What's Changing on St. Armands Circle This Summer, Told Through Its Storefronts

Walk the Circle on a Tuesday evening in August and you can read the last two years of barrier-island history in the doorways. One shop light is on where it was dark all of 2025. Two parcels on North Boulevard of the Presidents still sit quiet, waiting on a permit. A longtime Italian kitchen has a new sign but the same family behind the pass. If you live on St. Armands or nearby on Lido, the story of the Circle right now is not about new tenants chasing tourists. It is about which operators are choosing to rebuild here on tougher, more resilient terms, and which corners are still in the in-between.

That is the through line worth tracking as a resident, because it shapes the small daily choices, where you take a visiting friend to dinner, which weekend you avoid the traffic loop, when the block by Chase Bank will feel finished again.

The Italian kitchen at 22 S. Boulevard, under a new name

If you had a standing reservation at Le Colonne before the 2024 storm season, the address is the same and so is the family. The restaurant reopened in early January 2026 as Nōnnō Umberto, an Italian seafood and steakhouse at 22 S. Boulevard of the Presidents. The rebrand honors Umberto Salustri, whose son Simone runs the kitchen alongside co-owner Amber Mayner.

When hurricanes Helene and Milton forced the family to close Le Colonne, they didn't know what the next steps would be. The bridge back was a food truck. To keep the business afloat, Simone and Mayner opened an Italian food truck called Buonissimo Mobile Italian Kitchen last year. That gave them the runway to gut the brick-and-mortar and decide what a reopened Le Colonne should actually be.

The soft opening tells you how much appetite there was for it back. The owners of Nōnnō Umberto expected a fairly quiet soft opening for the rebranded Italian restaurant on St. Armands Circle the first week of January. But it was anything but quiet as staff served more than 250 people on the first night, growing to 800 people over the course of the first week, according to co-owner Amber Mayner.

For residents, the useful detail is on the menu rather than the marquee. The team leaned into seafood, with dishes like ravioli aragosta at the front of the new lineup, and the dining room now carries a lightly redone look built during a compressed renovation the family finished just in time for the New Year holiday.

The block on North Boulevard that is still waiting

Directly across the Circle, the corner that once held Shore Restaurant has been the loudest silence on St. Armands since late 2024. Shore closed after the storms, and its founders were candid about why. Shore co-founder Tom Leonard said at the time that infrastructure issues on the circle "forced us to re-evaluate our future here."

Something is finally moving on that block. In June 2026, Kauffman Shore Properties LLC filed a site plan with the city for a mixed-use rebuild on 0.33 acres at 24 and 28 N. Boulevard of the Presidents. A few specifics worth knowing if you drive past that stretch:

• Plans to create a new location for Shore Restaurant are moving forward, after a St. Armands landlord submitted a site plan to the city of Sarasota for a mixed-use project along North Boulevard of the Presidents.
• Kauffman is proposing a three-story building that would contain retail, restaurant and residential space on 0.33 acres.
• The project includes the renovation of the existing Chase Bank building along with the removal and replacement of the adjacent former candy shop structure to create a unified mixed-use development.
• The two addresses on North Boulevard of the Presidents have been vacant since the 2024 flooding, and Mindy Kauffman is proposing to revitalize this part of St. Armands with more than 17,000 square feet of redeveloped commercial space topped with a condo.

The design language in the application is not window dressing. "The building design and site layout are intended to respond to the scale and character of St. Armands while incorporating resilient construction and flood-conscious improvements appropriate for the barrier island environment," Waddill and Pardue write in the development application. It would incorporate "updated construction measures and flood-conscious design measures such as flood panels on the first story, which will improve the long-term resilience of the property."

Do not clear your calendar for a ribbon cutting yet. The buildout date for the project is the fourth quarter of 2027, according to the development application. Next, the case is scheduled to appear before the Sarasota Development Review Committee July 15. Between now and then, the block stays quiet, and the eleven parking spots behind the property, plus eight the developer is coordinating to purchase from the public garage, will slowly move from a line item in a permit to something visible on the street.

The reason to track this closely, even if you never planned to eat at Shore, is that it is the first post-storm project on the Circle designed around flood panels and resilient construction rather than a cosmetic refresh. Whatever precedent this sets in front of the Development Review Committee will show up in how the next dozen St. Armands parcels get rebuilt.

