Walk St. Armands Circle this month and the island reads like recovery finished months ago. The tiki hut behind the Ritz-Carlton is packed by 4 p.m. Nōnnō Umberto has a wait on weekends. The building at 28 South Boulevard of the Presidents, gutted by storm surge less than two years ago, now holds a coffee bar, a jewelry shop, and a candy counter doing steady business in bacon-and-caramel bark. If you only look at storefronts, Lido Key looks done.
It isn't. The fastest parts of this recovery ran on private money and construction schedules that don't need anyone's vote. The part that actually determines what happens in the next storm runs through a city commission, a consultant's cost estimate, and a bill that hasn't been written yet. That's the piece worth tracking if you live here, and it has almost nothing to do with the next restaurant opening.
The Two Months When Everything Reopened at Once
The Tiki Bar quietly reopened to walk-up beach traffic in April with a rebuilt hut and a refreshed drink menu. The real send-off came two months later. On June 20, the Ritz-Carlton held a sunset celebration with a fire eater, a steel pan player, and dancers from GRAE Productions for around 200 guests, closing out an 18-month rebuild after high winds tore the original bar down during the 2024 storm season.
A few blocks over, the Salustri family had already had their own version of that night. Le Colonne, their Italian restaurant on the Circle since 1998, was destroyed by Helene and Milton. Rather than close for good, they ran a food truck called Buonissimo Mobile Italian Kitchen to keep the business alive while they rebuilt. When the restaurant reopened in January as Nōnnō Umberto, staff served more than 250 guests the first night and roughly 800 over the first week, according to co-owner Amber Mayner.
Malia Price's timing landed the same month. At 22, she opened The Sarasota Style at 410 St. Armands Circle, in the space that used to hold Tilden Ross Jewelers next to Crab & Fin, with ribbon cuttings from both the Sarasota and Longboat Key chambers of commerce in mid-January.
Across the ring, the three-unit building at 28 South Boulevard of the Presidents finished its own quiet comeback. Flooding had forced the owners to strip drywall four feet up the walls and rebuild the electric and HVAC systems on an elevated platform. Le Shop, a coffee and wine bar, opened in November. Acadia Jewels Fine Jewelry & Design opened January 1. Then Chocolate Emporium, branching from its original shop on Anna Maria Island, soft-opened its second location there in late June, filling the final vacancy in the building. Store manager Liv Baker has said she expects more locations to follow.
The churn hasn't stopped. Sloan's Ice Cream, the hot-pink Palm Beach County chain that's been expanding since 1999, has signed for 1,450 square feet at 380B St. Armands Circle, its first Florida west coast location, with an opening targeted for early 2027 in a space that Speaks Clam Bar vacated after nearly eight years.
Behind all of it sits the reason any of these businesses have foot traffic to compete for. On May 26, the City of Sarasota and the Army Corps of Engineers cut the ribbon on a completed $12 million renourishment project that restored 1.2 miles of shoreline south of Ted Sperling Park, using roughly 300,000 cubic yards of sand dredged from New Pass. It's part of a 50-year agreement with the Army Corps calling for renourishment roughly every five years. The last one was in 2021.
Here's a rough scorecard of where things stand as of this month:
| What's happening | Status |
|---|---|
| Ritz-Carlton Tiki Bar | Fully reopened, June 20 celebration |
| Lido Beach renourishment | Complete, ribbon-cut May 26 |
| Nōnnō Umberto (formerly Le Colonne) | Open since January, high demand |
| The Sarasota Style | Open since January |
| 28 S. Blvd of the Presidents building | Fully leased as of June |
| Sloan's Ice Cream | Signed, targeting early 2027 |
| Lido Beach dune project | Under construction, finishing early 2027 |
| Shore restaurant rebuild | Stalled on permits, targeting fall 2027 |
| Undergrounding of Circle/Lido power lines | Approved in July, assessment not finalized |
What the Ribbon-Cuttings Don't Show You
Every project on the top half of that table answered to a private schedule. A hotel chain's construction budget. A family's decision to keep serving food out of a truck until the dining room was ready. A landlord's insurance settlement. None of that requires a public vote, which is why it moved in months instead of years.
The bottom half runs on a different clock. Sarasota's dune project, set to raise the protective dunes along Lido Beach by two feet to a 6.6-foot elevation, is scheduled to begin this fall and won't wrap until early 2027. City engineer Sage Kamiya has framed it as the difference between a 10-year storm buffer and a 25-year one. It's a $1.2 million project, a tenth the cost of the sand alone, but it's the piece that actually decides whether the next storm re-erodes the beach the city just rebuilt.
Shore is the clearer example. The café and restaurant spent more than 15 years on the Circle before closing in 2024 after taking on several feet of saltwater during back-to-back hurricanes. Owner Tom Leonard, part of the Kaufman Shore Properties group, is targeting a flood-resilient rebuild for fall 2027, with the restaurant following a few months after the café and retail side. Reopening well and reopening fast turned out to be two different decisions, and Shore chose the slower one.
The Vote That Actually Determines the Next Storm Season
The piece of this recovery you can't see from the sidewalk happened at City Hall, not on the Circle. On July 20, the Sarasota City Commission voted twice, both unanimously, to bury every overhead electric and communications line running from St. Armands Circle to the far end of Lido Key. The first vote approved a $7.95 million professional services agreement with Utility Consultants of Florida, a Largo firm that beat out Kimley-Horn and Bowman Consulting for the work. The second adopted a resolution authorizing an $8 million tax-exempt line of credit to get the project moving before the assessment is finalized.
That assessment is the number worth watching. Charles Haff, vice president of the St. Armands Residents Association, told commissioners that more than 80 percent of the roughly 3,500 households on the barrier islands support the project, even knowing it likely means a special assessment near $10,000 per property spread over 20 years. That figure isn't locked in. City staff still has to come back with real parcel-level numbers, and commissioners are trying to coordinate the timing with a separate St. Armands drainage project moving through Sarasota County, so crews aren't digging up the same stretch of road twice.
The parallel to the beach project isn't subtle. Both are long-term maintenance obligations dressed up as one-time fixes. HOA president Carl Shoffstall said as much at the beach ribbon-cutting when asked what comes next.
"We are looking for the next one already."
He meant the sand. The same logic applies underground. A finished storefront tells you the island reopened. A finalized special assessment tells you whether it's actually built for what's coming.
What's Actually on the Calendar Before Then
Two events are already locked in for residents planning the next two months. The St. Armands Circle Craft Festival runs September 12 and 13, a free two-day outdoor event with more than 100 artisans set up along South Boulevard of the Presidents and inside the Circle's park. The Jaguar Festival d'Elegance returns to the Circle this fall as well, drawing antique and current-model Jaguars to the same stretch of pavement it's used for decades. Both are worth working around if you're hosting visitors, since parking on the Circle has never been generous and a car show reserves most of the visible curb.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
The mistake is treating the storefronts as the whole story. They're the fast half, the half that private capital and a family's willingness to run a food truck for a year could rebuild without anyone's permission. The slow half runs through commission chambers, and it's the half that decides whether Lido Key handles the next major storm differently than it handled the last two. That decision is still pending, with real numbers expected back before the commission later this winter.
If you're trying to read this island accurately, the Tiki Bar reopening tells you the recovery started. The assessment vote this winter will tell you whether it finished.
If you own property on Lido Key or St. Armands and you're trying to figure out what any of this means for your specific address, whether it's insurance, resale timing, or just understanding what you're actually paying for over the next 20 years, Pointer Property Group knows this stretch of coastline block by block. Reach out and we'll walk through what it means for your corner of the island.
