What's Back, What's Still Boarded, and What's Next on St. Armands This Fall
August 6, 2026
August 6, 2026
Drive the Circle on a Tuesday morning and the split-screen is obvious. On the south arc, the awnings are down and the sidewalk tables are back. On the north arc, a chain-link fence still wraps a former Chase Bank and the shell of a candy shop that has been dark since the fall of 2024. Two years after Helene and Milton, St. Armands is not a place that "reopened." It is a place operating on two clocks at once, and if you live on Lido Key, the difference between those clocks is the difference between a normal fall and one where you keep driving past the same fenced parcel.
The useful thing to know as a resident is which businesses are on the fast track and which are on the slow one. That determines where you can take a friend next month, which corners of the Circle will still be under construction at Christmas, and which of the fall events are actually worth planning around.
The most watched reopening of the winter belonged to the Salustri family. Le Colonne, the Italian mainstay that closed after the 2024 storms, returned to 22 S. Boulevard of the Presidents in early January under a new name that honors Simone Salustri's father, Umberto. 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. If you tried to walk in during that first week and gave up on the wait, the room has since settled into a rhythm. The team is excited to share what the new menu has to offer for diners, especially the beloved Italian dishes that showcase seafood, like the ravioli aragosta (lobster ravioli).
The other room worth re-learning is the old Café L'Europe address at 431 St. Armands Circle, now operating as The Café on St. Armands. Oysters Rock Hospitality kept the landmark building but changed almost everything else. The Café on St. Armands features a Mediterranean-inspired menu with small plates and a seafood focus. The inspiration draws from meals from places like Spain, Greece, Italy, North Africa and the Middle East. Two adjacent concepts share the address and are worth knowing by name if you are meeting friends: The Wet Bar, a Gatsby-inspired lounge with creative cocktails, and Café Soleil, a coffee bar with morning cocktails. Between the three, one building now covers breakfast, a small-plates dinner, and a late drink, which is a very different footprint from what Café L'Europe occupied for half a century.
Around them, the anchors that never went dark are still running on their long-standing schedules. Crab & Fin, on the Circle since 1978, is still doing a bar happy hour from four to six and an early-dining discount from 4:45 to 5:45 seven nights a week. Columbia Restaurant is still Columbia. What has changed is that these anchors are no longer surrounded by the same mid-block tenants they had two years ago, which is where the second clock comes in.
If you have wondered when something is going to happen with the empty parcels on North Boulevard of the Presidents, the answer is now on the record. 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. Mindy Kauffman of Kauffman Shore Properties LLC is listed as the property owner of 24 and 28 N. Boulevard of the Presidents. She is proposing a three-story building that would contain retail, restaurant and residential space on 0.33 acres.
The context matters if you were a Shore regular. Shore restaurant, with locations on Longboat Key and near Orlando, previously had a St. Armands Circle location, but it closed in December 2024 after suffering flooding damage from hurricanes. The replacement is not a quick rebuild. The two addresses on North Boulevard of the Presidents have been vacant since the 2024 flooding, and 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 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 design is being written specifically for a barrier-island parcel that has now flooded on record. 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, including flood panels on the first story. The date to circle, if you are counting the months until that stretch of the Circle looks like the rest of it: the buildout date for the project is the fourth quarter of 2027, according to the development application, and the case was scheduled to appear before the Sarasota Development Review Committee on July 15.
Two clocks, two different Circles. It is worth naming the split plainly:
The Circle's event schedule has shifted around the reopenings, and it is denser in the shoulder months than it looks. If you want to keep the year on one page:
The two September events are the ones locals tend to underrate. They are close enough together that you can plan a single weekend where you skip the car entirely, which is the other thing that has quietly changed on Lido.
If you have not used it since the storms, the Bay Runner is worth re-learning as a resident tool rather than a visitor one. The Bay Runner is the free open-air trolley offering daily service between downtown Sarasota and Lido Key and St. Armands Circle. On a Third Thursday, or a festival Saturday, or any evening at Nōnnō Umberto where the wait pushed past your parking meter, it is the difference between the Circle being an errand and the Circle being an evening.
The residents' association has been using this to its advantage. LKRA's own calendar this year has leaned into the Circle's operating rooms, with meet-and-greets scheduled at Daiquiri Deck on St. Armands and the annual meeting held on the 8th floor of the Lido Beach Resort. The pattern is worth borrowing at a smaller scale. Pick a Third Thursday, park once, and let the trolley pick the return time.
The convenient story about the Circle is that it "came back." The accurate story is that half of it came back on a fast track measured in months and the other half is being rebuilt on a track measured in years, with a specific 2027 target that determines what the north arc looks like every time you drive it between now and then. Knowing which parcels are on which clock is the difference between a fall of vague frustration at the fences and a fall spent actually using what is open.
If you are weighing what any of this means for a specific address on Lido Key, whether that is a Ben Franklin Drive condo whose view now includes a future construction schedule or a Boulevard of the Presidents cottage sitting inside the Circle's walking radius, that is the kind of conversation Cindy Fischer is built for. Let's Connect.
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