This story has been updated.
Make Ready is nearing completion and the owners of San Antonio’s newest food hall expect a menu of mariscos, beer, burgers, juice and more will drive people to what was once a sleepy gap between downtown and the Pearl.
The Make Ready Market, at 203 8th St. between Broadway Street and the bike lanes on Avenue B, will open this fall with at least eight food and beverage vendors operating in the repurposed former Cavender auto dealership building.
The $2.75 million remodel by Hixon Properties created an open and airy shell with shiny concrete floors, garage doors replaced with new windows and a row of restored rustic columns.
Two more spaces in the food hall are yet to be filled, but the building is complete and work is underway to finish out each of the kitchen and serving areas.
“It’s an awesome location — look at this building, it’s beautiful,” said Orlando Aguirre, owner of Chilaquil in the Pearl’s Bottling Dept. food hall, who plans to open a Mexican seafood concept, Pescado Bravo, in Make Ready.
“I feel that it’s the next hot spot here in San Antonio.”
Before the end of the year, the Los Angeles-based Pouring With Heart is set to open Idle Beer Hall and Brewery at 414 Brooklyn facing the same shared courtyard.
The “poor man’s Alamo” building, as the developer calls the old warehouse, is getting a $3 million interior makeover and will have full inside and outside bars open daily.
Other vendors planned for Make Ready include Sofia’s Pizzeria, Four Brothers, Venezuelan Kitchen and Thai Bird. Tiny Pies and Buje Juice Co. — two newcomers from Austin — are also on the menu, as well as a burger concept from San Antonio’s Order Up called Eet-up.
Already, cyclists and office workers are lining up there for Mila Coffee, a food truck with its first brick-and-mortar outlet, using a spacious courtyard to relax or work in the shadow of the mass-timber Soto building.
Mila owner Marco Cardel, as the neighborhood newcomer, said he’s been partnering with four-decade-old mainstay Pete’s Tako House across the street.
Meanwhile, workers with Byrne Construction are busy all across the property, and electric vehicle maker Tesla is working to install 16 Supercharger stations across the street from the Soto at 718 Broadway.
Hixon Properties, which developed and manages the mid-rise Soto, owns with Cavender the former dealership and its garages and parking lots, and also several other parcels forming an 11-contiguous-acre section of lower Broadway.
“We feel like this is San Antonio’s best opportunity for an urban neighborhood,” said Hunter Kingman, vice president of acquisitions and development at Hixon.
The property is a 10-minute walk to the central business district and the same distance to the Pearl. Make Ready is two blocks from the Maverick Dog Park, and several apartment buildings like the Flats at River North have opened their doors in recent years.
Hixon also plans to build a multifamily development in the block adjacent to Make Ready now used for parking, and is demolishing a structure behind the reopened Augie’s barbecue restaurant at 909 Broadway to establish a new parking lot.
“We just feel like this is the missing piece to connect all the improvements on Broadway,” he said. “If you go up to the Soto and look down from the top, you realize River North is not that big. It’s just you had these holes like this for so long that it makes it feel more distant.”
With the block activated, as it will be when Make Ready is fully open this fall, “you don’t think twice about walking through,” he said.
The Soto was completed in 2019, just before the COVID pandemic, but by the end of 2020 had only four office tenants. Today, there are 13 tenants and 95% of the Soto is occupied with a street-level restaurant space available for lease, Kingman said.
“I think COVID ironically helped,” he said. “What employers have looked for and the feedback we’ve gotten is we need less space. But we’ve got to have space that’s compelling. You’ve got to get people out of their home office, you’ve got to offer something better than that.”
Hixon’s response to that was not a larger fitness center and fancy breakrooms, but a building with attractive outdoor spaces and food and beverage amenities.
The 14,000-square-foot make-ready building, where the dealership once spit-shined its new cars for buyers, was an opportunity to create another draw to an emerging area of town.
“It would have been a lot easier to do this as a finish-out for one office tenant, but it wouldn’t have contributed to the overall neighborhood,” and attract fresh faces on a daily basis, Kingman said.
Longtime chef, hospitality manager and San Antonio native Zach Garza is the general manager of the food hall and owner/operator of a Make Ready beverage stall, Garaje Cantina.
The food hall is giving Garza the chance to realize his dream of starting a business without extreme upfront costs, he said.
“Models like these and partners like Hixon provide an opportunity to start-up entrepreneurs that would not otherwise exist,” he said.
“I’m spending a fraction of the capital commitment that I would need for a free-standing [restaurant] in a strip center,” Garza added, which can cost up to $1 million these days. “It’s crazy.”
While Garza plans to serve beer and wine at Garaje, he doesn’t view the brewery or the several other vendors also offering such beverages as competition.
“To me, it’s all more of a draw,” he said. “Having everybody in proximity here creates a magnet, an attractive magnet for everybody to come in.”
Before joining Pouring With Heart as general manager of Idle Beer Hall and Brewery, Jessica Parr worked for another brewery in the evolving neighborhood where several bars, distilleries and breweries have sprung up in recent years.
Idle will serve its own beers brewed in-house, some locally brewed beers, plus wine and cocktails, she said, with food available for pickup from Make Ready.
Parr also doesn’t view the growing number of restaurants and bars as competition.
“I think when there’s a lot of like-minded people with like-minded businesses in an area, it’s more of an opportunity to help each other grow and kind of grow the neighborhood as a whole,” she said.
Hixon Properties is a financial supporter of the San Antonio Report. For a full list of business members, click here.
This story has been updated to correct the name of Buje Juice Co.
