If you have driven west on 114th toward Slide Road this summer, you have probably slowed down at the same corner everyone else in Fountain Hills Estates slows down at. There is a building going up on the northeast side, framed out, roof deck on, still wearing its construction fence. A few months back, the company behind it posted on Facebook asking Lubbock to vote on which monument sign design it should use out front. People voted. The sign is still not up. Neither is the drive-thru window.
That corner is Sticky Chikky, and it is the clearest example of something that is easy to miss about this stretch of southwest Lubbock: it is filling in at two different speeds at once. Half of what shows up when you search restaurants near 114th and Slide has been open long enough to have a regular crowd. The other half is still steel studs and a permit number. Knowing which is which saves you a wasted drive on a Friday night.
The Building Everyone Keeps Watching
Sticky Chikky is the Amarillo-born chicken and sticky rice concept that built a following there before announcing its Lubbock expansion in January. According to the company and local reporting at the time, the new location at 114th and Slide is under a fifteen-year lease that was set to begin in July of this year, with construction targeted to finish in December. That timeline puts the actual opening closer to winter than fall, no matter how finished the exterior starts to look from the road.
That gap between what a building looks like and when it opens is worth remembering here, because it is not the first time. The Plaza's second Lubbock location, a few hundred feet away in the same 114.Slide development, was announced back in 2021 and did not open until January 22, 2024, more than two years later. If you are timing a fall night out around a restaurant you have only seen from the outside, the building being framed does not mean the food is close.
What's Already A Regular Stop
The corner has plenty that is not waiting on anything. The Plaza Restaurant and Bar has been serving Tex-Mex at 11425 Slide Rd for more than two and a half years now, and its brisket tacos and shrimp enchiladas with jalapeño cream have built the kind of following that makes it busy most evenings. It is the second Lubbock location for a family-run chain that started in Borger in 2001, and the one at 114th and Slide is its first in any city to run alongside a sibling location, the original still open at 5029 Milwaukee Ave.
The rest of the block has filled in around it. Within the same development, you can already find:
- Crumbl, for the cookie rotation that changes weekly
- Jersey Mike's Subs, for a sub sandwich lineup
- MotoMedi Mediterranean, for a newer addition to the corner's food mix
- Johnny Fab's Cadillac Grill, for a full sit-down option beyond The Plaza
- The Brass Tap, if you want a beer list with your dinner
- SMOK'D Pit Barbecue, tucked near the United Supermarkets on Slide
None of that is speculative. It is what is actually operating on any given weeknight, and it is close enough to Fountain Hills Estates that it functions as an extension of the neighborhood rather than a special trip.
The Corner That Broke It In First
Before any of the 114.Slide tenants signed a lease, Asada Mexican Grill was already running half a mile south at 10609 Slide Rd, open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. with a drive-thru, homemade corn tortillas, and a breakfast menu that runs chorizo, barbacoa, and asada from open to close. It built enough of a following on its own that in the fall of 2024 it announced a second, different concept, a bar and grill inside The Hub Shopping Center on Milwaukee Ave, with the same food but live music added on Friday and Saturday nights.
That expansion matters more than it looks. Asada did not wait for a national chain to prove the corner could support a second location. A local restaurant already operating there decided the demand existed and built a second version to meet it. The 114.Slide development and everything that followed arrived after that bet had already paid off, not before it.
Why This Particular Corner, And Not Just South Lubbock In General
South Lubbock has been growing for years, but growth does not land evenly, and this intersection has specific reasons for pulling more of it than the blocks around it. Slide Road at 114th carries close to 36,000 vehicles a day, according to the development's own leasing materials, with direct access from Loop 289 and the still-under-construction Loop 88. The same corner sits just down the street from UMC's newest hospital and medical office building, which means a meaningful share of the traffic passing through on a weekday afternoon is coming straight from a shift change rather than from a neighborhood errand run.
If you or someone you know works out that direction, in medicine or otherwise, this corner has quietly become the last real stop before home for a lot of people, not just a destination you plan for. That is a different kind of pull than a shopping center built purely to serve the houses already nearby, and it is part of why this specific intersection has kept adding tenants faster than similar stretches a mile or two off the highway in either direction.
Sixteen Years Between A Half-Acre Lot And A Drive-Thru
Fountain Hills Estates itself got its start back in 2010, platted with half-acre lots on what was then the edge of town near 114th and Milwaukee. For a long stretch of that history, the drive toward Slide Road did not offer much beyond open land. The corner filling in with a multi-tenant retail center, a second location for a longtime local Tex-Mex favorite, and now a chicken concept importing itself from Amarillo is a fairly recent development, most of it inside the last three years.
That pace is worth sitting with if you have lived here a while. The corner did not fill in because someone decided the neighborhood needed amenities. It filled in because the road network, the hospital traffic, and a couple of confident local operators lined up at the same intersection at the same time. The next stretch of that fill-in is already under construction. Whether the sign goes up before or after the first cold snap is genuinely still an open question, and that is a very specific kind of thing to know about a corner you drive past every week.
If you have questions about how this part of southwest Lubbock has changed, or you are trying to figure out what a half-acre lot near 114th actually looks like on the ground these days, Loya Harrison Cobb has been watching this side of town for a long time. Let's connect.
