McCullough Avenue Was Built for Dinner. Mornings Just Caught Up.

"If you are not there early, you probably are not going to get the pick you want," a Pearl Farmers Market regular named Kinsley said of the weekend kolache line that used to be the only way to get a taste of Dough Baby. For two years, that line existed in one place and one place only: a folding table at Pearl on Saturday and Sunday mornings. As of July 2026, it also exists four miles north, on a stretch of McCullough Avenue in Olmos Park that has spent decades doing one thing well after dark and nothing much before noon.

That is the part of this story worth sitting with if you already live here. Not that a bakery opened. Bakeries open and close constantly. What changed is which hours of the day McCullough Avenue actually serves.

The Street That Ran on Reservations

Walk McCullough between Hildebrand and Devine and the businesses that have anchored the corridor for years share a pattern. Pesto Ristorante, at 5221 McCullough, describes itself as fine Italian dining under chef Alejandro Santoyo, and its own posted hours back that up: closed Mondays, open Tuesday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., and open later on Fridays until 10. Business casual is the stated dress code, and reservations are accepted, which tells you this is a restaurant built for an evening you plan around, not a lunch you fit in.

A few blocks down at 4331 McCullough, Sabor Cocina Bar has been serving contemporary Mexican food from shaded patios since 2012. It is a genuine lunch-and-dinner concept, but the emphasis has always landed on dinner, the kind of place you book for a celebration rather than swing by on a Tuesday morning.

None of that is a complaint about the street. It is a description of what the street was for. If you wanted breakfast, a coffee, or a reason to be on McCullough before 10 a.m., the corridor did not really have an answer.

The Bakery That Sells Out Before Most People Are Awake

Nancy Fitch did not set out to fix that. She set out to sell cinnamon rolls on weekends. Dough Baby started as a pop-up at Pearl Farmers Market on March 2, 2024, built on a recipe she carried over from the Peach Cafe, the Boerne restaurant she owned for 15 years before spending eight years managing Pearl's markets. The first day, she sold out within an hour, working with two countertop mixers. It kept happening. Weekend after weekend, the tent at Pearl became one of the market's busiest stops.

By July 18, 2026, that momentum had outgrown a tent. Dough Baby opened its first storefront at 4219 McCullough Avenue, a few blocks from where Fitch herself lives. She has said as much directly: "We wanted a neighbourhood spot, and we live just four blocks away." The location also gave her a real commercial kitchen for the first time, which meant she could keep the cinnamon rolls and kolaches while adding baby cakes, seasonal pies, daily quiche, and a coffee and tea program that a farmers market stand never could have supported.

The grand opening sold out in two hours. That was not a one-time event. On a typical day, the shop can move up to 800 kolaches. Cinnamon rolls are capped closer to 150 a day, not because of demand but because the dough needs an overnight proof and there is only so much of it ready by morning. Fitch has since settled into closing the bakery Mondays and Tuesdays, a schedule that reads less like a corporate rollout and more like a small business finding its actual capacity.

None of this required the street to change. It required someone to notice that a lot of people already wanted a reason to be on McCullough before lunch, and that the demand had nowhere to go until a storefront gave it one.

The Trail Was Never the Missing Piece. The Stop Was.

The other half of this story is not new at all. Olmos Basin Park, with its trailhead at 651 Devine Road, has been sitting a few minutes from McCullough for years, doing exactly what a neighborhood park does. It is easy to undersell it and easy to oversell it, so here is the plain version:

• A roughly 0.8-mile paved loop circles the park's soccer fields, flat and easy, the kind of lap you do with a dog or a stroller rather than serious mileage.
• A second paved route, closer to 1.8 miles out and back, runs alongside Jones Maltsberger Road toward Basse Road.
• Underneath both of those, an estimated five miles of unmarked dirt trail wind through the wooded basin itself, popular with mountain bikers and trail runners looking for a quick loop before or after work.
• The park is open 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily, and dogs are welcome on leash.

The basin sits low by design. It was built behind Olmos Dam in 1927 specifically to catch floodwater before it reaches downtown, which means after a real storm the ground stays wet and buggy longer than you would expect from a park this close to the city center. Local trail writers have described watching the water line climb halfway up the trunks of the tallest trees after a hard rain. Give it a day before you trust the low sections.

None of that is a new fact about Olmos Park. What is new is that the walk finally has somewhere to end. A loop around the soccer fields plus a stop for coffee and a kolache used to mean getting back in the car and driving toward the Pearl for the second half of that plan. Now it means walking half a mile further down McCullough instead.

What Actually Changed

Here is the part that matters if you already own a home in Olmos Park and are not going anywhere. The restaurants on McCullough did not get worse, and the trail did not get better. What changed is that the corridor picked up a second identity it never had. For years, showing up on McCullough before 10 a.m. meant nothing was really open for you. Now it means a bakery that is already selling several hundred kolaches before most of the neighborhood has left for work, run by someone who chose the location because she can walk to it herself.

That is a small thing in the way that most real changes to a neighborhood are small. Nobody built a new road. Nobody rezoned a block. A woman with fifteen years running a Boerne diner and eight more managing farmers markets decided her weekend side project deserved a storefront, and she picked the street four blocks from her own front door. The street just happened to be missing exactly that.

If you are already out on the Devine Road trail some mornings, or you have been meaning to try the loop around the soccer fields before the day gets away from you, McCullough Avenue is worth a second look this fall. Not because anything about your neighborhood needs fixing, but because for the first time in a while, it has somewhere new to send you.

If you ever want to talk through what's changing in Olmos Park, whether it's the next restaurant opening on McCullough or how a shift like this tends to show up in how homes here get used and valued over time, Leslie Reyes Idais is always glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.