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by Scott Nishimura, Fort Worth Report
January 4, 2026

Editor’s note: During the holiday season, the Fort Worth Report is following up on the stories you told us you appreciated the most in 2025.

Last winter, longtime Fort Worth restaurateur and dumpling purveyor Hao Tran had just agreed to a lease on a substantially larger location in White Settlement.

Fast forward nearly a year, construction is due to start in January on Hao’s Duong DeVille, named for a Cadillac her father bought when she and her two siblings were children.

Her target opening is late spring. Construction will take about five months, according to Tran and her landlord Will Churchill, who owns the shopping center at Loop 820 and White Settlement Road with his sister, Corrie Fletcher.

Tran is still noodling on whether to retain Hao’s Grocery & Café at 120 St. Louis Ave. on Fort Worth’s Near Southside.

To keep her smaller shop, Tran says she needs to make it more economically viable: cooking classes and private events, such as prix-fixe dinners, pay the bills.

“The retail doesn’t cover the rent,” she said in early November, noting she’d already booked three events for the following month. “That’s the only way I can sustain business here.”

Tran regards the opportunity to build a 3,601-square-foot restaurant at the new shopping center as a godsend. “It literally dropped in my lap,” she said.

Tran juggles the business with her full-time career as a Trimble Technical High School teacher. She taught science at the campus for 25 years including culinary courses in the last two.

Tran opened the cafe seven years ago after spending years cooking for pop-ups. 

She estimated she surpassed 1 million dumplings sold in early 2025. She runs her shop four days a week and fills out her schedule with the classes and events.

Now at 57, and after a few unsuccessful attempts to expand, Tran thought she was done with that idea.

“I was going to retire (from teaching) and work through this until I didn’t want to do it anymore,” she said over bowls of pho one recent Sunday evening.

Unknown to her, Tran and her shop were on the radar of Churchill and Fletcher — the twin great grandchildren of the Fort Worth auto dealer Frank Kent. The siblings had purchased real estate at Loop 820 south of White Settlement Road and were renovating and repositioning the multiple commercial buildings on the site.

The duo’s prime target: a restaurant to broaden the offerings along the west side border of Fort Worth. Nearby Parker County is enjoying explosive growth with developments including the Walsh housing community and the UTA West campus. West Fort Worth’s high-end neighborhoods of Montserrat and Montrachet also bring potential customers.

The twins’ pursuit of Tran was similar to other efforts they’ve launched in commercial real estate where they first purchased sites, identified tenants they wanted, and then pursued deals. Melt Ice Creams on West Magnolia Avenue and Heim Barbecue are two such businesses they championed.

In Tran’s case, Churchill and Fletcher offered to finish out the new restaurant space at their expense.

“From our perspective, she’s a great lady with an immense amount of talent,” Churchill said. “To do a project that is worthy, it’s going to take a significant amount of capital. We felt it was important to take the burden of that responsibility on ourselves.

“It allows her to execute without having debt hanging over her head every day,” he said. “If she was a normal office tenant, we don’t do anything close to that.”

“It is a gift,” Tran says. “I have to work the business. Use it well.”

Churchill and Fletcher had some delays on their originally envisioned timeframe. Over the past year, the two also sold the family’s auto businesses; repositioned their Fort Brewery business; and began construction of a Weatherford location of Heim Barbecue.

The extra time was welcomed by Tran, who’s had plenty of time to consider her strategy. “I wasn’t in a rush,” she said.

Her Near Southside shop has three employees, not including Tran, and virtually no seating other than a small private dining room. 

She estimates the new restaurant will need 15 to 25 staffers as the space will seat 124 inside and another 34 on the patio, she said.

The new restaurant will have a full bar, a change from her BYOB cafe. There will also be a television.

“We’re not going to be a sports bar,” she said. “It’ll be a place where friends and community can gather and sit and have a drink at 10 o’clock on Tuesday night.”

The cafe is open from noon to 8 p.m. Thursday through Friday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, with events and classes on other days.

At the new place, Tran wants to start with Thursday to Sunday dinner service, then expand to other weekdays and times. Even if the hours aren’t yet set, she knows she wants a late dining room.

“That area needs it,” she said. “It needs a late-night place that’s got great food and great vibes.”

