980 University Drive East

Grub's space went through several incarnations, and may yet continue to do so (from The Eagle, 4/27/08)
We've covered the restaurants around the fountain (except for Blue Baker/Atami, which are still their charter tenants from almost twenty years ago)—Abuelo's Mexican Food Embassy (now Casa Mangiare), the building that once held Veritas Wine & Bistro, Ben & Jerry's, and It's a Grind (and their successor restaurants), and what was, until recently, Razzoo's Cajun Cafe...plus, the stand-alone restaurant east of it, the old TGI Friday's. Beyond that is 980 University Drive East.

It featured four spaces, with 980A (instead of 100), suite 200, suite 300, and suite 400, and as of 2025 there are two vacant spaces, though most of them have operated in the last twenty years. The first space was originally home to Pei Wei Asian Diner, a fast-casual concept owned by P.F. Chang's China Bistro, operating from late 2005 to August 2019 (Pei Wei closed a bunch of restaurants during this time, likely stemming from being spun off from P.F. Chang's). In late 2021, The Cookshack, a restaurant serving Nashville hot chicken, opened, but it too closed as of November 2025 (seems the whole chain imploded, at least partially). Suite 200 has SportClips (the first local location) since around 2005, nothing dramatic there, suite 300 had Jamba Juice, which closed in November 2023 (I don't think it ever got the new "Jamba" branding).¹ It is still vacant to my knowledge. Suite 400 opened in 2007 (maybe early 2008) as Eccell Steakhouse, a new concept by Eccell Group, before it closed in 2010 and became Bodega Coast, a seafood restaurant, trading in the Cafe Eccell-inspired menu for the nearby La Bodega, and that lasted six months before another concept, Knockouts Grill House (I think it was a sports bar) came. By January 2012 it was closed and a few months later, Grub Burger Bar opened. Grub Burger Bar was a relatively successful concept and opened a number of locations all the way to the East Coast, and by the time it was acquired by Hopdoddy in 2018, had 18 locations (several had closed in 2020). Grub doesn't exist as a chain anymore...Hopdoddy rebranded them and probably would've done the same here as it already had a location at Century Square about a mile or so to the west.

What does the future hold for this site? Prognosis isn't looking good, it's 20+ years old, half-vacant, and Hopdoddy is probably letting Grub Burger Bar run down its lease². This may end up being the first true redeveloped building on the strip, even if many of the restaurants in the center are second-generation.

1. Jamba Juice wasn't new to the area, not exactly. In 1999, they purchased the Zuka Juice chain, which had two locations, one of them being an Exxon at Welsh and FM 2818, the other near Best Buy and Office Depot, but these closed in 2001.
2. The other possibility is that it's Century Square they don't want to renew on, and will close down Grub for a new Hopdoddy location. Either way, Grub's future is looking dim.

A North Bryan Family Legacy

The former J.J.'s Liquor as it appeared in January 2026. (Picture by author).
Sometime relatively recently, I had a very brief conversation with Ms. Ferreri, whose late father, Joe, built a number of restaurants and a few hotels in the area.¹ But among those, Sugar 'N Spice, the other drive-in, was missing from my site, so like Wendy's and H-E-B Pantry, lets go for covering a complete set. From what I can put together, 1215 N. Texas Avenue was the original address of the location and aerials back this up.

It was in 1951 that the drive-in opened (as a North Bryan counterpart to the Triangle) by 1968 was under new management as Ferreri moved on with bigger projects (the hotels). By fall of 1970 it was closed permanently but Luke Court was to reopen the store as "Sugar N Spice Drive In Grocery", now at 1219 N. Texas Avenue, likely reusing signage.

A second location of this "new" Sugar & Spice soon opened at 601 W. 28th Avenue as well, and by 1972 two more locations were in planning or operation, 1402 W. 25th Street and 300 W. 19th Street.² In 1974, Court sold these to Southland Corporation, which first had advertised as 7-Eleven in spring of that year (with a few locations of its own also being built), and by August was holding grand openings for what would be eight locations.³ Apparently, 7-Eleven did add gas to this location, but its time as a 7-Eleven was short-lived. By 1978, it was sold and reopened as J.J.'s Filling Station, owned by J.J. Ruffino (the son of whom I have also briefly spoken to), which by 1981 would ditch the gasoline and become J.J.'s Liquor, which it would remain for almost the next thirty years.

