Last October, Manor got the grocery store it had been asking for since before half the town's newest subdivisions existed. The H-E-B on US-290 opened at more than 101,000 square feet, with a 14-pump fuel station and a payroll north of 300 people. It was the kind of opening that gets a ribbon and a news crew, the payoff for years of resident petitions finally landing on a corner everyone already drove past.
Then, in April 2026, a permit filing surfaced for a second grocery project at the Lapoynor Commons Center, and the town did what small towns do with a mystery: it started guessing. Coverage picked it up fast, framed as a follow-up act to H-E-B's debut. But read past the headline and the numbers tell a different story than "grocery war." The new building is roughly 6,600 square feet. That's not a rival supermarket circling the same real estate as H-E-B. That's about the footprint of one wide aisle at the store Manor just spent thirty years waiting for.
The Square Footage That Tells The Real Story
Here's the filing as it actually reads. On April 9, 2026, a project simply labeled "grocery store" was submitted to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation for 11724 Lapoynor St. The plan is a two-story building costing roughly $500,000, with a grocery store and retail space on the ground floor and offices plus a mezzanine above. Construction was expected to start around June 2026 and wrap by mid-December, which means the building should be framing up right now.
Set the two projects side by side and the contrast does more explaining than any press release would:
| Project | Size | Status | Corridor |
|---|---|---|---|
| H-E-B | 101,000+ sq ft | Opened October 2025 | US-290 |
| Lapoynor Commons grocery | ~6,600 sq ft | Filed April 2026, construction June–December 2026 | Lapoynor St |
| La Mexicana Supermercado | Smaller-format market | Opened early 2026 | FM 973 |
A grocery store one-fifteenth the size of H-E-B isn't built to compete with H-E-B. It's built to do something H-E-B was never going to do, which is serve a narrower, more specific slice of what Manor eats.
The Name Already On The Lease
The detail that made this filing interesting wasn't the square footage. It was the name attached to it. Listed as a tenant on the same paperwork is Islah Uddin, a Manor teenager who, along with his younger brother Omar, has spent the last three years running Mirchi Boyz, a food truck serving Indian and Pakistani dishes from a lot on West Parson Street.
The brothers started the truck in 2023, when Islah was 14 and Omar was 12, working weekends instead of spending summer at the pool.
"I thought it over for a while, and I'm like, 'yeah, it's a good idea.'"
That's Islah, talking to a local TV crew back when the truck was new. The menu has since built a following around a mugaz burger, a nihari burger, and desi-style wings, all served halal, all from a truck that seats you outdoors on plastic chairs. Whether the Lapoynor filing means Mirchi Boyz is about to get walls and a roof, or whether Uddin's name is attached to something entirely new, hasn't been confirmed. But the fact that a food-truck owner, not a grocery chain's real estate department, shows up on the paperwork for a "grocery store" project tells you the building is being planned by someone who already knows this town's plate, not someone studying rooftop counts on a spreadsheet.
A Precedent Already Sitting On FM 973
If that reads like a stretch, there's already a version of it operating a few miles away. La Mexicana Supermercado opened on FM 973 earlier this year, a smaller-format market carrying Mexican grocery staples, a butcher counter, and a seating area, the kind of store built around a specific community's weekly list rather than a general one. It didn't arrive with a press conference. It arrived because there was demand for it that a big-box aisle wasn't going to satisfy.
That's the pattern the Lapoynor filing fits, once you stop reading it as round two of the H-E-B story. Manor's mayor, Dr. Christopher Harvey, has said as much about how the city wants its growth to look, describing a community that wants new restaurants and retail but also wants to hold onto its mom-and-pop character. A 6,600-square-foot building with a food-truck owner's name on the lease is what that balance looks like on paper before it looks like anything else.
The Corridor That's Filling In Anyway
None of this has slowed down while the mystery grocery store sorts itself out. Chick-fil-A opened on US-290 in April 2025, adding roughly 120 jobs and a playground built for the families now filling out Manor's newer subdivisions. A year later, in April 2026, HTeaO opened a few blocks down the same highway, betting on the exact commuter traffic that road carries between Austin and its eastern suburbs every day.
Both of those openings landed on the corridor everyone already expected to fill in, the stretch of 290 where a national chain can count cars and know the math works. The Lapoynor project didn't. It's tucked off the highway, on a street named for the same commons center, in a building sized for something closer to a neighborhood grocer than a destination stop. Two different kinds of growth are happening in Manor at the same time. One is chasing traffic counts. The other is chasing what the people already living here are actually cooking for dinner.
What Actually Happens Between Now And December
If the TDLR timeline is holding, ground broke back in June and the building should be closed in and finished by mid-December, putting a possible opening somewhere in early 2027. That's a longer runway than H-E-B's build, which makes sense given the difference in scale, but it also means the mystery has a few more months to run before anyone confirms what's actually going into that ground floor.
In the meantime, the more interesting question isn't who the grocer is. It's what kind of grocer a 6,600-square-foot building with Islah Uddin's name on it is built to be. If Mirchi Boyz is heading toward a storefront, it would be following the same path La Mexicana Supermercado already walked: start with a following built one order at a time, then build the walls around it once the following is proven.
Either way, watching what actually opens at Lapoynor Commons by the end of the year will tell Manor residents something about their own town that a ribbon-cutting for a 101,000-square-foot supermarket never could.
Manor's growth has never been a single story, and this is one more chapter in a town that's been writing several at once. If you're curious about what else is changing in the neighborhoods around Austin's eastern edge, the team at Four22 Realty Group keeps a close eye on the corridor, one filing, one food truck, one grand opening at a time. Start Your Move Today, or just say hello. We're happy to talk Manor even when there's no move on the table yet.
