Is South Beach Grille Back Open on Fort Myers Beach?

Yes. South Beach Grille reopened on 26 August 2026 at Santini Marina Plaza, 7205 Estero Boulevard, on the south end of Fort Myers Beach, following an invitation-only soft opening over the preceding weekend. It is serving from 4pm to 10pm. The reporting comes from Fort Myers Beach Talk, the Beach Observer and Beach Bulletin's news site.

It had been closed since 28 September 2022, the day Hurricane Ian came ashore and flooded the plaza, which is very nearly four years. It is one of the island's most recognised restaurants, a recipient of multiple Fort Myers Beach Observer Best of the Beach awards, and it had served the island since 2004.

The restaurant is run by Brad Phillips and his wife Susan. Brad's father Dennis Phillips opened it, so this is a second-generation business resuming rather than a new one arriving. The couple grew up in Naples and live in Bonita Springs. Head chef Cory Morin has returned after working there before the storm, along with a number of the veteran staff. The paper quoted Brad Phillips saying he had missed Fort Myers Beach and was looking forward to life getting back to normal, and a customer, Johanna Farley, saying simply that they had really missed it.

I am Kris Asquith, Broker Associate at Premiere Plus Realty, and I sell across nine Southwest Florida markets including Fort Myers Beach.

Santini Marina Plaza sits on Estero Boulevard on the south end of the island, and every tenant it had was flooded when Ian came ashore. The plaza's owner, Yariv Shaked, has spent the years since rebuilding it, and the rebuild was not a like-for-like restoration. Reporting on the recovery describes impact-rated windows and doors on the storefronts, waterproofed cement, a new roof system and secured air conditioning units, changes aimed at the plaza surviving the next storm better than it survived the last one.

It has come back one tenant at a time rather than all at once. Legno Italian Kitchen, an Italian and Sicilian restaurant run by John Maffei, opened there in December 2025 and was the first restaurant back since the storm. South Beach Grille follows it, so the south end now has two full-service restaurants operating where Ian had left none.

Because it is the harder half of the problem, and it is the half that does not show up in a construction schedule.

Rebuilding a dining room is solvable with money and time. Reassembling a staff close to four years later, after everyone has moved on to other jobs and in many cases other towns, is a different kind of difficulty, and it is not something a new operator can buy. A restaurant that reopens with its own chef and its own people is not really a new restaurant. It is the previous one resuming.

For an island that lost most of its dining in a single night, the distinction between those two things is most of what recovery actually means. New tenants filling old storefronts is a plaza being leased. The original operators coming back is the island getting its own places back, and that is a slower and better signal.

Slowly, and unevenly, which is the honest way to describe most of Fort Myers Beach's recovery. The commercial rebuild has not moved at one pace across the island. Times Square, the commercial district at the north end, took the brunt of the damage and has been rebuilding in its own right for years. The south end, further from the pass, lost its restaurants and shops just the same, and Santini Marina Plaza's tenants going dark for close to four years is a fair measure of how long full commercial recovery actually takes here, regardless of which end of the island a property sits on.

The practical consequence is that a buyer who visited a year ago and formed a view may be working from an out-of-date picture. Some plazas have tenants now. Some blocks still do not. Nobody can honestly put a number on what a reopened restaurant does to nearby property values, and any agent who tells you otherwise is guessing. What is fair to say is what changed on the ground: a stretch of the south end that had nowhere to eat now has two working kitchens.

Ask what is actually open near it rather than what is planned. Fort Myers Beach has had no shortage of announced projects since Ian, and the gap between an announcement and an open door has caught more than one relocating buyer off guard. Santini Marina Plaza is a useful example precisely because it is not a rendering. Legno Italian Kitchen and South Beach Grille are both open for business today, with staff, menus and hours, which is a materially different thing from a plaza that is still permitted and unbuilt.

For a buyer weighing the south end specifically, that distinction is worth more than most of what shows up in a listing description. A storm-hardened plaza with two operating restaurants tells you something concrete about the pace of recovery on that stretch of Estero Boulevard. It does not tell you what a particular home is worth, what its flood elevation is, or what its association holds in reserves, and those are the questions that actually decide what a property costs to keep. The Fort Myers Beach waterfront homes page covers what else moves value here, and the Fort Myers Beach vacation and second homes page covers what changes if you are weighing this as a second home rather than a primary residence.

Read the recovery of a commercial plaza the same way you would read any other piece of local news: as one data point, not the whole picture. Santini Marina Plaza's slow, tenant-by-tenant reopening says the south end is coming back and is worth watching. It does not replace an inspection, a flood-zone check, or a look at what an association actually has in the bank, all of which matter more to what you pay to own a place than whether the restaurant two blocks away has reopened. The home buying process walks through where each of those gets checked, in order, before you are under contract.

If you are weighing a property near the south end, or anywhere else on Fort Myers Beach, get in touch or call (239) 300-1427 for a straight read on a specific address rather than the island in general.