How long does a boarded-up restaurant have to sit on a piece of Intracoastal waterfront before you stop expecting anything to happen with it? For the old Lulu's Waterfront Grille on North Roscoe Boulevard, the answer turned out to be about five years. The restaurant closed in 2021, and the 1.34-acre lot sat there for nearly five years, windows dark, while everything around it in Ponte Vedra Beach kept moving.
Two miles away on Solana Road, a shorter but similar story played out. Woody's Bar-B-Q closed on January 14, 2023, and its spot in the Winn-Dixie-anchored Ponte Vedra Square sat vacant for close to two years before anyone signed a permit to do anything with it.
Both buildings are finally getting occupants in 2026. What is worth noticing is not just that they are filling up. It is what is filling them, and how much larger the bet is this time around.
The Roscoe Boulevard lot cost more than the last restaurant ever charged for dinner
In November 2024, Shark Tooth Dining LLC bought the Lulu's site for a price reported as $4.1 million by some outlets and $4.2 million by others. The buyer was Alex Cranberg, an oil executive and school-choice advocate who moved to Ponte Vedra from Colorado more than a decade ago and lives on Ponte Vedra Boulevard. His wife, Cathy Cranberg, runs Aspect Energy.
Cranberg's company partnered with Atlanta-based True Story Brands, founded by South African native Justin Anthony, to build Yebo Beach Haus, a New American restaurant with sushi, seafood, and steaks drawing on Cape Town-style flavors, alongside a second-floor Lions Head Private Members Club. St. Johns County issued a building permit on January 20, 2026, putting the construction cost at $3.14 million for a 10,279-square-foot building with roughly 66 parking spaces and about 207 seats in the restaurant alone, before the private club's separate seating upstairs. Cronk Duch Architecture and Wolf Design Group are handling the design.
Anthony described the goal simply, calling it a chance to build:
"a world-class dining and hospitality landmark for Ponte Vedra."
Construction was expected to begin in early 2026, and as of this writing no opening date has been announced. What has changed is the scale of the bet. A roadside seafood restaurant's old footprint is being replaced by a project that combines more than $7 million in land and construction costs, private club included.
Solana Road's version is smaller money, same pattern
The math on Solana Road is more modest but tells the same story. St. Johns County issued a permit on December 12, 2024, for The Local to build out the old Woody's Bar-B-Q space at a cost of $500,000. The contractor was 3rd Little Pig Construction. The Local is owned by Ted Stein and J.C. Demetree of Roost Restaurants, which opened its first location in Miramar in 2017 and its second in Neptune Beach in 2019. Ponte Vedra Beach is the third stop, and the build-out is already open, according to the restaurant's current posted hours.
The Local's own description of its approach:
"Every restaurant we build, we do so with the neighborhood in mind."
A few doors down at 262 Solana Road, a different kind of new arrival opened without waiting on any vacancy narrative at all. Ponte Vedra Wine Bar & Restaurant, owned by pastry chef Samantha Munn, opened its doors on October 13, 2025, with a Palm Beach-inspired European menu, an extensive wine list poured through a Coravin system, and murals of native birds on the walls. Munn has said she was encouraged to open the concept by friends who wanted something like it in the area, and the restaurant now hosts wine club nights and pairing dinners.
So within the same half-mile stretch of Solana Road, a barbecue joint's old space has become a coastal American kitchen, and a wine bar has opened in a spot that did not require anyone to wait out a vacancy at all.
The two names that didn't need an empty building
Not everything landing in Ponte Vedra Beach this year is a backfill. Two names arrived on Florida A1A North without inheriting anyone else's old lease.
Black Pearl opened with a soft launch on January 21, 2026, at 880 Florida A1A N., Suite 18B, inside the Ponte Vedra Pointe Shopping Center. The concept blends Japanese and Italian cooking, a style sometimes called Itameshi, under chef Abel Chiok, who has more than 20 years of experience including a stint at Jacksonville's Vidrio. A hidden speakeasy tucked inside the restaurant opened a week later, on January 28. The build-out permit, issued in November 2024, put the cost at $400,000, with a separate $6,000 sign permit filed the previous September. Owner Kelvin Ole explained the reasoning behind the location:
"There is a big opportunity in Ponte Vedra Beach, Jacksonville Beach, San Marco and Downtown."
A few blocks up at 830 Florida A1A N., Le Petit Paris owner Alex Chezaud has been working on his sixth location, following the original 2019 shop in Mandarin, a Southside location that opened in 2023, a Le Petit Paris and Le Petit Atelier pairing at Atlantic Beach's Shoppes of Northshore, and a 2025 addition in San Pablo. Chezaud has talked about opening the Ponte Vedra Beach location as early as 7 a.m. to catch families dropping kids at nearby Bolles School Ponte Vedra. As of this spring, the build-out was still being finished, so check current hours before planning around it. Chezaud put it this way:
"Ponte Vedra is very special for us, because we've been wanting to come here since almost day one."
What's actually open if you're deciding where to eat tonight
Here is where things stand right now, not where they are headed eventually:
- Open: Black Pearl, 880 Florida A1A N., including the speakeasy
- Open: Ponte Vedra Wine Bar & Restaurant, 262 Solana Road
- Open: The Local, 226 Solana Road
- Finishing up: Le Petit Paris, 830 Florida A1A N.
- Under construction, no completion date announced: Yebo Beach Haus and Lions Head Private Members Club, 301 North Roscoe Blvd.
Three of the five are already serving dinner. The two still in progress happen to be the ones tied to the neighborhood's most conspicuous long-term vacancies, which tracks. Filling a five-year-empty waterfront lot with a 10,000-square-foot building and a private club takes longer than opening a wine bar in a shopping center storefront.
The through-line
None of these projects happened in isolation, but they are not one coordinated wave either. They are five different owners, from a South African-born restaurant group in Atlanta to a Mandarin café owner building his sixth Northeast Florida shop, all deciding within roughly the same 18 months that Ponte Vedra Beach was worth a real investment. Two of them are doing it by finally answering what to do with buildings the neighborhood has been driving past for years. The other three didn't wait around for anything to open up. They just showed up.
If you have been wondering why there always seems to be scaffolding somewhere on Solana Road or A1A this year, that's the answer. The blank buildings are closing out. The new ones are filling in around them. Either way, there are more places to eat dinner in Ponte Vedra Beach this August than there were last August, and that is not nothing.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own address, whether you're thinking about buying in the area or wondering what your current home is worth in a neighborhood that's clearly still drawing investment, Michael Wright and Suzi Ford know these streets block by block. Reach out anytime to talk through what you're seeing.
