Digital subscribers can listen to this article.
Subscribe today for unlimited access to Texas Monthly. Already a subscriber? Log in.
On the eastern edge of the Hill Country, Temple sits along the Balcones Escarpment. The fault line, which slices through Central Texas, creates a transition zone, where the coastal sediments and rich soil of the American South give way to the limestone of the American West. In that sense, the Bell County town embodies the state’s combination of Southern and Western (though not quite Southwestern). No Texan’s life is complete without spending time here.
I wasn’t yet a Texan when I visited Temple for the first time, eighteen years ago, to meet my future wife’s parents. We had dinner at El Puerto de Jalisco, a Tex-Mex joint that’s still open, before decamping to “the farm,” as my in-laws called their property. The nineteen idyllic acres didn’t have crops or livestock, just olive trees and a pond often visited by a duck they called Waldo. My wife’s dad was a pulmonologist at what’s now known as Baylor Scott & White Medical Center, the pioneering hospital that helped make Temple more than a railroad town. Her mom, a onetime city council member, ran an antiques shop downtown. And I was a Nebraska-born, Manhattan-dwelling city slicker with long hair, a beard, and an overwhelming fear of dogs.
The Bell County Courthouse, in Belton.Photograph by Arturo Olmos
Over the years I returned to Temple often. My wife and I got married there in 2010 and moved to Austin, from New York, in 2016. Our two children loved the farm, where they would laze on a tire swing or steer the John Deere Gator around. In town, they enjoyed visiting the charming Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum and their Mimi’s shop. I eventually trimmed my beard and cut my hair short, styling it in a respectable side-part look. We even adopted a dog—a silly retriever mix who loved running free on the property. My wife and I established a date-night routine in town: We’d start with an ice-cold martini at the old-school Cheeves Brothers Steakhouse and follow it with pasta and a bottle of red at Pignetti’s.
Then things changed. In 2021 we held my father-in-law’s celebration of life at the farm. Four years later, upkeep proved to be too much for my mother-in-law. She sold the land and closed her shop, and my wife and her sisters rushed to sort through a lifetime’s worth of stuff, making difficult decisions about what to save (old photos, incredible Japanese audio equipment) and what to let go of (too much to mention here).
My family and I returned to the area for a weekend vacation in June to experience Temple with fresh eyes. With an estimated population now topping 98,000, the city—along with its Bell County neighbors of Belton and Salado—is going through something of a resurgence, with ample affordable real estate and an underdeveloped downtown full of promise.
Hawn Tower, a nine-story apartment building in downtown Temple, has had a few past lives and names. It opened as the 105-room Doering Hotel in 1928 and included a smaller annex where the Arcadia Theatre still stands. The landmark passed through a number of owners, among them Corpus Christi oilman R. H. Hawn, for whom it was renamed. The Hawn Hotel fell out of use in the late seventies and was empty until fall 2021, when Turner Brothers Development partnered with the city to develop Hawn Plaza, which includes the Tower housing complex and commercial spaces.
These days Hawn Tower is full, seemingly populated by the types of hip residents you’d find in an ad for the property. When I visited, a young man sporting a white T-shirt, jeans, and a wispy David Wooderson–like mustache held the door for me. I was there to see Kiara Marshall, a model who recently moved to Temple with her family and opened Studio Nine, a natural-light-photography studio and event space on the building’s airy top floor. It’s an ideal location: The near-360-degree view brings in our state’s abundant sunshine at flattering angles throughout the day and offers enchanting
perspectives of the moon and stars at night.
Marshall, who grew up in Georgetown, lost her right leg in a car accident in 2003, when she was ten years old; she was brought to Scott & White on a Life Flight helicopter. She never set out to return to Temple, let alone move here. “But we were very surprised with how family friendly it has been. It’s really cute,” she says. After many years of modeling in New York, she’s engaged, and the couple has a three-year-old daughter who adorably clicked away with a toy camera during my visit. Marshall, a member of the Temple Chamber of Commerce, loves to explore the city’s offerings, including pork belly bao buns from the Taiwanese-Chinese spot Cha Community (she calls it “the best food I’ve eaten in Temple”). Dance lessons at Bo’s Barn Dance Hall are next on her list.
Temple newcomer Kiara Marshall, owner of Studio Nine. Photograph by Arturo Olmos 
Pickleballers between sets at Commonwealth, in Temple. Photograph by Arturo Olmos
My tour of the city introduced me to a place that’s a far cry from the one I first visited. I popped into Bon Bon Market downtown, which sells fresh flowers, pottery, and apparel alongside rare beers, sake, and potato chips, all from Japan. There’s Bird Creek Brewing, a burger spot that was named a 2026 Brewery of the Year at the Texas Craft Brewers Cup. Treno Pizzeria and Taproom has pour-your-own beers and a playground, while Bold Republic Brewing hosts live bands and even the occasional magician. On the day we went, Georgetown’s Bahler Street was slinging excellent Neapolitan pizza from a food truck.
When I stopped by Neighbors on 7th, the dive bar was hosting a motorcycle club while a well-bearded singer-guitarist performed. “Got a request for some Ella Langley,” he said between songs in a voice that resembled John Mellencamp’s by way of the Hill Country. “That ain’t gonna f—in’ happen,” he added, before launching into “Hippies and Cowboys” by the outlaw-country star Cody Jinks.
