The restaurant is the third in McKinney from Frisco-based 33 Restaurant Group, which also operates downtown restaurants The Yard and Cadillac Pizza Pub in addition to a number of other concepts in North Texas. The McKinney location is the third Union Bear restaurant, and restaurant officials are looking to make the elevated eatery a gathering spot for the community.
“You're going to feel like you're in a special place, but you're also going to feel like you're in your neighborhood hang,” General Manager Gabe Nissen said.
The details
The restaurant offers a chef-driven menu of American classics like the Big Tavern Burger, which features double meat, double cheese, lettuce, tomato, grilled onions, pickles and mustard.
The menu also features dishes including the “Grown Up” chicken tenders, Korean shrimp tacos, fish and chips, and sausage rigatoni. Appetizers available include pretzel bites and green chile-dusted pork rinds, and guests can also order from a selection of sandwiches and salads.
Each Union Bear restaurant offers pizza, with the variety varying by location. The concept’s first location in Plano offers flatbread-style pizza and the second location in Denton offers hand-stretched pizza pies, according to its website.
The McKinney location offers a Sicilian-style deep dish pizza in both classic and white pie varieties. Nissen said guests that have visited multiple Union Bear locations often discover the different pizza types.
“Even in such a finite segment as pizza, we're able to provide that variety,” Nissen said. “It keeps it really fun.”
Other items unique to the menu at the McKinney location include a chicken fried ribeye served with jalapeno gravy, the grilled pork chop, a seasonal redfish dish and the grilled New York strip steak. The menu was developed with the restaurant group’s other downtown eateries in mind in an effort to create menu items that draw patrons to all three locations, Director of Operations Tanner Fleming said.
“Our food menu is really one of the most exciting things about what we've done here,” Nissen said. “There are going to be items that you're going to see at every location, but we also have some real rock stars.”
Diving in deeper
The restaurant’s drink menu features over 15 types of Union Bear beer, including award-winning varieties.
Union Bear officials brew a “No Coast IPA” along with varieties like Union Bear Light, Amber Ale, German Pilsner, Pomegranate Blueberry Sour and more. Various brews from the company have won statewide and national awards, including the Mexican Lager, Fleming said.
“You can't have a Union Bear without beer,” he said.
Non-beer options for patrons include a list of hand-selected spirits, cocktails, frozen drinks and wine.
Quote of note
“When people think about eating here, you can get some appetizers to share when you have beers and watch the Masters, or you can sit down and have a really nice meal with somebody that you care about, and you can be proud to bring them ... and know that they're going to have a great experience,” Nissen said.
The setup
The restaurant is located in a renovated historic building, which was formerly a hardware store and a grocery store, city documents state. The process to renovate and expand the building required approvals from the city’s historic preservation advisory board and staff.
The project also required some extra steps that wouldn’t be found in a newly constructed building, but Union Bear officials wanted to preserve elements of the existing structure, Fleming said.
“We could have just [bull]dozed everything and rebuilt, [it] would have been the easy way to go. We just didn't want to go the easy way,” Fleming said.
Original plans for the restaurant featured a bigger footprint with a large production brewery, Fleming said, but the final restaurant was scaled back to fit into downtown McKinney. Fleming said the reduced scale was “the smartest decision we could have made.” Beer served at the restaurant is instead brewed at the Denton Union Bear location.
“I don't know that downtown McKinney would have loved delivery trucks pulling in, grain trucks,” he said. “What we have in our production brewery in Denton takes a large parking lot to just get in and out of, let alone city streets.”
The restaurant expansion retained elements of the existing building, including some exposed brick, and also enabled the addition of an all-weather patio that can be heated or cooled depending on the season.
“We really invested on this patio to try to make it something that's usable,” Fleming said.
- 308 W. Virginia St., McKinney
- www.unionbear.com/union-bear-mckinney
