On a Thursday evening at Santini Plaza, the parking lot fills before six. Bikes lean against the railing outside Legno Italian Kitchen. A line forms at the door of South Beach Grille. Two miles north, Times Square sits quieter, still defined more by what used to be there than what is.
That gap says something the reopening lists tend to miss. Fort Myers Beach isn't recovering evenly. It's recovering in patches, and right now the patch doing the most work isn't the one with the name everyone remembers.
Santini Plaza did what Times Square couldn't do yet
After Hurricane Ian, Santini Plaza on the south end went nearly dark. Business owner Jeff Nesbit of Nesbit Real Estate Inc. described it plainly to WINK News: it had been a ghost town for a long stretch, and this year marks a real turn. Legno Italian Kitchen owner John Maffei told the same outlet that when he opened his doors, the whole community showed up right away.
That kind of quick, organic reactivation is the story of the south end this year. South Beach Grille, long one of the most popular hangouts for residents and visitors in that stretch, was aiming for a July 15 grand opening this summer, with a possible soft opening beforehand. A few blocks over in Key Estero Plaza, Jersey Mike's had targeted that same mid-July window, and the owners behind the old Mr. Tequila are aiming for a September 2026 debut under a new name, Sol Tequila. Same family, same location, new sign out front.
None of this required a zoning fight or a flood-elevation redesign. These are existing footprints getting filled back in with tenants who wanted to come home. A snowbird named Jojo McCloskey put it simply to WINK News: now she just takes her bike down to the plaza, because it's coming back and that's what residents like.
Times Square is rebuilding by inches, and the first project tells you why
Compare that to Times Square, the plaza whose name still gets used as shorthand for the whole island. Since Ian, it has run almost entirely on temporary infrastructure: food trucks, pop-up counters, provisional seating. The town's first approved permanent replacement building cleared Town Council on December 15, 2025, and it's not a bar or a restaurant reflecting the old identity of the district. It's a three-story building with an open-air ice cream concept, Meli's Ice Cream Shop, on the ground floor and a one-bedroom residence for the owner's family above it, replacing the old Kilwins site at 50 Old San Carlos Boulevard.
The numbers behind that approval explain the pace of everything else at Times Square. The parcel is about 1,195 square feet. To make the project work under current flood and building codes, the town approved a floor-area ratio of 2.5 instead of the standard 1.8, allowing 2,797.5 square feet of development stacked vertically on a lot that small. That's not a business owner choosing to reopen. That's a business owner negotiating with FEMA elevation rules, tighter zoning, and a last-minute agreement to help pay for a future wave-mitigation wall if the town ever builds one, according to reporting from SWFL Life and Gulfshore Business.
A second Times Square project is still working through that same process. Developer Shlomo Melloul has proposed a three-story building on two parcels facing the pier and Lynn Hall Memorial Park, with a rooftop bar, ground-floor space for street vendor kiosks, a public shade and water station, and an art installation meant to recall the old street bazaar feel of the district. Melloul told the Fort Myers Beach Observer and Bulletin earlier this year that he was frustrated pier construction hadn't started, noting the island was already three and a half years past the hurricane at that point. As of that reporting, the Army Corps of Engineers was still reviewing the county's plans for the rebuild, and current estimates put pier completion around August 2027, nearly five years after Ian.
That's the mechanism worth understanding if you live here. Times Square isn't slow because nobody cares. It's slow because every square foot there has to answer to flood maps and floor-area math in a way that a strip plaza on the south end doesn't.
The old guard never left, and the in-between spots are holding the line
Not everything on the island was waiting on permits. Nervous Nellie's, the waterfront restaurant on Old San Carlos Boulevard that's been serving grouper tacos and stone crab claws since 1991, kept its place through all of it. Pinchers, a few doors down, kept its fresh fish market counter running as a reliable stop for families coming off the beach.
Mom's Restaurant sits in between those two stories. It's operating as a food truck at its original Estero Boulevard spot while permanent rebuilding plans move forward, still serving the buttermilk biscuit sandwich and the meatloaf grilled cheese that regulars ask for by name. It's a small, useful reminder that some of the island's most familiar flavors are running on temporary equipment right now, the same way Times Square itself has been running on temporary structures since 2022.
The events calendar is already routing around the construction
This year's calendar bears out the same pattern. The Beach Keepers Club opened its 2026 season with the 11th Annual Cleanup this spring, well before the construction dust at Times Square had settled. The lineup heading into fall keeps that same energy spread across the island rather than anchored to one plaza:
- Mullet Madness, hosted by What's Up FMB, brings a two-day run of live music, themed contests, and the Joe Dirt Look-Alike Contest for kids and adults.
- Island Hopper Songwriter Fest spreads award-winning singer-songwriters across local bars, restaurants, and beachfront venues rather than concentrating them in one plaza.
Even JobuFest, originally slated for its usual spot, had to relocate to The Whale on May 30 because of ongoing construction at its normal venue. That's a small but telling detail from earlier this year. Event organizers were already planning their calendars around the reality that the traditional center of the island wasn't ready to host large gatherings, and they found new ground rather than waiting.
What this actually means if you live here
If your mental map of Fort Myers Beach still puts Times Square at the center, it's worth updating that map for at least another year or two. The south end, particularly Santini Plaza and Key Estero Plaza, is where the everyday rhythm of the island has relocated while the historic downtown works through a rebuild that's constrained by code in ways a strip plaza simply isn't. Times Square will get its restaurants, its rooftop bars, and eventually its pier. The first building cleared council this past December, and a second is in the pipeline. But for this season, the island's daily life is happening two miles south, and it's worth knowing that before you plan your evening around a name that hasn't caught back up yet.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property on the island, whether you already own here or you're watching from a distance, the team at KW Elevate Luxury tracks these plaza-by-plaza shifts as part of understanding how Fort Myers Beach is actually functioning, not just how it's marketed. Contact us if you'd like a grounded, local read on what's happening on the island right now.