This garage door faces Texas Avenue. (Picture by author, 1/2026)
As I previously mentioned in another post, Spec's bought the three JJ's Liquor stores in 2010. The one on Texas Avenue in College Station was their wholesale warehouse for a while, while Rock Prairie Crossing and this one continued to operate. But within a few years of that, the JJ's at Rock Prairie doubled in size when it rebranded, and this location simply closed up shop (around that time the H-E-B was rolling out its full size store, and it's a mystery why Spec's couldn't have replaced its store with something there, or expand the Bryan store).

While part of the lot was redeveloped as a self-service car wash at some point that continues to be in operation at 1217 N. Texas Avenue, the building, which had served under Ruffino, Ferreri, and 7-Eleven, was abandoned.⁴

1. Most notably Ramada Inn, Ferreri's Italian Cuisine, and Triangle Drive-In. This post should finish them.
2. The addresses, 1402 W. William Joel Bryan Parkway and 300 W. Martin Luther King Jr. Street respectively, are no more. The latter was demolished in the late 2000s while the former disappeared between 1995 and 2003. 601 W. 28th Avenue is still in operation as a convenience store, but not a branded one.
3. The local 7-Eleven stores were sold to E-Z Mart in 1993 after Southland's 1990 bankruptcy. By that time, none of the Luke Court-era stores were in business as 7-Eleven.
4. Abandoned on paper, maybe. There was a truck parked outside the building when I was taking photos and I could music coming from inside (which was crammed with boxes and other junk), so I'm hoping it was just security of some sort...but I wasn't about to find out! It's why I don't have too many pictures of the property.

Editor's Note: I've been trying to make a post for days that weren't previously made but this has created a problem of tightly packing too many in at one time, or outright missing deadlines. As a result, the updates of this blog will be uneven. There are about five or six posts that I've been meaning to re-do that I'll be working on, as well as upgrading stuff relating to Post Oak Mall. Join me at Numbered Exits in the meantime.

The Now-Defunct Dairy Queen on Highway 21

Music for the Funeral for Queen Dairy
If you read my stuff on Houston (you should) there's a lot of stuff on there that have fallen victim to TxDOT's highway expansion plans. In addition to covering some of Northwest Freeway's lost businesses, there's also a big section on Katy Freeway, which had some major clearances, like a whole strip where five restaurants (including McDonald's, Whataburger, and Denny's), La Quinta Inn, the entire REI parking lot, and an independent car dealership just got wiped off the map (and that's just one section). While Highway 6's expansion has generous ROW for TxDOT to work with, a few businesses on Highway 21 aren't so lucky. One of those is Dairy Queen at 3003 Highway 21 East¹, which closed January 27, 2026.

The sloppily copy-edited press release.
This particular Dairy Queen opened in 1977 (judging by the one-year anniversary) as the 6th Dairy Queen in the area² and other than that there's not much I can say about it with other than update in the early-to-mid 2010s. Of course, Smith Dairy Queens, the current area franchisee, is not going to replace it, of course, blaming medians but while Wendy's, McDonald's, Jack in the Box, Whataburger, and others have since expanded out locally to varying degrees of success (medians or not), Dairy Queen hasn't.

All pictures were taken by the author, January 2026.

1. For years, up until at least the mid-1990s, the address was erreoneously written as "3000 East Highway 21". It was never on that side of the street.
2. The five others were the ones that still exist today (minor relocations excluded), with the exception of a store near what is now William Joel Bryan Parkway and North Parker Avenue.

Editor's Note: Several more posts have gotten major upgrades. Walton Shopping Center replaces the Primo Pizza article and the old "Eastgate" article while FedMart has been fully rewritten.

