Third Street has three new signs up this year, and if you've walked past any of them, they don't read like a young chef's first swing at a concept. Grouper Shack opened at 1700 Third St in December, taking over the storefront the Bearded Pig barbecue joint left behind that spring. Bella Vista A'Mare moved into the old Biggies Pizza space at 311 3rd St N, next door to Rita's, in early 2026. And out on Beach Boulevard, a Smalls Sliders location is due before the end of the year. What connects them isn't the food. It's that every one of these operators had already proven the concept somewhere else before they picked Jacksonville Beach for the next address.
That distinction matters if you live here and want to know what a new storefront actually signals. A first-time restaurant on a beach block is a bet on an idea. A second or third location from an owner who already has the sales numbers from another town is a bet on this specific stretch of Jacksonville Beach.
Every one of these has already done this somewhere else
Grouper Shack's Jacksonville Beach location is owned by Nathan Stuart and Margo Klar, who between them run eight restaurants across Northeast Florida. They opened their first, Orange Park Fish House & Oyster Co., back in 2018, and have since added Boathouse locations in St. Augustine, Ponte Vedra Beach, and Julington Creek, a second Grouper Shack in St. Augustine, and New Berlin Fish House & Oyster Co. in Jacksonville. The Third Street location is their second Grouper Shack, and it opened in a soft-launch phase training a staff of 50 before settling into its regular hours. Stuart has said the seafood runs on whatever's coming off North Florida boats that week, wahoo one stretch, sheepshead the next, dropped off daily by local commercial fishermen. The property also includes a market counter selling portioned fish, oysters, and crab legs to take home, along with shuckers, gloves, and spice rubs, still under construction as of the restaurant's opening.
Bella Vista A'Mare is the second location for chef Giovanni Prignano, whose original Bella Vista in Fruit Cove has been a St. Johns County fixture since 2022 and picked up multiple St. Johns Magazine Best Of honors in 2024, including Best Italian Restaurant and Best Chef. The Jacksonville Beach spot carries over the same menu built around dishes like cacio e pepe and veal Milanese, with murals of the Amalfi Coast on the walls as a nod to Prignano's upbringing near Salerno. It seats around 125, smaller than the Fruit Cove original's 150, and runs a full bar the first location didn't originally have.
Smalls Sliders is a different kind of second act. It's a national fast-casual chain known for its bright orange shipping-container buildings, and Jacksonville Beach is one of only two sites the brand chose for its entry into this market, the other going up in St. Johns. The Beach Boulevard location is expected to run about 820 square feet with a walk-up window, a drive-thru, and covered outdoor seating.
Here's the short version of what's landed and what's still coming:
- Grouper Shack — 1700 Third St, opened December 2025, second location for owners with eight restaurants across Northeast Florida
- Bella Vista A'Mare — 311 3rd St N, opened early 2026, second location for a Fruit Cove restaurant with multiple 2024 St. Johns Magazine Best Of wins
- Smalls Sliders — 14444 Beach Blvd, expected by the end of 2026, one of two initial Jacksonville-market locations for a national chain
The same owners are betting on Avondale too
Stuart and Klar aren't only expanding within the beach. Across town, they're preparing to open Boathouse Avondale around Thanksgiving at 3951 St. Johns Ave, about half a mile from the core of Avondale's shopping district. That location will lean into sushi and seafood, building on the "best sushi" titles their Ponte Vedra Beach Boathouse has already collected. The building itself was a grocery store roughly a century ago, and the couple had to renovate it to Avondale's preservation standards before deciding to open a restaurant there instead of re-leasing it to another tenant.
The point isn't that one restaurant group is busy. It's that the same operators who know exactly what a successful seafood concept costs to run and what it earns are choosing to plant flags in both Jacksonville Beach and Avondale in the same year. That's a different signal than a single new restaurant opening on its own.
The Saturday routine doesn't care who's opening next door
None of this changes what already happens every Saturday. The Jax Beach Arts Market runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Latham Plaza and Seawalk Pavilion, and the Beaches Green Market runs the same morning, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., over at Penman Park. Both are on the city's own recreation calendar as standing weekly events, not seasonal pop-ups. Whatever storefront turns over on Third Street, these two markets keep their same footprint and their same morning slot, which is worth knowing if your Saturday already has a shape to it.
Two weekends already on the calendar
Beyond the weekly rhythm, two events anchor the fall at Seawalk Pavilion specifically. Beaches Oktoberfest returns October 16 and 17, built around local craft breweries alongside imported lagers, with live music running through both days. Then on November 7 and 8, the Super Girl Surf Pro comes to town, billed as the world's largest women's surf competition and free to attend, with live music built into the event as well. Between the two, Seawalk Pavilion carries most of the neighborhood's outdoor foot traffic for the back half of the year, on top of whatever else is already booked there on a given weekend.
If you're planning around either one, parking near the pavilion is worth treating as a limited resource. It fills fast on major festival weekends, and arriving early tends to matter more than anything else you can plan for.
What ties the restaurant news to the calendar isn't coincidence. A neighborhood that draws proven multi-unit operators to open second and third locations is the same neighborhood that can support a free surf competition and a two-day beer festival without either one feeling like a stretch. The markets run every Saturday whether or not Third Street has a new tenant. The restaurants opening this year aren't guesses. Between the two, Jacksonville Beach's fall calendar reads less like a list of things happening to the neighborhood and more like a record of who already decided it was worth building here.
If you're weighing what it actually means to live near this stretch of Jacksonville Beach, from the daily rhythm on Third Street to what a property near Seawalk Pavilion is worth holding onto, The Gilman Group can walk you through it with the same candor we'd want if we were asking.
