Walk east on Central Avenue from 9th Street this month and the block-by-block texture changes fast enough to notice. Near the MLK corner, storefronts that sat empty for a year or two are filling with first businesses run by people who left other careers to open them. A few blocks later, across from Tropicana Field, the buildings are newer, the tenants are recognizable names, and one of them just hired a Food Network chef. Both stretches sit inside the same EDGE District. Both opened businesses in 2026. They are not the same bet.
That split is the more useful thing to understand about the district's current building boom than any single opening on its own. Five new food and drink concepts have landed or are landing on Central Avenue this year, and they sort cleanly into two groups based on where they sit on the street, not on what kind of food they serve.
The west end: three people betting on themselves
The 900 block of Central, closest to MLK Street, is where the smallest storefronts sit, and it's where three first-time or first-location owners have staked their opening.
Fusillo Italian Pasta, a fast-casual handmade pasta counter, is taking over roughly 700 square feet at 905 Central Avenue, a space that sat vacant for close to two years after Nash's Hot Chicken closed. The concept comes from two lifelong friends from Italy, Alessandro Casali and his business partner Greco. Casali spent his career on marine bridge projects for Italy's largest motorway company before deciding to open a restaurant. Greco was a Carabinieri officer and restaurant manager in Milan. Neither had run a restaurant in the United States before scouting Central Avenue.
"Florida felt like the land of opportunity." — Alessandro Casali, co-owner, Fusillo Italian Pasta
The plan calls for ten to twelve indoor seats and eight more outside, with a beer and wine license and hours that stretch to 1 or 2 a.m. on weekends to catch the district's late-night foot traffic.
A few doors down at 909 Central, in the former Expedia Cruises space between the now-closed Buya ramen bar and Fusillo, Sunshine City Paint is a women- and veteran-owned paint-and-sip lounge from owner Julie Gioscio, a former Marine Corps aircraft mechanic. The business had targeted a soft opening in early June, offering six wines on tap alongside instructor-led classes and open canvas time.
"The studio will provide easy and affordable indoor activities that will help build community." — Julie Gioscio, owner, Sunshine City Paint
Continue to 937 Central and construction is underway on Casa Origen, a farm-to-table breakfast and lunch counter moving into the space that housed No Vacancy, a retro Florida-themed bar that closed after a six-year run. The menu is built around organic, minimally processed ingredients sourced from Tampa Bay farms, grass-fed tallow instead of seed oils, and a counter-service format aimed at breakfast burritos, bowls, and smoothies. The opening is targeted for this summer.
None of these three had an existing brand, a chain behind them, or a second location elsewhere. Each one is a person's first shot at Central Avenue, in a storefront small enough to make that shot possible.
The east end: proven names moving into new construction
Head a few blocks east, past 12th Street, and the pattern flips.
Bosphorous Turkish Cuisine opened in February at 1246 Central Avenue, on the ground floor of the EDGE Collective building. The 5,200-square-foot restaurant, run by longtime restaurateurs Doved and Tammy Sexter, first opened in Winter Park in 2004 and has since expanded across Central Florida. The Sexters had been eyeing downtown St. Pete since 2019 before this location came together. The space itself was previously Furnish Me Vintage, a furniture and home decor shop that closed in 2019.
Sharing the same building, with an entrance fronting 1st Avenue South directly across from Tropicana Field, is Amorino Gelato, which held its grand opening on May 1st and 2nd with a giveaway of 1,000 free rose-shaped cones. Amorino is a French chain founded in Paris in 2002 that now operates roughly 300 shops in more than 20 countries. This is its second Florida location after a kiosk at Tampa's International Plaza, and its first full storefront in the state. The 1,800-square-foot shop sits inside a building constructed in 1926 and fully renovated as part of the EDGE Collective, complete with a 7,000-square-foot communal garden shared with office tenants upstairs.
A block further at 1301 Central, Ellison Development is building The Central, a 2.1-acre mixed-use project that will include a 168-room hotel under Marriott's Autograph Collection flag. Chef Geoffrey Zakarian, known for Chopped, The Kitchen, and Iron Chef America, will open his flagship restaurant there when it's finished, his first new restaurant in nearly a decade. Zakarian has described St. Pete as "a city brimming with energy and creativity." Construction on the hotel got underway through 2026, with the restaurant not expected to open until 2027. The project's first completed piece, a 540-space public parking garage across from Ferg's Sports Bar and Grill, opened in 2025.
Every name on this end of the street already had a track record somewhere else before it picked Central Avenue.
Why the split happens exactly where it does
The pattern isn't about taste or demand. It's about square footage and what kind of building is available to fill it.
The west end storefronts, at 905, 909, and 937 Central, are the kind of spaces that sat empty for one to two years after their last tenant closed. They're small, older, and priced for someone who's betting their own savings rather than backing from a franchise system or an institutional developer. That's exactly the profile of tenant who took them: two friends who left engineering and law enforcement careers, a veteran opening her first business, a farm-to-table concept still under construction with no other locations to point to.
The east end buildings are newer construction or ground-up renovations built by developers with capital behind them. The EDGE Collective building at 1246 Central was rebuilt from a 1926 structure into 16,000 square feet of modern retail and office space, the kind of buildout that comes with rents matched to tenants who can absorb them, like a 20-plus-year restaurant chain or a 300-location international gelato brand. The Central at 1301 is new construction from the ground up, anchored by a Marriott flag and now backing one of the biggest names in American food television.
Two different kinds of buildings are attracting two different kinds of tenants, and they happen to sit on the same half-mile of street.
A walk down Central Avenue, block by block
Here's what that split looks like if you're actually walking it this week.
- 905 Central — Fusillo Italian Pasta, which had aimed for an early-March opening in the old Nash's Hot Chicken spot.
- 909 Central — Sunshine City Paint, which had targeted an early-June soft opening in the former Expedia Cruises space.
- 937 Central — Casa Origen, under construction toward a summer target in the old No Vacancy building.
- 1246 Central — Bosphorous Turkish Cuisine, open since February on the ground floor of EDGE Collective.
- 1246 Central (1st Ave South entrance) — Amorino Gelato, open since its May 1-2 grand opening, sharing the renovated 1926 building with Bosphorous.
- 1301 Central — The Central, parking garage open since 2025, hotel construction ongoing, Zakarian's restaurant targeted for 2027.
Six stops, two entirely different kinds of buildings, and two different stories about who gets to open a business on this street right now.
If this pattern holds as EDGE Collective II moves forward and Casa Origen and the rest of the west-end openings settle in, the corridor's two halves are likely to keep feeling more distinct from each other rather than less, even as the total number of places to eat keeps climbing.
Watching a neighborhood's commercial corridor this closely, block by block and building by building, is the same instinct that shapes how Plotkin Homes tracks St. Petersburg's neighborhoods for clients who want more than a median price and a listing photo. If you're curious what's actually happening on the ground in the EDGE District or any other St. Pete neighborhood, reach out and we'll walk you through it.
