Drive down Mercer Street this month and the street feels more settled than it has in years. A Thai chef who spent a decade running a food truck out of Belterra finally has walls and a roof. A bakery that opened its doors five years ago is still milling its own flour on site. A pub that started life as a barbershop marked fifteen years in business earlier this year.
Two miles away on Highway 290, something entirely different is taking shape. A 26.45-acre lot near Belterra is being cleared for what will be the largest single retail project this town has ever seen, anchored by a Target the size of a small airport terminal. Same town, same year, two completely different growth stories.
What actually landed on Mercer Street this year
If you've noticed more foot traffic downtown, you're not imagining it. Here's what opened, in order:
- Rice and Oak Thai Texas Grill Kitchen opened January 2 in downtown Dripping Springs. Owner Siwaphan Sampaotong spent almost a decade running the Aroi Thai food truck in Belterra before making the jump to a permanent kitchen. The menu carries over the woks, curries, rice bowls and soups regulars already knew, just with a dining room attached now.
- Ritzy Rexann, a western-style boutique, opened downtown in January, selling vintage-cut pants, blouses, jackets and a case full of jewelry and hats.
- Beerburg Events opened a new outdoor beer garden this past May, built around native landscaping instead of the usual gravel-and-string-lights formula. The Dripping Springs Chamber of Commerce cut the ribbon on May 28, and the space now runs 2 to 8 p.m. on weekends.
- Roxie's is on its way to Mercer Street later this year, bringing Southern comfort food built around fried chicken, homemade pies, a full bar and a patio big enough for the kind of slow, family-style dinner this street is known for.
None of that is a chain testing the market. Every one of those is a person betting on a permanent address on a street that's already tight on real estate.
The anniversaries tell the same story from the other direction. Abby Jane Bakeshop, which mills its own flour for quiches and loaves, quietly hit five years in business in January. A Mercer Street pub that took over an old barbershop space, and kept the name as a nod to it, reached fifteen years earlier this year. That's not a street in flux. That's a street where the businesses that stick around keep sticking around, and the ones with staying power just got reinforcements.
Not everything held on. Garbo's, the Austin-based lobster roll spot, closed its Dripping Springs location on January 25, not quite two years after it opened in April 2024. The brand isn't gone from Central Texas, it still runs two brick-and-mortar spots in North Austin and its food trucks, but Dripping Springs specifically didn't stick for it the way it has for the businesses built here from the start. Juniper Tree Market, the downtown boutique that sold jewelry, apparel and décor, closed after five years, running a final 25%-off weekend sale through the end of January before shutting its doors for good.
The other side of town is moving at a completely different speed
Here's where it gets interesting for anyone who's been hearing "Target is coming" for the better part of a year and wondering why nothing's broken ground.
The store is real. Target confirmed it in February 2026, and it will anchor a development called The Village at Dripping Springs, a 26.45-acre site on West Highway 290 sitting between a CVS and the Dripping Springs Racquet Club, near Belterra. Early filings pegged the store at roughly 145,000 square feet. Filings released in March with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation revised that up to about 147,000 square feet, along with a construction budget estimated at $7.5 million for the site work alone.
If you assumed this store would be open by now, or even by next spring, the filings say otherwise. Construction isn't projected to start until May 2027, with completion targeted for mid-November of that same year. That's not a rounding error. It means the Target that's already been the subject of a full year of neighborhood conversation hasn't broken ground as of this writing, and won't open for well over another year after it does.
The development plan calls for two more commercial buildings totaling about 19,300 square feet, plus four additional lots still open for whoever wants to build next. It's landing in company that's already there: OrangeTheory, Chick-fil-A, Dunkin, Torchy's Tacos, H-E-B and Jersey Mike's already occupy that stretch of 290. This isn't the highway discovering retail. It's the highway getting a much bigger anchor for a pattern that was already forming.
Not every reaction to that news has been enthusiastic. When Community Impact and KXAN checked in with residents back in the fall of 2025, the sentiment wasn't unanimous. Some saw a Target as a genuine convenience. Others saw it as one more sign the town's small-town character is getting harder to hold onto as the highway fills in.
Two corridors, two different bets
Laid side by side, the contrast is hard to miss:
| Mercer Street | Highway 290 near Belterra | |
|---|---|---|
| What just opened | Rice and Oak, Ritzy Rexann, a new beer garden | Golden Chick |
| What's coming | Roxie's, later this year | The Village at Dripping Springs, targeting late 2027 |
| Ownership pattern | Local owner-operators, first or only location | National franchise flags alongside independent operators |
| Scale of the newest project | A beer garden and a restaurant buildout | A 26.45-acre, multi-building shopping center |
Even the newest highway arrivals lean toward chain formats run by local owners rather than the from-scratch concepts showing up downtown. Golden Chick opened this year at 104 Highway 290 under Austin local Tariq Khan, who also owns two other locations in the Austin area. Dixie Tint Pros, a window tint shop, opened near the Belterra corridor under an owner who also runs a location in Lakeway. Both are locally owned, but both are also part of something bigger than a single storefront, which is a different bet than what Roxie's or Rice and Oak are making on Mercer Street.
What this means if you're the one driving between them
None of this is really about which corridor "wins." It's about what each one is actually for. If you want a spontaneous Tuesday dinner or a Saturday afternoon wandering past a mural and a coffee roaster, Mercer Street is where that keeps happening, and this year it happened with more staying power than usual. If you're running errands or waiting on a Target to finally show up, that timeline runs through 2027, not this year or next spring.
Dripping Springs isn't choosing one identity over the other. It's building both at the same time, on two different clocks, with two different kinds of business owners placing two very different sizes of bet. That's worth knowing whether you're deciding where to grab dinner tonight or just trying to keep your mental map of the town up to date.
If you're curious how any of this shows up in what a specific street or neighborhood is worth right now, that's the kind of question Kristen Balke spends her days answering for people in Dripping Springs and the rest of the Lake Travis corridor. Let's connect.
