7 H-E-B Locations Texans Drive Across Town For

A man in Austin drives past the H-E-B two blocks from his house, gets on MoPac, and keeps going for twenty minutes.

Ask him why and he’ll start talking about a cheese counter, and he won’t stop for a while.

These are the H-E-B locations Texans drive across town for.

1. Central Market North Lamar

The H-E-B that started it all sits on North Lamar in Austin, and it opened in January 1994 with roughly 400 kinds of cheese inside.

Texas had never seen anything like it.

Central Market is H-E-B’s upscale banner, and the North Lamar store still runs the winding one-way path that forces you past the produce, whether you wanted produce or not.

Austin shoppers gripe about that layout constantly, and they keep going anyway.

The cooking school, the live music on the patio, and a wine wall that reads like a library are the reasons a 20-minute drive turns into a two-hour Saturday.

2. H-E-B Mueller

The H-E-B on East 51st Street in Austin is the store architects fly in to look at, which is a strange thing to say about a grocery store.

Built on the old Robert Mueller airport land, the store carries 600 solar panels on its roof that generate about 200,000 kilowatt-hours a year.

That’s enough to light the whole store.

Rooftop monitors pull daylight down into the aisles, so the place doesn’t have the buzzing fluorescent ceiling you brace for in a supermarket.

The demo kitchen, the wide daylit aisles, and the shaded patio are why Austin families treat a grocery run at Mueller like an outing, and why people from Round Rock drive down for it.

3. Montrose Market

Houston’s H-E-B on West Alabama sits a few blocks from the Menil Collection, and the store was built to fit that neighborhood rather than fight it.

The chain kept the live oaks.

At 75,000 square feet, Montrose Market earned Silver certification under Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), the highest rating any H-E-B grocery store held at the time, and it did it with daylight, water conservation, and shade.

Houstonians will tell you the parking is a nightmare and then park there anyway.

The prepared foods counter is the draw, and on a decent day half of Montrose eats lunch under those oaks in the parking lot island.

4. Central Market Broadway

San Antonio's Central Market on Broadway opened in 1997 inside a converted H-E-B, which tells you how much faith the company had in the idea by then.

It worked immediately.

The Broadway store pulls shoppers from Alamo Heights, from Stone Oak, and from small towns an hour out on 281 who make a day of it.

The hatch chile roasters out front in August pull a crowd off Broadway, and the cooking school books out weeks ahead.

H-E-B has announced a major renovation here, so the store your parents shopped is about to change.

5. Hancock Center

Austin spent two years watching the H-E-B at Hancock Center get torn apart, and then it reopened on February 20 and everybody forgave everything.

The store runs 125,000 square feet now, including a 31,000-square-foot addition bolted onto a building that went up in the 1960s.

There's a True Texas BBQ barbecue joint inside.

With indoor seating, which means you can buy brisket, a case of Topo Chico, and a birthday card without moving your car.

The sushi counter and the enormous prepared-foods run are what turned a neighborhood store into a place people cross the river for.

6. Alliance

North Fort Worth got the store that proved H-E-B was serious about Dallas-Fort Worth, and it opened on Heritage Trace Parkway in April 2024.

Two decades of waiting.

H-E-B ran Central Market stores up in the Metroplex since 2001, but the regular grocery banner stayed away from Dallas for two decades, which North Texans took personally.

Now the Alliance store pulls shoppers from Keller, Roanoke, and Denton, and the Saturday parking lot fills all the way to the back row.

The company has since added stores in Frisco, Plano, McKinney, Allen, and Mansfield, and none of them cooled the Alliance crowd off one bit.

7. Murphy

Collin County has been waiting on this H-E-B the way kids wait on Christmas, and the doors open at 6 a.m. on July 22.

The store sits at Farm-to-Market Road 544 and McCreary Road, runs about 122,000 square feet, and comes with a barbecue restaurant that has its own drive-thru window.

A drive-thru. For brisket.

Add the pharmacy, the sushi bar, the bakery, and around 600 employees, and Murphy is about to become a destination for people who don't live in Murphy.

Wylie and Sachse drivers already know which back roads they're taking.

H-E-B by the Numbers

H-E-B turned 120 years old last year, and Texans still talk about it like a neighborhood store that got lucky.

It isn't small.

The San Antonio company runs over 455 stores across Texas and Mexico and books more than $50 billion in sales, which makes it the largest privately held employer in the state.

The national scorekeepers agree with Texans, too.

In dunnhumby's latest ranking of American grocers, H-E-B took first place for the fifth time in nine years, finishing ahead of Costco, Aldi, and Trader Joe's.

The Barbecue Counter Nobody Saw Coming

H-E-B put a barbecue joint inside the grocery store, and Texas was ready to laugh at it.

Nobody's laughing.

True Texas BBQ smokes its meat on site every day, makes the sides from scratch, and pours local beer, and Texas Monthly named it the best barbecue chain in the state.

In Texas, that sentence starts fights.

The counters run from Magnolia out to Midland, and a True Texas BBQ inside a store is now the single fastest way to turn a regular H-E-B into one people drive to.

The Chains Chasing It

Nobody in Texas grocery is standing still while H-E-B collects the trophies.

Aldi is the loudest threat, and the German discounter says it's opening more than 180 new stores across 31 states this year, Texas included.

H-E-B saw that coming.

Its own bargain banner, Joe V's Smart Shop, spent years proving itself in Houston and has now planted stores in Dallas, which is the same fight in a different jersey.

Walmart still moves the most groceries in Texas, Kroger owns big pieces of Houston and Dallas, and Costco runs the bulk business, so the crown H-E-B wears is about loyalty rather than volume.