Central Avenue Finished What It Started. The Chattaway Almost Didn't Get to See It Happen.

"I'm excited to get started and excited to see what the next 75 years looks like." That's Cullen Mahoney, the real estate investor who now owns the Chattaway, talking about a 75-year-old burger joint on 22nd Avenue South that almost closed for good this summer. Twenty blocks north, on Central Avenue, a food hall that took six years to build finally has something to serve you on a Tuesday night. Both of those sentences are true in St. Petersburg this August, and neither one is the story most people who live here have actually heard.

Here's the thing worth knowing if you've been putting off a trip downtown: the version of Central Park St. Pete you've read about, the one with two counters and a bar, is already out of date. And the Chattaway, which was supposed to be gone by now, isn't going anywhere. Both things happened at once, on opposite ends of the same city, and together they say something about how this neighborhood is actually handling growth right now, not how the press releases describe it.

What's Actually Serving Food at 551 Central Ave Right Now

Central Park St. Pete opened its first two counters, Palm Avenue Deli and Constellation Burger, for takeout only back on February 19. A soft opening for dine-in followed four days later. Most coverage from this spring and early summer described the place exactly that way: a five-story building with a construction history longer than some marriages, serving food on one floor while the rest sat unfinished.

That description no longer holds up. Walk in today and the food hall level is running eight live concepts: Central Bar and its beer wall, Palm Avenue Deli, Constellation Burger, Speaks Pasta, Strawberry Fields, Don Ricardo's Taqueria, Kojo Wok, and Park Pie Pizza. Underneath the main floor, the 22-seat cocktail parlor known as The Winfield has quietly opened too, which is the piece most people who only looked at the ground level are missing.

What's still on the way:

1. Kojo, the full-service Asian restaurant on the rooftop, which operates on a real-restaurant construction timeline rather than a food-hall one
2. Bar Hana, the tiki-style rooftop bar attached to Kojo
3. Night Owl, the members-only fifth-floor social club

The building took six years partly because of the pandemic and partly because of consecutive Gulf Coast hurricane seasons that pushed the timeline more than once. None of that changes the fact that as of this month, the ground floor is a real food hall with eight kitchens, not a rumor with a beer wall attached.

Twenty Blocks South, an Old Favorite Almost Didn't Make It

While Central Avenue was finishing something new, the Old Southeast neighborhood was almost losing something old. The Chattaway, a family-run restaurant at 358 22nd Avenue South known for its pink-and-green paint job, painted bathtub planters, and a British tea room run by matriarch Jillian Frers, went under contract in March. The plan at the time was for it to close for good in mid-July after more than 75 years in the same family.

Then the story changed. A local ownership group stepped in, led by Mahoney along with Ferg's Sports Bar owner Mark Ferguson and Shrimpy's Waterfront owner John John Delladonna, and decided to keep the restaurant running rather than shut it down. The sale is expected to finalize this August, with a grand reopening tentatively planned for late August or September.

What's changing: the new owners plan to add more seafood to the menu, obtain a liquor license, and install a proper point-of-sale system. Ferguson has been candid that the tea room probably won't survive the transition. What's staying: the layout, the outdoor patio with its quirky bathtub planters, and the pink-and-green color scheme that's made the place recognizable for decades.

Ferguson said the model for this kind of deal came from watching what happened to El Cap, the vintage neighborhood bar and burger grill on 4th Street North, when the Seed & Feed Hospitality Group bought it in 2023 instead of letting it disappear. That's worth sitting with for a second. This isn't the first time an old St. Pete institution has been bought by people who grew up going there, rather than replaced by whoever could pay the most for the real estate. It's starting to look like a pattern, not a one-off.

Not every old favorite gets that ending, though. Thirsty First, the sports bar and neighborhood hangout at 515 Central Avenue, closed for good in July after a decade in business, with owner Greg Mikurak throwing a final celebration for regulars before locking the doors. Ten years wasn't enough to survive whatever came next for that lease. Seventy-five years, so far, has been enough for the Chattaway.

The Grand Central District Filled In While Everyone Watched Central Park

The two headline stories aren't the only thing that changed this year. West of downtown, in the Grand Central District, the fill-in has been just as real. This is the stretch bordered by 16th Street and 31st Street, home to more than 450 independently owned businesses and the birthplace of St. Pete Pride, according to the district's own association.

Jimmy's, the longtime Ybor City taco spot known for birria and shrimp tacos on handmade tortillas, opened a second location at 2534 Central Avenue in the former home of The Foundry vintage furniture store. It carries the same menu that won Best Guacamole and Best Ybor City Restaurant in Creative Loafing Tampa Bay's 2025 Best of the Bay awards.

A few blocks the other direction, in the EDGE District, two Italian transplants opened Fusillo Italian Pasta at 905 Central Avenue in early March, building bowls around fresh daily pasta for thirteen to fifteen dollars. Downtown proper picked up Mei, a Nordic-Japanese concept from the team behind the Michelin-tied Kōsen, running two separate dining experiences under one roof: a 50-seat communal Living Room and an eight-seat Kitchen Counter tasting menu. Beach Drive got Isu, a Nikkei restaurant tucked into the basement of Fortu under the same ownership. And inside St. Pete Distillery, a 45-seat speakeasy called 31 South opened with Prohibition-era design details and a chef whose background includes Michelin-rated kitchens.

None of that is Central Park's doing. It happened around it, on the same streets, in the same stretch of months.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

If you've been treating downtown St. Pete's restaurant boom as a single story about one big building on Central Avenue, that story is too small. The bigger one is that a neighborhood can finish a six-year construction project, save a 75-year-old restaurant from closing, lose a ten-year-old bar, and add half a dozen new independent kitchens within a few blocks of each other, all in the same year, without any of it canceling the others out.

The corridor is only going to get busier from here. Central Park still has its rooftop restaurant, its tiki bar, and its members-only club to bring online, and the Chattaway's grand reopening is targeted for late this month or September. If you'd rather see the ground floor of one and the patio of the other before the crowds catch up to both, this is the window.

Whether you're already a regular at Jimmy's or you grew up going to the Chattaway on Sunday afternoons, the way this stretch of St. Petersburg keeps rebuilding itself without erasing what came before is worth paying attention to, especially if you've ever wondered what it means for property nearby. If that's you, Madison Wells knows this stretch of Pinellas County block by block and is always happy to talk through what a changing corridor like this one means for a home you already own or one you're watching.