Walk south on Hendricks Avenue this summer and you will pass at least five storefronts that were something else a year ago. An art supply store. A donut shop. A boutique. A French bistro that had anchored the Square for years. None of them are new buildings. All of them are new businesses, and most opened within the same twelve months.
That is the part the postcard version of San Marco misses. The lion fountain, the art deco theater marquee, the old train station: those are still the images that show up when people describe the neighborhood. But if you actually live here and have wondered why there's been a construction sign or a soft-opening post on your phone every few weeks, the answer isn't happening in the Square. It's happening one street over, and it's happening fast enough that keeping track of who's where has become its own small neighborhood pastime.
What Used to Be a Donut Shop, an Art Supply Store, and a Boutique
Start with the most visible one. Good Dough, the artisan donut shop that had been on Hendricks Avenue for eight years, closed in 2025. In May 2026, that roughly 1,460-square-foot space at 1636 Hendricks Ave reopened as Hard Pressed Burgers, the first brick-and-mortar location for a food truck brand that had spent years building a following at Ink Factory Brewing in Jacksonville Beach and, more recently, behind Catbird Coffee Roasters in Murray Hill. Owners Eddie Evans and Justin Pa'ala picked San Marco on purpose.
"San Marco and Murray Hill are kind of just like OG spots. It's an easy no-brainer."
The 45-seat restaurant debuted May 13 with the same smash-burger menu that made the trucks popular, plus additions like a buffalo chicken sandwich, hot dogs, and beer and wine. By August, the location was popular enough that reviewers were noting it can run out of food during busy stretches, something that rarely happens to a place still finding its footing three months in.
A few blocks away, the old Syrene boutique space, across Hendricks from the Publix-anchored San Marco East shopping center, became Bold City Wings this spring. The permit for the buildout was pulled in January for a $108,000 renovation, with owner Lunsford putting the total investment closer to $250,000. It's a family business four generations deep, built on a wing brand Lunsford ran in the Washington, D.C. area before bringing it home to the city where she grew up.
Then there's the building that used to be Reddi-Arts, the art supply store at 1039 Hendricks Ave. That single address has quietly become the busiest redevelopment story on the street. Tavola Trattoria, an Italian concept from the Bentonville, Arkansas-based Table Mesa Restaurant Group, soft-opened in late July with a limited menu of pizza, stromboli, pasta and zeppole, with steak options planned as the kitchen settles in. A few doors down in the same building, The Huguenot Wine, Cheese & Charcuterie Bar was about three-quarters finished with construction as of late August, with owner Chad Munsey targeting a late-summer opening and posting job listings for staff in early August.
Munsey isn't new to San Marco wine bars. He opened The Grotto in the Square back around 2001 and sold his majority stake in 2008. He's also the owner of The Bearded Pig on Kings Avenue. For the new concept, he specifically passed on space closer to the Square in favor of Hendricks Avenue, citing the building's condition, the parking nearby, and the fact that an Italian restaurant was already moving into the same complex. That's worth sitting with for a second: a veteran restaurant owner chose his location because of who his neighbor was going to be, not because of the Square's name recognition.
Nearby on Naldo Avenue, just off Hendricks, KoBu opened as a Japanese sushi and omakase spot with an intimate dining room, open five nights a week. And on Hendricks itself, The Books Cellar, a combined bookstore, coffee counter and wine bar with around 1,100 titles and seating for 54, opened this spring from owners Patrick and Sandra Madigan, who brought in a librarian to run the inventory and event calendar.
The Square's Own Anchor Changed Hands Too
It isn't only Hendricks. The building at 1440 San Marco Blvd, right in the Square, spent years as Bistro Aix and, more recently, a concept called Blue. Earlier this year it reopened as Cafe San Marco and Bar San Marco, run by David Revuelta and Daimi Morales, with Rene Martinez as general manager. The renovation kept most of the existing kitchen equipment but added a new refrigerator, retiled floors and a $13,000 coffee maker, bringing startup costs to about $60,000. The bar restored the original red brick that had been painted over and swapped a wall of mirrors for a single large one.
Cafe San Marco runs a narrow but specific window: 6 to 8 a.m., grab-and-go pastries, coffee and juice, the kind of Cuban cafe ritual Morales grew up with in Cuba before marrying Revuelta, a Jacksonville native, eight years ago. It's a small detail, but it's the kind of thing that tells you the Square's most storied restaurant space didn't get replaced by another version of the same idea. It got replaced by something that runs on a completely different clock.
Why Now, and Why Here
The obvious question is why so much of this landed in the same twelve months on the same half-mile of Hendricks Avenue. Part of the answer is public money, and it's not hidden if you know where to look. The Downtown Investment Authority's Core Retail Enhancement Program awarded a $135,000 grant to Tavola San Marco LLC, the entity behind Tavola Trattoria, to help finance the buildout in the former Reddi-Arts building. In February, the DIA board voted 9-0 to award The Huguenot a separate $75,140 forgivable grant through the same program. That's more than $210,000 in city grant money funneled into two restaurants in a single building, on top of whatever the owners put in themselves.
That kind of subsidy doesn't explain every opening on the street. Hard Pressed Burgers and Bold City Wings look like straightforward bets by operators who already had a following. But it does explain why an oddly shaped former art supply store, the kind of space that might otherwise sit empty for years while a landlord waits for the right tenant, turned into a working restaurant row inside a matter of months. When the city is offsetting a chunk of the buildout cost, the math changes for what counts as a workable space.
What's Actually Open Right Now
If you're trying to plan an evening out rather than trace the whole pattern, here's where things stand as of late August. Hard Pressed Burgers, Bold City Wings, Cafe San Marco, Bar San Marco, The Books Cellar and KoBu are all open and operating on regular hours. Tavola Trattoria is running a soft opening with a limited menu while the kitchen builds consistency, open seven days a week with hours that stretch from 9 a.m. on weekends to as late as 10 p.m. on Fridays. The Huguenot is the one still finishing, with staff hiring underway and a late-summer target that puts its opening somewhere in the coming weeks rather than months.
That timing matters if you're the kind of resident who likes to be there for a soft opening rather than reading about it after the fact. Given how close The Huguenot sits to Tavola, and given that its owner picked the spot specifically because of that proximity, it's a safe bet the two will end up functioning almost like one destination once both are running.
A Corridor, Not a Coincidence
None of this required new construction. Every one of these openings took over a building that already existed, most of them occupied for years by something in a completely different category. That's a different kind of neighborhood change than a new development going up on a vacant lot. It's the same square footage, the same parking lots, the same walk from the Hendricks at San Marco apartments or the streets behind the Square, just with different names on the door and, in at least two cases, a city grant behind the buildout.
If you've lived in San Marco long enough to remember Good Dough's donuts or a decade of dinners at Bistro Aix, this is the year those two spots handed off to something new. If you're newer to the neighborhood, it's worth knowing that the stretch of Hendricks Avenue you drive past to get anywhere else in San Marco is, at the moment, the most active block in the whole neighborhood.
Michael Wright and Suzi Ford work across San Marco and the rest of Northeast Florida every day, and pieces like this one are part of how they stay current on what's actually changing in the neighborhoods they serve. If you're curious about what a specific San Marco street or block is worth right now, or you just want a local read on the market, Michael Wright is glad to talk it through.
