Drive along Lohmans Spur on a Wednesday evening and you'll find a parking lot that fills with folding tables, string lights, and the smell of dumplings and fresh-baked bread. Drive a few minutes farther down the same corridor and you'll find rebar, orange construction fencing, and a bridge deck that took four years to reach its current, half-finished state. Both are part of the same story. Only one of them is done.
Lakeway has spent most of this decade waiting for City Center, the mixed-use development at Lohmans Crossing and Lohmans Spur that keeps promising a walkable downtown and keeps missing its own deadlines. That wait has become such a fixture of local conversation that it's easy to assume nothing else is changing in the meantime. It is. The restaurants, the bakery, the weekly market, the community events. None of it needed City Center to finish first.
A Bridge Four Years in the Making
City Center broke ground in 2022 as three linked projects covering more than 80 acres: The Square at Lakeway (formerly The Square at Lohmans), the Oaks at Lakeway Phase II, and the Tuscan Village PUD near the Lohmans Spur and Lohmans Crossing intersection. The plan called for retail, residences, a new Main Street connecting the pieces, and public amenities including a splash pad and amphitheater.
The timeline has moved almost every year since. A completion date originally targeted for June 2025 slipped to June 30, 2026, after a council amendment passed July 21, 2025. Then, at the January 20, 2026 council meeting, the developer's team requested a fourth PUD amendment, and the Main Street deadline moved again, this time to January 31, 2027. The same meeting also decreased the project's planned office footprint by 10,000 square feet, added 72,000 square feet of retail, and cut the number of construction phases from eight down to two.
The one piece of visible progress arrived on the eastern end, where the Oaks at Lakeway Phase II is building its own section of Main Street closest to the H-E-B. Bridge girders went in on June 1, 2026, with concrete added later that month. It's real movement after years of a mostly cleared lot. The western half, tied to The Square at Lakeway, is still catching up.
Money has been part of the holdup. At a January 14, 2026 workshop, the developer proposed a 35-year Chapter 380 tax rebate agreement worth close to $47 million, starting at a 95 percent rebate and tapering to 60 percent. City projections showed roughly $10.6 million in costs against $25.4 million in projected revenue over the life of the deal. Council never reached consensus, and the applicant withdrew the item from the following meeting's agenda. In a July 2026 community update, Mayor Tom Kilgore was direct about it: funding remains the biggest hurdle, and residents can expect more news over the summer rather than a finished street.
The Food Scene That Filled In While the Concrete Cured
While City Center's Main Street sat in a holding pattern, Lakeway's food scene did something the construction schedule couldn't: it kept moving, and it did it almost entirely outside the project boundary.
Cupprimo, a cupcake bakery locally owned by Amy Closson, opened its second Lakeway location on January 31, 2026, serving quiche, coffee, and a rotating lineup that includes red velvet, blue velvet, and double chocolate alongside the shop's daily standard, primo vanilla. Oria, a Mediterranean restaurant built around charcoal and wood-fired cooking, opened February 27. At Rough Hollow, Canyon Grille closed briefly on April 6 and came back April 14 under new owner Haythem Dawlett as a farm-to-table concept, with a rotating seasonal menu sourced from regional farmers and fresh Gulf Coast seafood arriving multiple times a week.
Some of the anchors were already there and just kept going. SP Brazilian Steakhouse, family-owned by Ileana Salazar for nearly a decade, still runs its self-serve salad bar with more than 34 options and sends trained servers table to table with 14 cuts of meat, including picanha, lamb chops, and filet mignon. Café Lago, a longtime local breakfast and lunch spot, has been part of the Lakeway routine for years, still serving breakfast every day of the week.
None of these sit inside City Center's footprint. They're spread across Rough Hollow and the rest of Lakeway's existing commercial nodes, spots that didn't need a new bridge or a rewritten PUD to add a kitchen and start serving.
Wednesdays at Lohmans Crossing Already Feel Like Downtown
The clearest evidence that Lakeway's public gathering life didn't wait for a master plan happens every Wednesday at the Lohmans Crossing Shopping Center on Lohmans Spur Road, the same street that gives City Center its address. Rooted Markets runs the Lakeway Nights Farmers Market there from roughly 3 to 7 p.m. in the warmer months, shifting later into fall and winter. Vendors rotate but tend to include Dumplings Queen, Dough Re Me Bakery, BAustin Bagels, and Southern Steer Butcher for food, alongside makers like Kay Elise Jewelry, BF Woodcraft, and Jack's 3D Knicknacks. The market runs a monthly raffle and hosts a Shine & Show car meetup on the last Wednesday of each month.
It's the kind of recurring, walkable, mixed-vendor event that City Center's Main Street was designed to eventually host on a permanent basis. It's already happening, a few hundred yards up the road, on folding tables in a shopping center parking lot.
The city's calendar backs up the pattern elsewhere too. A free family concert and street dance at the Hurst Creek Sculpture Garden, next to the Lakeway Justice Complex, drew residents out this summer for a performance by Buffaloe and the Heard. Registration is already open for a cornhole tournament at the Lakeway Swim Center on September 26. None of it required a finished Main Street to happen.
What Changes When City Center Actually Opens, and What Doesn't
City Center will eventually add something Lakeway doesn't have yet: a single connected retail and residential core with a splash pad, an amphitheater, and a Main Street built for walking between all of it at once. When the Oaks at Lakeway Phase II section finishes and The Square at Lakeway catches up on its now-2027 timeline, that will be a genuine addition to daily life here, not a replacement for what already exists.
But the mistake would be treating the construction fence as a pause button on the rest of Lakeway. The restaurants opened anyway. The market kept its Wednesday slot. The concerts and tournaments went on the calendar without waiting for a ribbon-cutting. The city's own updates keep circling back to funding and phasing, and that's worth watching if you care about how City Center turns out. It's just not the same question as whether there's somewhere good to eat this week, or something to do this weekend. That question already has answers, and most of them aren't on the construction map at all.
If you're already living in Lakeway and keeping an eye on how the neighborhood is changing, or you know someone weighing a move here and wants a read on what's actually happening on the ground rather than what a brochure promises, Kinan Beck and the One Source Team track this kind of detail block by block. Schedule Your Austin Consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
