a choice between downtown and everything else. It is a choice between two zones with two very different personalities, and the fun part is that they are ten minutes apart.
This is the read the national roundups miss. They will tell you about Red, White and BOOM. They will not tell you why a beer bar from Sarasota picked a McKinney address for its first location outside Florida, or why the Ohio taco chain that skipped Dallas proper landed here first.
The downtown calendar is still the anchor
Start with the fixed points.
