Terry Black’s Picks Germantown for Its First Barbecue Hall Outside Texas — and Targets Early 2027
Texas barbecue does not travel well, as a rule. The whole proposition depends on a pit, a pitmaster, and a supply of post oak, and the further you drag it from central Texas the more it turns into an impression of itself.
Terry Black's is going to try anyway — in Germantown, and at a scale the family has never attempted.
The Austin barbecue name is building its first location outside Texas at 1220 Rosa L. Parks Boulevard, anchoring the corner where it meets Monroe Street. The building runs 18,312 square feet, which is close to double the roughly 10,000-square-foot footprint of its existing rooms. Current planning points to an early 2027 opening — a slide from the earlier talk of 2026, which is roughly par for a ground-up restaurant of this size.
Built for Nashville, not copied from Austin
The most interesting detail in the plans is not the square footage. It is the outdoor stage.
Alongside the dining hall, the project includes an outdoor bar and a beer-garden yard, with a stage built into it. That is a deliberate read of the market. In Austin, a barbecue joint can be a destination on the strength of the brisket alone; the line out front is the entertainment. In Nashville, a large outdoor space without live music on it is a large outdoor space that is not working hard enough.
Barbecue and a stage is not a novel pairing here, but doing it at 18,000 square feet in Germantown is a considerable bet on a specific idea: that people will treat a barbecue hall as a place to spend an evening rather than forty-five minutes.
Why Germantown
Germantown is Nashville's oldest platted neighborhood, laid out in the 1850s and named for the immigrants who settled it and built its butcher shops, breweries, and sausage works. For most of the twentieth century it was industrial and then largely forgotten. Its revival over the past two decades has made it one of the densest concentrations of serious restaurants in the city — a walkable grid of brick streets where a new room can open without needing to invent its own foot traffic.
A meat-centric hall landing in a neighborhood originally built by butchers is a tidy piece of circularity, whether or not anyone planned it that way.
The family behind it
The Black name in Texas barbecue goes back to the 1930s and the town of Lockhart, the small city southeast of Austin that the Texas legislature designated the state's barbecue capital. Lockhart's pits are where the whole central-Texas orthodoxy was codified: salt-and-pepper rub, hardwood smoke, brisket sold by the pound on butcher paper, sauce treated as optional at best.
Terry Black's is the Austin-based branch of that lineage, and it has built its reputation on beef ribs and brisket rather than on menu expansion. Whether that discipline survives a move to a state with its own strong opinions about pork and its own hot-chicken hierarchy is the genuinely open question — and the reason this opening will get watched closely.
Early 2027 is a long way off. In the meantime, our Nashville restaurant coverage tracks what's opening now, and the honky tonk guide handles the other half of a Nashville evening.
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