Drive past 12 Herff Road on any given Saturday and you will see the same thing you saw six months ago: an old farmhouse mid-renovation, scaffolding still up in places, and no sign telling you when the doors actually open. Ask around at Hamby's or the bar at The Dodging Duck Brewhaus and someone will have a theory. Ask three people and you'll get three different answers, because for over a year now, that has genuinely been true. The people building this thing have told the public three different completion windows, and all three came from credible sources.
That is not a story about a project running late. It's a story about what kind of project this actually is, and why the wait matters more than the wait itself suggests.
Three Timelines, One Farmhouse
The confusion isn't a rumor problem. It's a paper trail. Within the same month in the summer of 2025, three separate reports on the same project gave three different completion windows, all sourced to the people actually building it.
| Timeline claim | Source | When it was reported |
|---|---|---|
| "2026, most likely summer" | Woodmont Company's own president of brokerage services | Early July 2025 |
| Completion in summer 2025 | The developer and state licensing (TDLR) records | Days later, same month |
| A Q4 opening | Chef Jacob Williamson, describing his own menu planning | Later that same July |
| "Opening summer 2026" | Local business tracker, citing the developer | Twice more that same month |
Four data points, three different specific windows, all inside a single month. That's not a rumor mill distorting one clean answer. It's a project that kept revising itself as the actual work of converting an old farmhouse into a restaurant ran into the reality of old farmhouses. If you've ever renovated a house built before permits looked the way they do now, you already know how this goes.
A Farmhouse Renovation Runs on a Different Clock Than a Pad Site
Compare this to what's happening four minutes north on I-10. Boerne Town Center, at Christus Parkway, is filling in with national chains on cleared lots: Freddy's Frozen Custard & Steakburgers, McAlister's Deli, Chipotle, Panda Express, Nothing Bundt Cakes, Bad Ass Coffee, Playa Bowls. Matador Men's Grooming has a location planned there for 2026 as well. Chicken Salad Chick got there first. It opened at 34702 Interstate 10 West in May 2026, with a grand opening on June 3 built around a promotion giving free chicken salad for a year to the first 100 guests in line.
That's how fast a ground-up build on flat, cleared land can move, permit to plate in about a year. The farmhouse at 12 Herff Road is a different kind of project entirely. You're not pouring a new foundation and dropping in a prefab shell. You're opening up walls that have been closed for decades, discovering what's actually holding the roof up, and figuring out how to run a commercial kitchen through a structure that was never built for one. Every one of those discoveries can add weeks. None of them show up in a press release until the completion date quietly moves again.
The developer, the Woodmont Company, held its groundbreaking ceremony at 12 Herff Road in June 2025 and has been straightforward that the project also includes a Kiddie Academy and additional retail space on the same parcel, which is its own coordination problem layered on top of the farmhouse work. A project with more moving pieces and an older building is going to slip its own dates. That's not evasiveness. That's what adaptive reuse actually looks like from the outside.
Why Herff Road, and Not the Highway
Here's the detail that explains the whole decision. This restaurant group didn't need Herff Road. A Vegas-and-Dallas operation building its first Hill Country location could have taken cleared frontage on I-10 like everyone else did. Instead, 12 Herff Steakhouse is landing a few minutes from Boerne City Park, on a stretch of road that already has Hamby's, the Mexican restaurant Las Guitarras, and the microbrewery The Dodging Duck Brewhaus as neighbors. That's not empty highway frontage waiting for its first tenant. That's an established, walkable food strip that the developer chose to build into rather than build past.
The rest of Herff Road is filling in around that same logic. Farther down near Gallant Fox, a Starbucks with a pending drive-thru permit is part of the SoBo District, sitting next to a planned Boerne ER facility. A separate strip called Boerne Center is going up at Herff and Oak Park, leased through Origo Works, next to a new Texas Regional Bank branch. None of that is glamorous. It's infrastructure catching up to a road that's turning from a bypass into a destination people actually stop on, and the steakhouse project is the anchor tenant that made the rest of it worth building.
What's Actually Coming to the Table
The menu direction is the part locals haven't had much detail on, and it's worth knowing before you form an opinion about whether the wait is worth it. Culinary Director Jacob Williamson started his career under Jean-Georges Vongerichten before working for Wolfgang Puck, and he's told local press the steakhouse menu will change monthly with the seasons. Expect dishes built around:
- Handmade pasta
- Locally sourced Texas Wagyu
- Texas redfish
- Diver scallops
- A shareable list that includes wild mushroom arancini with truffle sauce
Meet Me Outside, the casual companion concept, previewed a different register at the June 2025 groundbreaking, with a menu that included smoked trout dip, beef Bourguignon tacos, and Buffalo chicken quinoa. The parent company, Hooper Hospitality Concepts, was founded by Andy Hooper after he worked for celebrity chef Mario Batali, going on to open Locale Italian Kitchen and El Luchador off the Las Vegas strip before debuting The Saint, a Dallas Italian steakhouse with a bit of casino theatrics, in 2023. Hooper carries a James Beard Award nomination from his Las Vegas work. Woodmont's own property brochure references Good Neighbor Coffee, another Hooper concept, as a possible third tenant on the same site, which would round the project out into a full food-and-coffee stretch rather than a single restaurant.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
None of this means the summer 2026 window is guaranteed either. Given the pattern, treat any completion date on this project the way you'd treat a contractor's estimate after the job has already surprised him twice: as the best current information, not a promise. As of late August, the farmhouse is still a farmhouse under construction, not a restaurant taking reservations, which tracks with a timeline that has already moved more than once. What the pattern does tell you is that this isn't a project quietly stalling. It's a project that keeps discovering how much work an old farmhouse actually needs, run by a group with real culinary pedigree that chose a slower, harder build specifically because the location already had character worth building into.
If you want dinner in Boerne tonight, Hamby's, Las Guitarras, and The Dodging Duck Brewhaus are all still right there on Herff Road, doing what they've always done. If you want a quick bite while you wait, Chicken Salad Chick is open now on I-10. And if you've been wondering why that farmhouse still doesn't have a sign out front, now you know: it's not neglect, it's the difference between building new and building right.
We pay attention to these details at Harkin Realty because knowing what's changing on Herff Road, on Main Street, and everywhere in between is part of actually knowing this town, not just selling houses in it. If you're curious what else is shifting around Boerne this year, or you just want a second opinion on your own corner of it, we're glad to talk any time.