One night I settled into dinner at the Commonwealth, which opened on Temple’s west side in 2024. The venue feels modern in every respect, from the full-service restaurant down to the three pickleball courts. The crowd ranged from a going-away happy hour to me and my nine-year-old son watching soccer at the bar. Commonwealth is the work of best friends (and brothers-in-law) Jerrod Wittman and Josh Pearson and their wives, sisters Kristi Wittman and Kerri Pearson; they all grew up in the area and are raising their kids here. “Temple has always felt like the kind of place where you can build something that actually becomes part of the community,” Jerrod Wittman says. “We kept coming back to the idea that Temple deserved a place that felt bigger than just another restaurant. And, if we’re being honest, just wanted a really good cocktail on date nights with our wives that we didn’t have to drive to Austin for.”
It takes about fifteen minutes by car to get from Temple to Belton, traffic willing, and it’s a trip you should make. At the Bell County Museum you can see a sculpture depicting the Chisholm Trail in bas-relief, the roughly 5,000-year-old Temple Tusk (believed to have come from a Columbian mammoth), and a fluted point made of tusk alongside stone tools from the Clovis era. Don’t miss the permanent exhibition on the Sanctified Sisters, an all-female utopian community that pioneered women’s independence in Texas in mid-nineteenth-century Belton and whose strict rules about celibacy earned them the curiosity of their peers and the ire of their husbands.
It’s in Belton that Kris Snyder decided to open Blackbird Books & Spirits in 2023. “It was sort of my existential crisis,” Snyder says. The bar-slash-shop is hidden behind two door-size portraits of iconic Texans: Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, a Bell County native and the state’s first female governor, and Wanada Parker, Comanche leader Quanah Parker’s daughter. The moody space beyond the doors includes a fireplace and a bar, both built with reclaimed railroad ties from the area, a framed tarot-style portrait of Dolly Parton (RIP), and a selection of witchy, LGBTQ books. You can select mead or a literary-minded cocktail (like the Gin Austen, gin with juice topped with rosé) from the leather-bound drink menu, and order food from the adjacent
Pizza PieRos.
A pepperoni pizza fresh from the wood-fire oven at Pizza PieRos, in Belton. Photograph by Arturo Olmos 
The outdoor bar at Barrow Brewing Company, in Salado. Photograph by Arturo Olmos
Snyder, who’s lived in small Texas towns since 2011, wanted to open something different. “You’re always going to find great barbecue, good dance halls, plenty of fun things to do,” she says. “I thought there was a need for a new bookstore in the Bell County area, and I thought the only way that I could pull off a new bookstore in little Belton was by adding a bar. Who doesn’t love a good martini with their Hemingway?”
If you’re looking for that great barbecue, Belton has it. Miller’s Smokehouse, a Texas Monthly Top 50 joint, currently serves a limited menu from a trailer after a fire devastated its restaurant this year. Across the street, the owners also run Muscovy Coffee Roasters, which serves a pillowy brisket and cheese klobasnek and coffee so good that I brought home a bag of beans.
For all the improvements in the area, Temple and Belton don’t have much in the way of boutique hotels. Head to Salado, about twenty minutes south of Temple, to stay at the Stagecoach Inn, which has persisted through more than a century and a half of changes. Built in the 1850s as a way station for cattlemen moving along the Chisholm Trail, the Stagecoach has hosted a long and varied list of guests including Sam Houston and Lady Bird Johnson. It was briefly part of the trendy Bunkhouse Hotels empire before Austin-based Alexa Management took it over, in 2023. The hotel, which features a resort-style pool, has a few remnants of the Bunkhouse era, like the serape robes on offer in the lobby, alongside Texas-made cedar-filled sachets (for your boots) and glassware from Dallas’s Rose Ann Hall.
The pool at the Stagecoach Inn, in Salado.Photograph by Arturo Olmos
Then again, if new and hip is why you traveled to Bell County, you might have come for the wrong reason. Perhaps the best part of my trip, and the surest recommendation I can make, was an afternoon spent around the corner from the Stagecoach at Salado Creek. I dipped my feet in and felt the soothing chill of the fresh spring water—a gift from the Balcones Escarpment—where it met the warm flow of the creek, a sensual treat for my aching soles after a weekend of traipsing around.
It was Father’s Day, and dads enjoyed noontime beers from nearby Barrow Brewing Company while their kids nursed frozen lemonades. Families brought picnics with food from the excellent Sacred Sandwich and Happy Pizza trucks. Some were clearly pro-caliber creek enthusiasts, with folding tents and lawn chairs, coolers and fishing rods. A couple walked by with their puppy; one dad held his son as they ambled by on a Buc-ee’s float. My wife and kids had joined me at the creek, and our dog frolicked in the water. In the distance, the bells from First Baptist Salado announced the time, followed by the old hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy.” It’s easy to imagine Sam Houston or the Chisholm Trail vaqueros and cowboys here more than 150 years ago or the Clovis people cooling themselves in the flowing waters thousands of years before that.
In that moment, I thought of how this land isn’t about hot new restaurants or bookstore-speakeasies. It’s about the people who are here, who have always been here, who will likely always be here. I looked around and at myself, so changed and yet not from my first visit to Temple. Buildings rise and fill and empty and fill again. Dining and hotel trends come and go. But the creek keeps on flowing.
Paul L. Underwood is an Austin-based writer who covers travel, music, and the arts.
This article originally appeared in the October 2026 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “A Sanctuary of Texanness.” Subscribe today.
Read Next
Dining and Cooking