For years, the honest answer to "where should we go tonight?" from behind the Cimarron Hills gate was either the clubhouse or a drive south to Round Rock. That is no longer the calculation. Between the Highway 29 exit and the downtown Square, four openings in 2026 have redrawn the short list, and one of them arrives on August 18 with sixty thousand square feet of food and drink attached to it. The point of this post is simple: the club's Osage Trace dining room does not have to be the default anymore, and the alternatives are close enough to reach in under fifteen minutes.
The Corridor That Had Nothing, Suddenly Has Everything
Drive southeast of the neighborhood toward Blue Springs Boulevard and you pass a six-acre construction site across from the GAF Energy solar factory. That parcel becomes The Junction, a purpose-built entertainment complex from Georgetown-based Cooley Capital Companies on roughly six acres at 210 Blue Springs Blvd. in southeast Georgetown, with about 60,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor space and a 5,700-square-foot food hall.
The economic logic behind it is more interesting than the square footage. Cooley Capital partner Matt Marshall told Round Rock Scoop that about 6,000 employees work within a mile of the site with currently zero food and beverage options serving them, and every restaurant space at The Junction leased before construction began, which is uncommon for a suburban project at this scale. Translation for a Cimarron Hills resident: a corridor that has been a dinner desert for a decade now has demand strong enough to fill a food hall on paper before anyone poured a slab.
Here is the opening-day lineup worth knowing before you walk in:
| Concept | Origin | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Sweet Lemon Kitchen | Georgetown, two downtown locations | Bakery and cafe |
| Dough-Go Pizza | Georgetown | 00 Italian flour dough pies |
| King's Chicken Wings | Waco | First location outside Waco |
| Taconmaye | Austin food truck origin | Full-service Mexican kitchen |
| JABS Smashburger | Vorha brothers | Smashburgers |
| Shawarma Point | Vorha brothers | Shawarma and Middle Eastern |
Sweet Lemon Kitchen, the bakery-cafe with two locations near the downtown Square, will run a full outpost at The Junction alongside its existing spots; Dough-Go Pizza, another Georgetown business, serves pies built on 00 Italian flour dough; King's Chicken Wings is making its first move outside of Waco; and Taconmaye started as an Austin food truck and now serves the Williamson County area with a full-service kitchen. JABS Smashburger and Shawarma Point, both from brothers Faraz and Faseeh Vorha, were added to the roster in June, with JABS replacing the originally announced Wholly Cow Burgers, three full-service bars will operate alongside the restaurants plus a speakeasy called The Nest that doubles as a private event room, and anchor operator 100x Hospitality is managing day-to-day operations and event bookings.
A speakeasy that turns into a private event room is a design detail. For residents who host, it means a legitimate in-town option for a milestone dinner that does not require booking a country club ballroom.
Two Restaurants That Chose Georgetown on Purpose
The Junction is the loudest arrival of the summer. The quieter story matters more if you already have a favorite steak order.
Earlier this year Sovian Restaurant & Cocktail Lounge opened at 1500 Rivery Blvd., Ste. 2175 this spring, a European-style steakhouse from Chef Vira Chudasma, who also runs La Riv Wood Fired Italian in Georgetown. That address puts Sovian roughly ten to fifteen minutes from the Cimarron Hills gate depending on the light at Wolf Ranch. What it offers is a category Georgetown has been missing: Georgetown's first genuine special-occasion European steakhouse from an independent operator, a category the city has been quietly missing, especially at a price point that competes with a night out in downtown Austin without the drive.
The math there is worth pausing on. An anniversary dinner in downtown Austin costs the meal plus roughly ninety minutes of round-trip driving and, often, a hotel decision. Sovian erases the drive without discounting the occasion.
The second chef-driven opening sits on the Square itself. Haji Moto Ramen & Sake Bar opened its doors at 114 E. 7th St. in downtown Georgetown after a soft opening pushed by inspection delays and holiday conflicts, with Chef-partner Jerry Thompson running a menu built around traditional-style ramen, with broths, noodles, gyoza, and karaage made in-house, the karaage fried twice in beef tallow, and a bar that leans on Japanese whisky and sake with Japanese beer on tap. Karaage double-fried in beef tallow is the kind of detail that tells you a kitchen is not phoning it in for a suburban clientele. Two full-service restaurants in one calendar year, both with chefs who chose Georgetown on purpose rather than as a fallback, is a shift.
