"There is a lot of economic synergy happening in Vilano Beach," Linda LaCerva, president of Vilano Beach Main Street, said in late 2024. "The excitement and energy are exceeding expectations."
She was talking about a hotel opening. If you live here, you probably felt the same thing but couldn't quite date it. Vilano Road doesn't feel like it exploded. It feels like it has been quietly rearranging itself, one building at a time, for about four years. That's because it has. Since 2022, this short stretch of road between the pier and the Publix plaza has added almost exactly one new dining destination a year, on a schedule steady enough that you could set a calendar by it. The surprise isn't that Vilano changed. It's that the change came in a sequence, not a wave, which is exactly why so many locals still describe the corridor as "a few good spots" when it now has closer to a dozen.
A corridor that adds one thing at a time
Start with what's actually documented. In October 2022, the space that had been Puccini's Pizzeria became Surfside Kitchen, a coastal casual gastropub in the Ava Way plaza just off A1A. Two years later, in October 2024, the Hyatt Place St. Augustine/Vilano Beach opened its doors as a 120-room, Art Deco-inspired hotel at 117 Vilano Road, and with it came Pesca Vilano, a rooftop kitchen and bar from chef Michael Lugo built around Latin and Caribbean flavors pulled from his native Puerto Rico. Early this year, Surfside Kitchen changed hands again and came out the other side with a modern menu overhaul, craft cocktails, and a reworked bar program. By June, Anchor 28 had opened on Vilano's main drag with a seafood-forward menu and a veranda styled to match the coffee shop a few doors down at the Holiday Inn Express.
That's four distinct additions in four years, each one landing roughly twelve months apart. It explains why the corridor doesn't read as a boom to the people who drive it every day. Nothing arrived all at once. But zoom out to the full stretch, from the Ava Way plaza to the pier, and you're looking at a food scene that didn't exist in its current form as recently as 2021.
There's a fifth chapter already in motion, and it's worth being precise about its status. Jared Van Dyke, a St. Augustine resident and real estate investor, along with his brother Joshua, a longtime Massachusetts restaurateur, is exploring a roughly 100-seat, open-air restaurant at 2931 Coastal Highway on a 0.86-acre lot, inspired by a coastal eatery on Plum Island. As of the most recent reporting, the project sits in St. Johns County's pre-application phase, which means the plans are conceptual and can still change substantially before anything is built. If you've heard a rumor about a new restaurant with live music and a courtyard bar, this is likely the source, and it is not open yet.
What's actually open on Vilano Road right now
That distinction matters, because Vilano's growth story is easy to overstate in one direction and undersell in the other. Here's the state of the corridor as it stands today.
| Addition | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Surfside Kitchen | Open, under newer ownership | Rebranded from Puccini's Pizzeria in 2022, menu and bar overhauled in early 2026 |
| Pesca Vilano | Open | Rooftop bar and restaurant inside the Hyatt Place, opened alongside the hotel in October 2024 |
| Anchor 28 | Open | Seafood restaurant on Vilano's main drag, opened around June 2026 |
| Van Dyke brothers' project | Not open, pre-application | Conceptual open-air concept proposed for 2931 Coastal Highway |
Everything in the top three rows is something you can walk into tonight. The fourth is a county filing, not a reservation. If you're planning an evening out based on what you've heard secondhand, that's the gap to know about before you drive over expecting a new courtyard bar that isn't there yet.
The calendar caught up to the corridor
For years, Vilano's public life ran on a summer clock. The beach filled up, the restaurants got busy, and by October things went quiet. That's no longer true, and the fall 2026 lineup is the clearest evidence.
The Florida Skimboarding Pro/Am Tournament, which draws competitors from more than 75 locations, ran August 14 through 16 this year, and the Vilano Beach Artisan Market Walk, a sidewalk market for local artisan goods, plants, and datil pepper sauces, filled the pier area the day after on August 15. Both have already come and gone for this season, but they set up what's next. The Vilano Beach Fall Triathlon runs October 11. The Vilano Music Festival, a one-day showcase of local bands, follows on October 17, running from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. The Jailbreak 5K crosses the Vilano Bridge from the St. Augustine Old Jail on October 24. And starting November 21, Nights of Lights sunset boat viewings begin, running through January 18, which means the corridor's calendar now stretches from a summer skimboarding tournament straight through a winter light display without a real gap.
Pair that with the restaurant timeline above and the pattern becomes obvious. A resident heading to the triathlon in October now has Anchor 28 and Pesca Vilano as dinner options that didn't exist for the equivalent event two years ago. The corridor isn't just hosting more events. It has finally built the infrastructure to feed the people who show up for them.
Why the growth stays on one street
If you've noticed that all of this is clustering on Vilano Road and Coastal Highway rather than spreading into the surrounding residential blocks, that's not a coincidence, it's a funding boundary. Vilano Beach operates as one of three Community Redevelopment Areas in St. Johns County, and the CRA's use of funds is limited to a defined footprint, roughly Ferrol Road north to Gardner Avenue. Vilano Beach Main Street, the nonprofit that manages the district, applies for reimbursement within that boundary and directs where redevelopment dollars land. That's a structural reason the new hotel, the rooftop bar, and the seafood restaurant all sit within a few blocks of each other instead of scattering across the wider North Beach community.
The scale of that investment is real, even if it's a long-run figure rather than a single-year snapshot. A Florida Department of State release from November 2024 credited Vilano Beach Main Street with more than $44 million in public and private investment and 25 net new businesses since the district earned its Main Street designation in 2003. That same fall, St. Johns County approved $58,000 in continued funding for the organization's programs, and county commissioners marked the groundbreaking of a $1.8 million Oceanfront Park renovation that includes a new covered performance stage with terraced seating. None of that is a this-quarter statistic. It's more than two decades of steady, boundary-limited reinvestment that happens to be compounding right now, which is why four restaurant changes in four years feels less like luck and more like a system doing what it was built to do.
What it means if you already live here
None of this requires you to do anything differently this week. But it does mean a few things worth knowing before your next walk down to the pier. If you're planning around the Van Dyke project, treat it as a maybe, not a menu. If you haven't been back to Surfside Kitchen since before this year, the ownership change means it's not the same kitchen you remember. And if your usual routine skips October because "nothing happens after Labor Day," the triathlon, the music festival, and the Jailbreak 5K are proof that assumption stopped being true.
The dolphin sculpture and the Blue Bird of Happiness statue still greet you at the pier entrance the way they always have. What's changed is what's within walking distance of them, and how much of the year gives you a reason to make that walk.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property values or timing a sale in Vilano Beach, that's a longer conversation, and it's one Claudia Hilbert and the team at Ponte Vedra & Co. have on a daily basis with people who already call this corridor home. Reach out for a free consultation and home valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
