On September 15, the doors open again at 1071 Country Club Rd, Suite C, from 3 to 9 p.m. If you've lived in The Willows for more than a few years, you already know the address without checking a map. It sits inside River Run Plaza, the same strip mall parking lot that turns into a farmers market every Saturday morning. What's opening there is Farah's, the longtime West El Paso kitchen that closed in 2023 and is now coming back under owner Edward Farah, minus the word "Mediterranean" in its name and minus the sit-down dining room most people remember.
The name change is small but it tells you what actually happened while the space sat closed. Farah explained it plainly to El Paso Inc.: the business had grown well past its original menu, so the name had to catch up. The new operation runs primarily as a commissary kitchen supplying Farah's corporate catering business, with public pickup and casual dine-in layered on top rather than the other way around.
The Suite Has a Longer Memory Than the Sign
Before Farah's, Suite C at River Run Plaza was Nick's Pizza, which closed its doors in September 2023, the same year Farah's own predecessor shut down. That predecessor, Salma Farah's Mediterranean, had a longer run than most West Side restaurants get: it opened in 2009 at 4126 N. Mesa St., later moved to 126 Shadow Mountain Dr., and built enough of a following that a 2019 roundup named it one of the city's top five Mediterranean kitchens, with its hummus and fatayer singled out as the draw.
So the timeline looks like this: one business closes on Mesa, its owner reopens on Shadow Mountain, that location closes too in 2023, and the same year a separate pizza shop on Country Club Road folds. Now, three years later, the Farah name lands in the space the pizza shop left behind. Two closures, one reopening, same stretch of road.
The Farah name carries weight in El Paso beyond any single storefront. It traces back to Farah Manufacturing, founded in 1920 by Lebanese immigrants Mansour and Hana Farah, which grew into the city's largest civilian employer and shaped a chunk of the region's industrial history. A restaurant closing and reopening under that name isn't the same as watching a random tenant churn through a strip mall suite.
What Reopening Actually Means Here
Don't expect the old dining room back. The public hours on opening day run 3 to 9 p.m., and the business model leans toward the catering side, the part that's been running the whole time Farah's storefront presence was dark. What you can expect on the menu: wraps in house-made saj bread, hummus, kibbeh, and tabbouleh, the dishes that built the original reputation. The catering menu has widened considerably, adding brisket and other braised meats alongside Italian and French dishes, which explains why the sign no longer says "Mediterranean."
West El Paso has held onto a cluster of Levantine restaurants along the North Mesa Street corridor for years. Farah's reopening doesn't sit on Mesa. It sits a few minutes away on Country Club Road, inside a plaza that already has its own identity, one built entirely around Saturday mornings.
A Market That Already Owns Saturday Mornings
River Run Plaza's parking lot has hosted the Country Club Farmers Market every Saturday since it launched on September 30, 2020. The market describes itself as governed by the local farmers who sell there, and by its own count it has helped more than 600 small businesses find a distribution channel since it started. When the market was new, a 2021 report from KVIA put weekly attendance at 100 to 130 vendors, a number that reflected the market in its early surge rather than a current headcount, but it gives a sense of how quickly this parking lot turned into a destination rather than a place to park for pizza.
For five years, this stretch of Country Club Road has run on one shift: Saturday morning, produce stands, a crowd that treats the lot like a town square more than a strip mall. A restaurant reopening in the same footprint doesn't change that rhythm. It adds a second one, an afternoon and evening option in a spot that used to go quiet the moment the market packed up.
The Rest of the Loop
Farah's and the farmers market don't have to be the whole outing. The rest of a typical Willows weekend has stayed fairly consistent, and it's worth naming the actual stops rather than the categories:
- 2Ten Coffee Roasters, the Sunset Road location at 145 E Sunset Rd, is the closest of the roaster's several El Paso spots and the one most Willows mornings start at.
- Braden Aboud Memorial Park and White Spur Park cover the short, close-to-home walks, the kind you take without turning it into a whole outing.
- Pacific Park rounds out the closer options for anyone wanting a change of scenery within a few minutes' drive.
- For a longer outing, the Charlie Wakeem/Richard Teschner Nature Preserve near Resler Canyon gives the loop an actual trailhead, a short drive from the neighborhood rather than a destination that eats the whole day.
None of this is new. What's new is that the Country Club Road end of the loop, previously just a Saturday-morning stop, now has a reason to show up on a Tuesday evening too.
The Loop Fills In, It Doesn't Change
The interesting thing about Farah's reopening isn't the menu, though the saj bread wraps and kibbeh are worth the drive on their own. It's that a single address on Country Club Road just went from a once-a-week stop to something closer to an anchor. The market still owns Saturday morning. Farah's, on its current hours, owns a few evenings a week. Put together, the plaza that used to empty out by early afternoon now has a reason to stay part of the routine past the produce stands.
That's the kind of shift that doesn't show up in a listing description or a neighborhood ranking, but it's exactly the kind of detail that tells you a place is still filling in, not just sitting still.
If you're weighing a move into The Willows or comparing it against the Country Club side of the Upper Valley, Cornerstone Realty tracks this kind of neighborhood-level change as closely as the comps. Broker Adel Reyes has spent two decades watching West El Paso's Upper Valley corridor evolve block by block, and that local read is part of what goes into every conversation with a buyer or seller here. Reach out when you're ready to talk about what a home in The Willows is actually worth in today's market, not just what a portal estimate says it's worth.