The gap The Junction fills is not a lifestyle upgrade for downtown regulars. It is the first sit-down destination for a corridor of Georgetown that had none.
Read the two developments together and a pattern emerges. The chefs are betting on Georgetown as a destination. The developers are betting on Georgetown as a workday market. Both bets require the same underlying assumption: households in neighborhoods like Cimarron Hills, Wolf Ranch, and the Rivery corridor will spend on food at a rate that used to require a Loop 360 drive.
The Weeknight Layer
Special-occasion dinners are one part of the map. The other is the Tuesday-night question, which is where the everyday layer of 2026 openings comes in.
Shake Shack is transforming a 3,000-square-foot space with a full interior renovation at 1320 W University Ave in Georgetown, with an ETA of late June 2026 and construction that started March 2. That address puts it directly on the route between the Cimarron Hills gate and Interstate 35, which is exactly the kind of location that changes weeknight defaults. A burger stop on the way home from a Round Rock meeting is now a genuine option rather than a McDonald's compromise.
Two other items in the pipeline are worth tracking even if they are not yet open. Taco Haven filed an official city permit on 04/10/2026 for a new location on San Jose Blvd., and Texas Roadhouse has begun its $2M ground-up construction in Georgetown, featuring a massive dining room and full-service bar. Neither is a chef-driven story. Both signal continued absorption of the west-side traffic that Cimarron Hills residents generate every day.
Where Osage Trace Still Wins
None of this makes the on-property option obsolete. The Osage Trace restaurant is located in the Cimarron Hills clubhouse and serves club members and neighborhood residents, more casual for lunch and offering more upscale options such as steak or fish in the evening to give patrons an elevated dinner experience. There are three occasions where staying inside the gate still wins on merit:
- A weeknight where the drive itself is the thing you want to skip. The Osage Trace is a five-minute cart ride, and no new opening changes that math.
- A lunch that runs long. Lunch hours are Tuesday 11:00am-5:00pm and Wednesday-Sunday 11:00am-3:00pm, with a Member Favorites Menu only from 3:00-4:00pm. That mid-afternoon Member Favorites window is a small detail that matters if your calendar runs on Zoom time.
- Standing reservations for a group. The clubhouse absorbs a party of ten without the calendar gymnastics a new downtown restaurant requires in its opening months.
The right way to think about the summer is not Osage Trace versus everything else. It is that the "everything else" column finally has enough entries to be interesting.
What This Means If You Are Hosting
The practical value of the 2026 openings for a Cimarron Hills household is a shorter hosting radius. Family flying in for a weekend used to mean a decision tree: dinner at the club, dinner on the Square, or a drive south. The tree now includes a European steakhouse fifteen minutes away, a serious ramen bar on the Square, a food hall with six kitchens under one roof, and a Shake Shack for the kids who do not care about any of the above.
Two logistics notes for the August 18 Junction opening. First, every restaurant space leased before construction began, which usually means the first six to eight weeks run near capacity on weekends. Plan on a weeknight visit for the first month. Second, the site sits on the southeast side of town rather than the Square, so the drive from the Highway 29 gate routes down Austin Avenue rather than through downtown traffic.
A Note on the Neighborhood This Is Happening Around
Restaurant density is not an isolated data point. It tracks the growth of the surrounding rooftops, and Cimarron Hills is adding to that count. Cimarron Hills is a 1,000-acre master-planned neighborhood in Georgetown with approximately 600 homes and a new phase of estate lots of 0.5 to 1.9 acres planned for 2026. A new phase of estate lots is another 6,000-employees-within-a-mile story in miniature. The kitchens choosing Georgetown are choosing it partly because of who is moving here.
If you would like a closer look at what is happening inside the gate this year, the Cimarron Hills neighborhood page collects current listings and community detail. And if you are thinking about how the surrounding Georgetown growth is changing what your home might be worth, Marion Lamantia is available to walk through it. Request Your Free Home Valuation at marionlamantia.com/home-valuation.
