The two-mile sidewalk along Coffee Pot Bayou and North Shore Drive is one of the most consistently used pieces of public space in St. Petersburg. On any given Saturday morning, you will find walkers, joggers, cyclists, and paddleboarders already out before the heat arrives. Pelicans work the water. Manatees surface near the boat ramp at Coffee Pot Park. Dolphins appear without warning and disappear the same way.
This part of the neighborhood is not new information. Old Northeast residents have known it for years. What shifted in 2025 was simpler and more specific: the building at the south end of that walk became somewhere you could actually go.
The Anchor That Went Dark
The Vinoy Resort and Golf Club sits at 501 Fifth Avenue Northeast, where the waterfront path bends toward downtown. It is a 1925 Mediterranean Revival building that shows up in the background of most aerial photographs of St. Petersburg. For anyone who walks the bayfront regularly, it is simply part of the view.
Marchand's Bar and Grill, the Vinoy's signature restaurant, closed in 2020. For nearly five years after that, the hotel operated in a kind of transitional state — renovating, changing ownership, refiguring itself — while residents walked past it on their morning routes. The building was there. The destination was not.
That absence mattered more than most food coverage acknowledged. The waterfront corridor between Coffee Pot Bayou and the downtown Pier is a natural arc. It has a launch point, a middle, and a logical end. Without a functioning anchor at the south terminus, the walk had no arrival. You looped back.
What the Renovation Actually Produced
New ownership committed to a $50 million renovation of the Vinoy, and the first visible result for residents came on May 20, 2025, when Elliott Aster opened inside the hotel's original dining hall.
The restaurant is a collaboration between the Vinoy's new ownership and the Chicago-based Boka Restaurant Group, led by Michelin-starred Chef Lee Wolen, a 2025 James Beard Award semifinalist. Wolen's resume includes stints at El Bulli, Eleven Madison Park, and the Four Seasons Palm Beach, but the concept he built for the Vinoy is grounded rather than showy. The menu focuses on wood-fired steaks, handmade pastas, and a rotating antipasti bar. Specific dishes include King Crab Tagliatelle, a 45-day dry-aged prime bone-in ribeye, squid ink chitarra, and smaller plates like endive and beets salad with Florida citrus and feta.
The name comes from Elliott's aster, a Florida-native wildflower with pink-purple blooms that attracts Monarch butterflies. It is a specific, local detail in a project that could easily have reached for something more generic.
The dining room itself draws from the building's original architecture — restored Pompeian frescos, ornate plaster castings, and historic photographs of St. Petersburg on the walls. There are two entrances: one through the hotel lobby, and one via the outdoor terrace overlooking the porte-cochère. That second entrance matters if you are arriving from the waterfront path rather than from a hotel room. It reads less like a hotel restaurant and more like a restaurant that happens to sit inside a historic building.
Elliott Aster serves the main dining room Tuesday through Sunday from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m., with the lounge and bar open from 4 p.m. to midnight.
What the Walk Looks Like Now
Coffee Pot Park sits at the northern end of the corridor, at the corner of First Street Northeast and 31st Avenue Northeast. The park has a kayak ramp, a boat ramp, a playground, and shaded benches along the bayou. It fills up early on weekends, and the trailer parking spots are frequently claimed before 9 a.m. Street parking on the surrounding blocks is the practical fallback.
From the park, the wide bayfront sidewalk runs south roughly two miles, following North Shore Drive past North Shore Park before reaching the downtown waterfront and the St. Pete Pier. The same path connects north toward Weedon Island Preserve for cyclists willing to cover more ground. The surface is level, well-lit, and carries consistent foot traffic across all seasons, though the wildlife calendar shifts: winter draws manatees seeking warmer water, spring brings courtship activity in the shallows, and summer mornings offer the densest paddleboard activity before the afternoon heat sets in.
At the Pier's southern end, Perry's Porch opened as a waterfront dining option — named for Commodore Perry Snell, the developer whose land purchases in the early 1900s created much of the neighborhood's physical geography. It offers coastal cuisine from morning through dinner with views of the skyline and the bay. For residents walking the corridor on a weekend morning, it provides a logical midpoint stop.
The full arc now works the way it was always supposed to: Coffee Pot Bayou as the starting point, the walk south as the middle, and a genuine choice at the end — the Pier and Perry's Porch for daytime, Elliott Aster and the Vinoy terrace for evening.
What's Still Coming
The Vinoy's renovation is not finished. The ownership group has indicated that future phases will include improvements to Paul's Landing, the hotel's poolside restaurant, and upgrades to the Vinoy Esplanade, an outdoor event space on the waterfront side of the building. Neither has a confirmed opening timeline as of May 2026.
The practical implication for residents is that the Vinoy as a neighborhood amenity is still expanding. What opened in 2025 was the first phase of a longer project. The corridor has its anchor back, but the anchor is still being built out.
For residents of Old Northeast, this is not a story about a hotel renovation. It is a story about the walk you have always taken finally having somewhere to land.
If you are thinking about what that corridor means for value in this neighborhood, or if you have questions about what is selling and at what prices on the blocks closest to the waterfront, Plotkin Homes knows this market at the street level. Reach out any time.