Aggieland Outfitters of Southgate

This building has been Aggieland Outfitters for the last 20+ years but time is running out...
Technically this is not a day later after January 7th's post as I've made a placeholder, something I've done for Numbered Exits.¹

The earliest reference I can find for the address (208 George Bush Drive, formerly 208 Jersey Street) is 1962 with the opening of a medical doctor, David J. Shannon with the address being used a few years later for Gala Realty. In 1972, the first convenience store, Sak & Pak, moved in. In 1977, this was replaced with UtoteM (I can't tell if they purchased it or not) and in 1984 was rebranded as Circle K (#3346) as it took over the chain. In 1993 it was sold (by this time the address was 208 George Bush Drive) and became Tropicana Quik Mart (a locally-owned operation)². It closed in 2000 with Aggieland Outfitters taking over the entire building in 2002 with a large indoor-and-out renovation. This also took over the 210 space. This was the home of Cut-Rate Liquor (later Coach's Cut Rate Liquor—this I DO remember, it was on the left side of the building; the door doesn't even exist anymore). This operated from 1971 to shortly before Aggieland Outfitters took over. It replaced Big G Malt Shop, but I can't find too much on the restaurant, only that it existed in the late 1960s.

Among the new features of the store was a little fenced-in area with a Bevo statue with its horns sawed off and for a decade when A&M left the Big 12 and stopped playing University of Texas, it was replaced with a "Gig'em" statue in a wave of related iconoclasm, but as of summer 2025 the Bevo statue is back. In fall 2023, a new location was built just about three blocks away due to eventual construction at the intersection (most of the other places have been closed or cleared, including McDonald's at Marion Pugh, the Equity office, the Unitarian Universalist church, 101 Grove, a large apartment building that sat on the corner of the street, and a few other houses. Despite that, both stores continue to operate, at least for now.

All photos in this post were taken January 2026 by the author.

The liquor store may have had a pick-up window.

The north side of the building dates back to the opening of Aggieland Outfitters and has faded over the years as murals tend to do. That iteration of Kyle Field, once iconic to College Station, is now just a memory.

This alley area was created when a shed was built behind the store around 2013. Note the cinderblock on the right, which was created on the liquor store side of the building and dates back to that time.

Bevo's back, but that statue isn't the same as the original pre-2012 one.
1. It's a way to fill every day that I haven't made a post with something, and the next one will come on the 23rd.
2. The phone books had been pretty good about when businesses stopped operating, but still listed the Circle K after it changed hands.

Citgo Southwest Parkway

Picture from June 2025 by author On May 31st, I removed five pages from Carbon-izer.com: Southwest Parkway, Harvey Road, Texas Avenue - Bryan, Other Bryan Roads, and Wellborn Road (FM 2154). Since I covered Archie's Taco Bell recently, I thought it was only fair to cover some of the other roads that were removed, and today we're doing one of the things on Southwest Parkway that has curiously never been covered (other than in passing); the Citgo at 101 Southwest Parkway (not to be confused with the other Citgo on Southwest Parkway).

Directly at the northeast corner of Southwest Parkway and Wellborn, this was originally a Citgo/7-Eleven when it opened in June 1986 (7-Eleven stores, at least in this part of the country, were paired with Citgo gas). In 1993, 7-Eleven left the area but the stores (now under E-Z Mart) kept the Slurpee machines (later rebadged as ICEE), so this was the cold slush drink headquarters growing up. Unfortunately, the machines later broke down and the owners did not replace them, ending it as a place to get frozen Dr Peppers. In 2004, the store converted to Zip'N, and I remember when the store's name was a ground display surrounded by bushes (this was done away with in a station renovation). Later on, the gas station parking lot was integrated with Southwest Crossing around it.

The intersection has evolved--the once-quiet southeast corner has turned into not only parking lot access for a large apartment complex, but a number of other establishments (Starbucks, Chipotle, Whataburger, Wild Pita, and Andy's Frozen Custard), but the Citgo continues to age. While it's still technically signed as a Zip'N, there's a sign above it saying "Ricky Food Mart" or something along those lines, and it's a bit depressing to see a gas station once a family favorite for gasoline fall into disrepair, but that's life, I guess.

UPDATE 10-26-2025: This will be redeveloped as a new Layne's location in the near future. The new [endangered] label will be added to this post as a result.