What August actually tastes like on the Circle

Late summer used to be when residents had the Circle mostly to themselves. The season-long Taste of Summer promotion has quietly changed that math. According to Visit Sarasota County's 2026 events calendar, Taste of Summer Specials run August 1 - 31, 2026 across participating restaurants in the county, and several St. Armands kitchens fold their Savor Sarasota menus into the same window.

Crab & Fin at 420 St. Armands Circle publishes the format directly. Savor sarasota june 1st-30th 2026. We are excited to announce that starting June 1st 2026 will kick of the June special dining month. During June the 2 course lunch experience is offered at $25 and dinner will feature a 3 course option for $45. Their nightly early dining window is the other locals' trick worth knowing. We offer our early dining discounted menu nightly 4:45 - 5:45pm seven days a week During the Early Dining period most entrees are offered at a 20% discount, and you also get to choose a complimentary soup OR salad.

A few other names to keep in rotation while the North Boulevard corner is dark:

• Café on St. Armands at 431 St. Armands Circle, the Mediterranean reset of the former Café L'Europe, with the Wet Bar lounge and Café Soleil coffee bar built into the same landmark building.
• Columbia Restaurant, the Spanish and Cuban room that is the oldest operating restaurant in Sarasota, useful when out-of-town guests want the historic Sarasota version of the evening.
• Daiquiri Deck, whose sidewalk seating gives you the best low-effort people-watching table on the Circle and which programs live music seven nights a week.

Weekends worth blocking off through winter

The Circle's event calendar is more forward-loaded than most residents realize once the summer heat breaks. Rather than a running paragraph, here is the shape of what is on the books, so you can plan around the traffic and the parking:

A few notes on what each one actually looks like once you get there. The Craft Festival is the free, walk-up version, with This popular, free, outdoor event takes place inside St. Armand's Circle Park. For two days, guests will enjoy works from over 175 artisans and craft persons participating in this fun event. Fright Night is the family draw. Our fabulous Halloween event, in its 17th year, returns for the young, and spooky at heart. And the January Art Festival is the closest thing the Circle has to a season opener, with St. Armand's Circle will once again come alive with gallery-style booths filled with every medium of fine art during the St. Armand's Circle Art Festival. The popular free, outdoor event takes place along South Boulevard of Presidents and inside St. Armand's Circle.

If you host visiting family in the fall, the practical planning move is to book dinner around, not during, Ferraris on the Circle. The car show pulls the entire ring into slow-crawl traffic and reserves most of the visible curb space for display. Reserve a seat at Nōnnō Umberto or Café on St. Armands for after 7 p.m. and walk in from the residential side streets.

The trolley solves the one thing residents complain about

Circle parking has always been the friction point, and it has not gotten easier. Daiquiri Deck's own guidance to guests puts it plainly. St. Armands Circle is all pay-to-park. You can download the Park Mobile app, or use the provided parking meters to pay for parking. Parking is generally free on Holidays, but subject to change based on City regulations.

The workaround, and this is genuinely the best-kept residents' secret when guests are in town, is the free trolley. Jump on the Bay Runner, the free open-air trolley offering daily service between downtown and Lido Key and St. Armands Circle. Park downtown, ride over, eat, walk to Lido Beach, ride back. On event weekends it turns a two-hour parking headache into a fifteen-minute logistics win.

The pattern underneath all of this

If you step back from the individual openings and permit filings, what is happening on St. Armands is a story most quarterly market reports miss. The Circle is not simply repopulating its old storefronts. It is being rebuilt, address by address, around resilient construction, family operators returning under new brands, and a mix of retail and residential above the ground floor. Nōnnō Umberto is the finished version of that story. The Kauffman Shore project is the version still on the drawing board. Everything in between is the transition you are living through.

For homeowners on St. Armands, Lido, and Bird Key, that pattern is worth watching for reasons that go beyond dinner reservations. When the next storefronts on the Circle rebuild, they will do it under the flood-conscious template being tested one block north. That changes the character of the ring, gradually, and it changes the conversations neighbors have about their own properties too.

If your own plans on the island have you thinking about what comes next, Christa Spalding is glad to talk through the neighborhood in the same level of detail. Let's connect.