Why St. Armands Circle Keeps Rearranging Its Restaurants

In the first week of January, the dining room at 22 South Boulevard of the Presidents filled past capacity within the hour. Staff at the newly rebranded Nōnnō Umberto served more than 250 diners that first evening, and by the end of the week the total had climbed toward 800, all packed into a space that had spent most of the past two years as something else entirely.

If you live on the Circle, you already know the building. You may not know why it took this long to reopen, or why, a few blocks away, a longtime retail anchor just moved out of its own storefront, or why the restaurant trying to move back in down the street is doing it with flood-proof glass instead of a standard storefront. Watch closely enough this year and the Circle starts to read less like a strip of shops that happen to change hands and more like a map of which addresses were worth rebuilding exactly as they were, and which ones needed to become something new to survive the next storm.

The Restaurant That Came Back As Itself

Nōnnō Umberto is the simplest version of the story. It's the address staying put. The restaurant spent decades as Le Colonne before Hurricanes Helene and Milton forced the family to close it. Rather than walk away, owners Amber Mayner and Simone Salustri kept the business alive with a food truck called Buonissimo Mobile Italian Kitchen while they figured out what came next. What came next was a full renovation of the original space, finished just in time for the New Year, and a new name honoring Simone's father, Umberto Salustri, who opened the restaurant in the first place.

"It feels like a dream come true that we did it, we made it," Mayner said after opening week.

This is the version of recovery that looks the way you'd expect: same corner, same family, a new name stitched onto an old legacy. Not every building on the Circle got to take that path.

The Address Tommy Bahama Left Behind

Until late 2024, 300 John Ringling Boulevard was Tommy Bahama. Then, after the hurricanes, the store relocated to 465 John Ringling Boulevard, moving into the space that used to be Shore. It's a small detail with a large implication: one of the Circle's most recognizable retail names decided its old building wasn't the one to rebuild in, and found a fresher address instead.

Read across that table and the pattern comes into focus. Nobody on the Circle is simply reopening. They're trading addresses, and the address each one lands on says almost as much about the neighborhood's rebuilding math as anything on the menu.

Who's Moving Into the Old Tommy Bahama Spot

The answer is Pinchers, the seafood concept that got its start in Bonita Springs in 1997 and has since grown into a Gulf Coast fixture under Phelan Family Brands, the same company behind Deep Lagoon and Texas Tony's Rib & Brewhouse. Pinchers signed a lease for more than 8,000 square feet at 300 John Ringling Boulevard and is targeting an October opening, according to Kevin Rooney, the company's vice president of marketing and advertising. It'll be the chain's first foothold on St. Armands, with the closest existing locations sitting in Lakewood Ranch and Venice, roughly 14 and 20 miles away.

The building itself sold for $8 million in 2022 to a group of Michigan-based LLCs, according to Sarasota County property records, and Alison Horbach of Ripco Real Estate, who represented the ownership group, described the new long-term lease as more than a routine transaction.

"It's a sign that rebuilding is possible even when the odds are stacked against you."

That's the sentence that connects Pinchers back to Nōnnō Umberto and forward to the next building on the list. Every one of these moves is being narrated, by the people involved, as evidence that the Circle is coming back. The interesting part is that coming back doesn't mean coming back the same.

Why Shore Is Rebuilding With Flood-Proof Glass

Shore's own return is the clearest example of that. Owner Tom Leonard, part of the development partnership Kaufman Shore Properties, is planning a full-service restaurant, café, and retail store at 24 and 28 North Boulevard of the Presidents, on the corner of Madison Drive. The building is designed to incorporate flood-proof glass at the street level, a mitigation strategy meant to get around FEMA's so-called 50% rule, which bars renovation of flood-prone properties when the cost exceeds half the structure's value, unless the whole building is raised above flood level.

That single design choice tells you what every business on this list is actually solving for. Nobody is renovating around the flood rules anymore. They're building to beat them from the start.

The project isn't without friction. The plans mark a new third floor as residential, but individual room labels suggest short-term rental use, which caught the attention of Sarasota's planning staff at the Development Review Committee's July 15 meeting. Leonard has been open about wanting to eventually pursue a zoning change that would allow short-term rentals in the Commercial Tourist district, a shift that's already drawing pushback from residents wary of hotel-style units in that zone.

"A lease agreement approved by the city commission would be required for these parking spaces, in addition to an off-site parking agreement, which would be required," Chief Planner Brianna Dobbs told the committee, adding that purchasing spaces in the St. Armands parking garage outright isn't an option under the terms of the parking bond.

Whatever gets resolved there, the flood-proof glass is the real headline. It's the physical evidence that businesses returning to St. Armands are building for the next storm, not just repairing the damage from the last one.

The Beach Got Its Fix First

While the restaurants were sorting out their addresses, the beach the Circle sits next to was going through its own version of the same process. Lido Beach's renourishment project, a $12 million effort funded through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, wrapped with a ribbon-cutting on May 26, 2026, restoring 1.2 miles of shoreline using roughly 300,000 cubic yards of sand dredged from New Pass. It's the first renourishment since 2021, part of a 50-year agreement with the Army Corps that calls for the work to repeat roughly every five years, and the timing lined up with a stretch of shoreline that Hurricanes Helene and Milton had already worn thin.

The beach isn't finished changing. This fall, the city begins building the protective dunes back up, raising them two feet to a 6.6-foot elevation and adding native salt-tolerant plants along stretches where dunes barely exist anymore. City Engineer Sage Kamiya put the goal in plain terms: moving storm protection from a ten-year event standard to a twenty-five-year one. That work is expected to run through early 2027, which means the wider beach you're walking on right now is really the midpoint of a longer project, not the finish line.

What's Actually on the Calendar This Fall

Underneath all the construction, the Circle's normal rhythm is still running on schedule.

• The Circle's fall art and craft market returns September 12 and 13, free to attend, filling St. Armands Circle Park with work from artists and crafters across the country.
• Fright Night, now in its 17th year, transforms the Circle into its annual Halloween event for families.
• The Jaguar Festival d'Elegance brings antique and modern Jaguar automobiles back to the Circle, one of several car-focused events the St. Armands Circle Association runs each year.
• For the everyday stuff, St. Armands Market, run by Pilar Tucker in the space her family's restaurant, La Malinche, used to occupy, still keeps the island stocked so a milk or coffee run doesn't require leaving City Island at all.

Reading the Circle by Its Addresses

The easiest way to misread all of this is to treat it as a list of openings and closings, the kind of update that could describe any commercial strip recovering from a couple of bad storm seasons. What makes St. Armands different is how legible the choices are once you line the addresses up. A restaurant that survives the flood math reopens under its own name. A retailer that doesn't reopens somewhere else. A building that's rebuilding from scratch does it with glass engineered to outlast the next hurricane, and picks that fight over what else it's allowed to become once it's standing.

If you've lived here through the last two storm seasons, none of that should feel abstract. It's the same math your own street has been running, just conducted in restaurant leases instead of insurance renewals.

Dianne Anderson has spent decades watching Sarasota's barrier islands work through exactly this kind of change, and keeping track of what's rebuilding, what's relocating, and what it means for the neighborhoods her clients call home is part of the job. If you're curious what any of this looks like from the inside, from a longtime islander's perspective rather than a headline, Dianne Anderson would love to talk. Let's Connect.