The P. Terry’s hamburger restaurant at Capital Plaza was built to be seen from I-35.
Now, the highway’s expansion is forcing it out.
The glass-walled burger stand opened Aug. 24, 2016, with a sharp white roof that juts past the dining room like a plane lifting off. The support structure is painted with the same red used in Ferraris.
The retro-futurist building, designed by Austin-based Michael Hsu Office of Architecture, is meant to catch the attention of drivers along one of the busiest stretches of road in Texas. More than 200,000 vehicles pass that part of I-35 each day, according to Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) traffic counts.
Patrick Terry founded P. Terry’s Burger Stand with his wife Kathy. He calls the location the company’s flagship, even though it was their 11th location.
“The brilliance of the design of the store is based on the fact that the property was triangular in shape,” Terry told KUT News. “It just became a billboard for us for the last 10 years. And in our minds, it’s iconic for the brand.”
The Capital Plaza restaurant will close June 28 because of the state’s expansion of I-35 through Central Austin. TxDOT records have shown at least since 2023 that the building was among more than 100 homes and businesses in the path of the project, including apartment buildings, a daycare, the Austin Chronicle office, a cafe open for a year and a crystal shop.
HDR Engineering Inc.
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TxDOT
A TxDOT schematic showing the triangular tract of land where P. Terry’s Burger Stand was built next to I-35 near U.S. 290 East. The light blue line around the property depicts the highway’s new property line.
The P. Terry’s is at the northern end of TxDOT’s Capital Express Central Project. That eight-mile rebuild of I-35 between U.S. 290 East and Ben White Boulevard is adding two non-tolled, high-occupancy vehicle lanes in each direction, rebuilding east-west bridges, tearing down the upper decks and lowering the highway from Holly Street to Airport Boulevard.
Making the highway wider requires demolishing many homes and businesses along the frontage roads. Most buildings slated for demolition have already been torn down. The P. Terry’s at 5701 North I-35 is perhaps the most visually recognizable of those buildings still standing.
Nathan Bernier
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KUT News
P. Terry’s is in the Capital Plaza shopping center, near the northern end of TxDOT’s I-35 Capital Express Central expansion project. The highway is being widened all through Travis County, but the project is split into three major components.
P. Terry’s doesn’t own the land. Travis County tax records list the property owner as Thurman Russell T Descendants Trust. TxDOT negotiates with the property owner in eminent domain cases. P. Terry’s is negotiating with its landlord over what the company will receive for losing the location.
Terry said whatever money the company receives won’t replace what it’s losing.
“There is no number that they’re going to offer or we’re going to get that will come close to compensating current construction costs, as well as what the restaurant’s been doing [in profits],” Terry said. “You’re not even going to get compensated for what it would cost to build another one.”
The building cost more than $2 million to build, Terry said, and would cost about $3 million today. He said they had at least 10 years left on the lease.
The burger chain opened its first location in July 2005 at the corner of South Lamar Boulevard and Barton Springs Road. Since then, it’s grown to 38 locations, with about half of them in Central Texas including in Austin, Georgetown, Pflugerville, Kyle, San Marcos and New Braunfels.
P. Terry’s is currently focused on growing in the Houston area, where it has four locations and a fifth due to open by the end of the year. But Terry said they’re always looking for spots in Central Texas and are currently scouting around Liberty Hill.
But finding another piece of property to replace the Capital Plaza location has been hard.
“We’ve been looking,” Terry said. “We’ve obviously known this was going to happen for at least a year.”
Terry said he’s not opposed to the highway’s expansion, but that doesn’t making losing the restaurant easy.
“We’ve had a ton of lucky breaks in the last 20 years, and this isn’t one of them,” he said. “That’s life. But it doesn’t mean I can’t be sad about it, right?”