For most of the past year, the corner of Hunter Road and FM 306 was a construction site with a good vantage point. If you live in Havenwood at Hunters Crossing and drove that stretch toward Gruene, you watched shaded canopies go up, then patio furniture, then a sign that read "Coming May 2026" and, later, "No Membership Required." The building sat next to Dos Gatos Kolaches, the daytime bakery that had already opened in December 2025 and given the corridor its first real reason to stop rather than pass through. Whatever was coming next was clearly meant to pair with it.
That project opened its doors on June 8, 2026, as Hunter Road Country Club, a bar and grill at 1176 FM 306. The name is a joke, and the owners will tell you so directly. But the joke has a point, and the point matters more to the people who actually live on this corridor than to anyone visiting for the weekend.
New Braunfels has a tourist economy, and Gruene sits at the center of it. The dance hall, the shops, the river tubers in summer: it's the version of this area that shows up in travel guides and gets crowded on Saturday afternoons. Havenwood residents already know this. It's part of why the neighborhood was built where it was, close enough to reach Gruene in minutes but tucked behind its own gates on wooded one-acre lots.
Hunter Road Country Club was built for the other side of that equation. Co-owner Chase Katz, who also runs Zelick's Icehouse in San Marcos along with Pie Society and Dos Gatos Kolache Bakery, told the Herald-Zeitung the name is a deliberate contrast to what people expect from the phrase.
"We're the Hunter Road Country Club, and no memberships are required. We called it a country club, but that's just kind of a play on what a country club actually is."
He went further in comments to MySA, framing the concept against the exclusivity the name usually implies: the space was meant to feel unstuffy, laid back, and aimed at the people who already live here rather than the crowds passing through. Katz put it plainly: New Braunfels has plenty of visitors, but this particular spot was built to be a comfortable, ready fixture for the people who call the area home.
That distinction is the actual news here. Gruene has never lacked for places to eat and drink. What it has lacked, at least on this stretch of Hunter Road, is a spot that isn't competing for tourist foot traffic and isn't priced or paced for a day trip. Havenwood sits close enough to benefit from that difference without absorbing the parking and crowd overflow that comes with Gruene proper on a Saturday in July.
Hunter Road Country Club didn't open into a vacuum. It's the third confirmed piece of a corridor that's been filling in for about six months, and the pattern is worth naming because it changes what "close to Gruene" actually means for a Havenwood address.
| Business | Location | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Dos Gatos Kolaches | Hunter Road, next to HRCC | Opened December 2025 |
| Sprouts Farmers Market | 275 Creekside Crossing | Opened January 23, 2026 |
| Hunter Road Country Club | 1176 FM 306 | Opened June 8, 2026 |
| Menchie's Frozen Yogurt | 323 Creekside Crossing, Ste. 113 | Under construction, targeting late 2026 |
The Sprouts opening is its own small landmark. It's the first Sprouts location in Comal County, a 23,395-square-foot store built at a cost of $2.3 million as part of the larger Creekside Town Center development. For a neighborhood that previously had to drive into San Antonio or Austin for that kind of grocery format, having it a few minutes down the same corridor as the new bar changes the math on how often you actually leave the area for errands versus staying local for them.
Menchie's is still mid-build. Permit filings put the estimated $180,000 renovation on a projected timeline running from early June to early December 2026, which means it's not open yet, but it's confirmation that Creekside's retailers see enough foot traffic on this stretch to keep investing in it.
Inside, Hunter Road Country Club leans into the joke of its own name with wood-paneled walls, pool tables, darts, and a jukebox, the kind of setup Katz has described as a throwback to the 1960s and '70s rather than anything resembling a golf clubhouse. There's a large patio with an outdoor bar, which is where most of the traffic seems to land on a warm evening.
The hours run Monday through Wednesday from 3 p.m. to midnight and Thursday through Saturday from noon to midnight, according to reporting from MySA. Kids are welcome until 7 p.m., after which the space shifts to a 21-and-older crowd. Dogs aren't allowed, which is worth knowing if your evening plans usually include one.
The menu is scratch-made and priced like a neighborhood spot rather than a destination restaurant: a small Caesar salad runs $7, the HRCC Burger and Patty Melt are both $17, a Shrimp Po'Boy or Birria Grilled Cheese come in at $18, and the steak frites tops the menu at $32. Cocktails range from $11 to $16 and include a Country Club Margarita, an Espresso Martini, a Fresh Grapefruit Paloma, an Irish Maid, and a Tequila Old Fashioned. Community Impact's coverage of the opening also lists birria cheese fries, crab dip, wings, birria frito pie, and vodka Parmesan sandwiches on the appetizer side, which gives the food program more range than a typical bar-and-grill list.
None of this moves a median price or changes a school zone. What it does is change what the drive between Havenwood and Gruene is actually for. Before this year, that stretch of Hunter Road was a pass-through, a few minutes of road between a gated neighborhood and a tourist district. Now it has its own anchor, one explicitly built to give locals somewhere to land before they ever reach Gruene's crowded core.
That's a small thing until you're the one deciding where to grab dinner on a Tuesday, or where to send visiting family for a casual night out without fighting for parking near the dance hall. A bar with pool tables and a $17 burger isn't going to show up in anyone's market analysis. But it's exactly the kind of detail that tells you whether a neighborhood's daily life is filling in around it or whether you're still driving twenty minutes for anything that isn't a chain restaurant off I-35.
For Havenwood, the answer this summer is that it's filling in. Whether that trend holds through Menchie's opening and whatever comes after it is worth watching, but the direction is already clear.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood like Havenwood at Hunters Crossing actually offers day to day, not just on paper, that's the kind of ground-level detail The Renfeld Group tracks closely across New Braunfels and the Hill Country. If you'd like a clearer picture of how a specific street or subdivision is actually living right now, reach out and request a custom market plan.
ADDRESS 453 W San Antonio St New Braunfels TX 78130
ADDRESS 453 W San Antonio St New Braunfels TX 78130
