Terry Black's Is Opening in New Braunfels on September 15. It Won't Be the Family's Last Stop on I-35.

The pit at Terry Black's newest smokehouse has not lit yet, but the date is set. On September 15, the fast-growing Austin barbecue chain opens its first New Braunfels restaurant, a $5 million space in the former home of a Los Cucos Mexican Cafe at 1310 E. Common Street. For a town that sits in the heart of Central Texas barbecue country, an hour south of the smoke that made Lockhart famous, the arrival is less a novelty than a heavyweight moving in next door.

Terry Black's is not a small operation anymore, and New Braunfels is not its finish line. The chain has grown from a single Austin joint into a footprint that now reaches across much of Texas, and its owners are steering straight down Interstate 35 toward San Antonio. The New Braunfels restaurant is the next flag on that map, and the family planting it carries a barbecue name that reaches back to 1932.

A Hill Country Arrival

The New Braunfels restaurant leans into the things that fill a room on a fall weekend. Guests get a large dining room and a two-story outdoor deck built for the season, plus a pit house where the cooks work in view of the line. Hours run from 10:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and until 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, with private dining coming in the weeks after the debut.

The owners framed the choice as a long time coming. "We've had our eye on New Braunfels for a long time," cofounder Mike Black said in a release announcing the date. "It's a city with deep Texas roots, a strong sense of community and a lot of energy behind it." That energy is what the two-story deck is built to catch once the weather turns.

The food is old-school Central Texas, sold the way the region has always sold it. Meats go by the pound: brisket, beef ribs, turkey, jalapeno-cheddar sausage, and the outsized beef ribs regulars call dino ribs. Sides run to coleslaw, mac and cheese, creamed corn, and banana pudding. A cold Texas craft beer or the house frozen margarita rewards anyone who lingers, though the kitchen is built for speed, with multiple cutting blocks and pits kept constantly loaded so the line keeps moving.

That by-the-pound ritual is not a gimmick. It is the living form of Central Texas market barbecue, the tradition that grew out of the German and Czech meat markets that smoked their unsold cuts and sold them to farmhands wrapped in butcher paper. Lockhart's old-line joints still serve that way, and Terry Black's carries the habit into every new dining room it builds. A customer points at a brisket, a cutter slices it to order, and it lands on the tray by weight rather than on a fixed plate.

The Family Behind the Name

The people behind the pit share one of the most recognized surnames in Texas barbecue. Mark Black and his siblings Michael and Christina founded Terry Black's in Austin in 2014 and named it for their father, Terry Black. The tradition runs a generation deeper than that. Their grandfather, Edgar Black Sr., opened Black's Barbecue in Lockhart in 1932, one of the oldest barbecue restaurants in Texas still run by the same family.

That inheritance shows up in how the food is cooked rather than in any shortcut. Terry Black's holds to slow Central Texas smoking and lets a customer build a plate one cut at a time. "You don't come in here and get a set plate of food," Mark Black said in an earlier release. "You can order a slice of brisket, a rib, and a sausage link all at once." The idea is that each item has to stand on its own after hours over the coals, because the tray is assembled in front of the person who ordered it.

Terry Black himself is the through line. The restaurant carries his name, and his children built the company around the lessons of a pit their grandfather lit during the Depression. What began as one counter in Lockhart is now a family enterprise that spans a state, run by people who grew up weighing brisket and learned the trade before they were old enough to work the register.

A March Down I-35

The Austin original was only the start. Over the next decade Terry Black's added restaurants in Dallas, Fort Worth, Waco, and Houston, and it even opened a location in Lockhart within a mile of the family's ancestral pit. In 2025 the chain crossed the state line for the first time with a Nashville outpost. By CultureMap's count the company now runs eight locations, and New Braunfels is about to push that number higher.

Along the way Terry Black's became one of the most visible names in modern Texas barbecue, a brand as comfortable in a Deep Ellum warehouse in Dallas as in its flagship on Austin's Barton Springs Road. The formula travels: long pits kept loaded, meat cut to order, a deck for the after-work crowd, and a frozen margarita that has become a signature in its own right. Each new city gets the same playbook, sized up to fit the room.

New Braunfels is a waypoint, not the destination. With this restaurant finished, Terry Black's turns its attention south to San Antonio, where construction is underway at 2101 Broadway on a project that pairs two restaurants with a hotel and a bathhouse. The stretch of I-35 between Austin and San Antonio is filling in one smokehouse at a time, and New Braunfels sits squarely in the middle of it.

Why New Braunfels

The town Terry Black's chose is not a barbecue blank slate. German immigrants founded New Braunfels in 1845, and the smoked-sausage and meat-market culture they brought to the Hill Country still runs through the region. Just up the road, Lockhart is long celebrated as the Barbecue Capital of Texas, the town where the Black family story began. Dropping a Black restaurant into that country is less an introduction than a homecoming for a style that grew up right here.

There is a business logic to the address, too. New Braunfels is a fast-growing Hill Country city and a tourism magnet, drawing summer crowds to the Comal and Guadalupe rivers and to Gruene, the historic dance-hall district folded into town. A barbecue brand that thinks in destinations, with a hotel and a bathhouse on the drawing board down the road, is exactly the kind of operator that reads a growing tourist town as a place to plant a flag.

That history cuts both ways. New Braunfels diners already have strong smoke of their own, which is why the arrival reads as a challenge as much as a convenience. A market that knows brisket is a hard room to win, and Terry Black's is wagering that its name and its pits can win it. The two-story deck and the $5 million build are the size of that bet.

From a Counter to a Corridor

What the opening really marks is how far a family recipe can travel once it becomes a brand. Three generations ago, barbecue in this part of Texas meant a single counter in a single town, meat weighed on butcher paper and eaten where it was cut. Now the grandchildren of that counter are opening $5 million rooms with two-story decks and planning hotels down the highway, and the food on the tray has barely changed. The pit still runs on wood and patience. On September 15, New Braunfels finds out what that looks like up close.

Sources

• Terry Black's sets opening date for first New Braunfels restaurant (CultureMap San Antonio, Sep. 1, 2026)

• Terry Black's Barbecue (Wikipedia, company history and locations)

• Black's Barbecue, Lockhart (family history since 1932)

• New Braunfels, TX (Texas State Historical Association)

• Lockhart, TX (Texas State Historical Association)

Images courtesy Terry Black's Barbecue.