She said she’s asked longtime vendor and friend Thai “Luu” Vo, a Fort Worth vegan food truck operator, to become her chef de cuisine.

In preparation for the next stage of her life, Tran sold her home and moved into a garage apartment two years ago.

“I got rid of 80% of my personal belongings,” she said. “I’m living very feng shui.”

Scott Nishimura is a senior editor for the Documenters program at the Fort Worth Report. Reach him at scott.nishimura@fortworthreport.org.At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.

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Story Continues

People who have had their personal information stolen from the Stuff-owned Neighbourly platform could be vulnerable to online threats, a cyber security expert says.

Neighbourly has lost names, email address, private messages, posts and GPS locations which have been put up for sale on the dark web.

The website was initially shut down on New Year’s Day after the breach was uncovered but is now back online again.

Neighbourly has told members it will look to get a court injunction, but it is satisfied the breach was quickly contained.

It surfaced around the same time of another major breach with privately-owned Manage My Health, which more than 120,000 patient files compromised.

“The most concerning thing about the Neighbourly one is that there is GPS information in there, which I assume is people’s homes,” Patrick Sharp, general manager at Aura Information Security told RNZ.

“So that, correlated with other information that’s out on the internet might provide some kind of attack opportunity for an attacker.”

Sharp said the taking of the information was “absolutely” a concern.

“After the Medibank breach in Australia in 2022 there were tens, or maybe hundreds of thousands of actual financial crimes that resulted from the information stolen in that breach… so this is probably the beginning,” he said.

“Bear in mind as well that the people who are impacted by the ManageMyHealth breach and the Neighbourly breach are potentially people who are quite vulnerable and don’t understand how to protect themselves.

“So if a member of your family, an elderly person in your family, or anything like that tells you that they’re affected then you should probably help them try to understand or vet any kinds of unsolicited contact they get from anyone as well,” Sharp said.

“I think more than anything they need to be suspicious, and if someone calls you out of the blue or you get an email which you’re not expecting, you should just be very, very suspicious about it.”

Sharp said cyber attacks rise toward the end of the year, and websites or platforms growing in size an expose vulnerabilities.

“The reality is that websites are very complex systems and they go through a lot of change as they update new features and so on, and so when they do that, the possibilities of introducing new vulnerabilities into those websites is very, very possible,” Sharp said.

“And so unless they maintain a high degree of security during the development process and the update process, those vulnerabilities can be quite impactful,” he said.

“In practice one it’s out there, it’s out there,” Sharp said.

Neighbourly earlier said it took its data privacy responsibilities seriously and had contacted members directly.

On its website, it promotes itself with the tag line “your personal information is safe”.

Lives could be put at risk

Gorilla Technology chief executive Paul Spain said the Neighbourly data breach was “really significant”.

“There’s a large amount of data involved and it impacts somewhere between 800,000 and one million people potentially,” he said.

“The size of the breach suggests that it is certainly a possibility for a large percentage of those people who have their data taken.”

Spain also said the taking of GPS co-ordinates was a concern and would be concerning for some people.

“I guess the reality is when there’s this many people impacted then probably most folks won’t directly be impacted, but you just don’t know whether you’re going to get targeted with some sort of a scam where they know some personal information and they are able to take advantage of you,” he said.

“And if that ends up leaking out on the dark web and becomes available to anybody that could actually put, in some cases, put people’s lives at risk.”

He said a court injunction would be to stop people who are New Zealand-based from referencing the information.

“Because once it’s available out there, of course, anybody can get it and so you could just do a court injunction that says ‘hey, this is private information and shouldn’t be published through through legitimate platforms’,” he said.

“But it’s still available unfortunately to anyone that chooses to pay for it or retrieve the portions of it that might be leaked for free.”

Spain described the Neighbourly breach as a wake-up call.

“And unfortunately we seem to have, I think, a kind of ‘she’ll be right, mate’ attitude to cyber security in New Zealand for a lot of organisations, and it’s surprising, you know, how many organisations don’t get regular cyber security audits carried out or have a good level of clarity around where their risks are and what they can do to reduce those risks.

“You know, an organisation of the scale of stuff.co.nz who own Neighbourly, they should be at the scale to make sure that they’re keeping on top of these things.”

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