Fifth Avenue South has had roughly the same twenty restaurants for years. What changed this year is that several of the ones already there stopped being what they were. Chef Vincenzo Betulia spent years running The French Rustique Brasserie on the avenue before converting the same space into Tulia Italian Steak, adding an outdoor bar and swapping French plates for Italian steak and pasta. He didn't leave the address. He changed what it does. A few blocks west, Roma Italian Bistro & Pizzeria moved into the former KJ Sushi space and came back as Ottimo on 5th Cucina & Bar, same owner, same street, new menu entirely.
That pattern, an address staying put while its purpose changes, is also the story of the whole neighborhood this fall. For the past few years, Old Naples has lived next to fencing: a shuttered beach hotel being rebuilt into a resort, a downtown hotel rising near Third Street South, a golf course being rebuilt on ground that had sat closed since redevelopment began. None of those projects finished on the same clock. This is the season several of them land within the same few weeks of each other, right as the calendar that actually runs the neighborhood, the farmers market, the film festival, the tree lighting, starts back up for the year.
A resort finishing its second act
Naples Beach Club, A Four Seasons Resort opened its doors in October 2025 on the site of the old Naples Beach Hotel & Golf Club, the beachfront property that had anchored that stretch of Gulf Shore Boulevard North for nearly 80 years before its redevelopment. What opened last October was phase one: the 220-room hotel, the restaurants HB's and Sunset Bar reviving names locals already knew, and the Merchant Room under chef Gavin Kaysen.
The part still arriving is phase two, and it's landing now. The Gardens, an 18-hole course designed by Tom Fazio in partnership with Discovery Land Company, is set to open this fall, replacing the public course that closed when the old Naples Beach Hotel & Golf Club began its redevelopment. Alongside it, the resort's Market Square is filling in the amenities that weren't ready for last year's opening: The Wager, a sports gastropub with a four-lane bowling alley and putting green, and The Picture House, a 22-seat cinema showing first-run films. Both were promised for 2026 when the resort opened, and both are arriving in the same stretch as the golf course.
A hotel on the block where the city started
Half a mile away, on the same general timeline, the Olde Naples Hotel opened its first phase this year at 200 Broad Avenue South, part of the Opal Collection. It sits on the block where Naples was founded in 1889, and its restaurant, Annie's Bistro, Bar & Bakery, is built to work all day, morning café through dinner service, open to anyone walking by, not just hotel guests staying upstairs. That distinction matters for a downtown where hotel restaurants have historically served hotel guests first. Annie's is designed to function as a neighborhood restaurant that happens to sit inside a hotel, a few steps from Third Street South.
Here's the convergence in one place:
| What | Where | What changes this fall |
|---|---|---|
| Naples Beach Club, A Four Seasons Resort | 801 Gulf Shore Blvd N | The Gardens golf course, The Wager, and The Picture House complete the second phase of a resort that opened in October 2025 |
| Olde Naples Hotel | 200 Broad Ave S | First full season for Annie's Bistro, open to non-hotel guests, on the block where Naples was founded |
| Tulia Italian Steak | Former French Rustique Brasserie space, Fifth Ave S | Still calibrating its menu after converting from French to Italian steak in 2025 |
| Ottimo on 5th Cucina & Bar | Former KJ Sushi space, Fifth Ave S | Relaunched under the operators of Roma Italian Bistro & Pizzeria |
| Barrio Taqueria | 539 Fifth Ave S | Opened February 18, heading into its first fall and winter season |
| All Too Well Gourmet Sandwiches | 795 Fifth Ave S | Opened February 12, same |
Five separate multi-year timelines, a resort redevelopment, a hotel build, three restaurant conversions, none of them coordinated with each other, are all clearing their final milestones inside the same season. That's not typical. Naples projects usually finish one at a time, spaced out enough that a resident notices each one on its own. This year the spacing collapsed.
The avenue itself, in the numbers that matter
The other way to read the Fifth Avenue South changes is by what kind of restaurant they are, not just which ones. Until Bontà Bakery opened on the south side of the avenue two years ago, the casual, no-reservation options on Fifth were mostly coffee, cupcakes, and Kilwins. Barrio Taqueria and All Too Well Gourmet Sandwiches, both opened in February, extend that shift: quick, walkable food at Fifth Avenue rents, run by operators with real kitchen experience rather than counter-service chains. Slice Shop, a by-the-slice pizza spot near Vergina, filled a gap the avenue had never had at all.
None of this replaces the avenue's fine-dining core. It sits next to it. Twelve of the avenue's established rooms, including Aqua, Bistro 821, Le Colonial, Ocean Prime, Osteria Tulia, Sails Restaurant, Truluck's, and Tulia Italian Steak, are running Flavors of Fifth through September 30, a prix-fixe program that puts a lower-cost tasting of the avenue's higher-end kitchens on the table for a few more days before the season crowd arrives and reservations tighten back up. Proceeds from each menu sold go to Beverly's Angels, a program supporting local workers and their families.
What the calendar does next
Right now, in late September, the avenue's weekly summer programming has already wound down. Evening on Fifth, the Thursday night series of live music, dining, and shopping along the sidewalks, ran its last date of the season on September 10. Flavors of Fifth closes out the month on September 30. For a couple of weeks after that, the neighborhood's public calendar goes quiet before the next run of dated events lands in quick succession:
- October 23–26: Naples International Film Festival, hosted by Artis-Naples, with screenings and filmmaker Q&As.
- October 25: the Fifth Avenue South Halloween Spooktacular, held at Cambier Park with an Evening on Fifth extension from 5 to 8 p.m.
- Mid-November: the Third Street South Farmers Market resumes its Saturday morning run through April.
- December 5: the Christmas Walk and official tree lighting on Fifth Avenue South, in Sugden Plaza.
That's the same six-week window the Gardens golf course and the Olde Naples Hotel's first full season are landing in. The neighborhood's public life and its physical construction are hitting the same calendar for once.
A smaller, quieter version of the same idea showed up on 12th Avenue South, where Flora & Fauna, a longtime floral studio, expanded into a full storefront with a champagne bar and a curated gift collection. It's not a headline opening. It's the same logic as Tulia and Ottimo: an address that was already part of the neighborhood, doing something different with the same square footage.
None of this changes what Old Naples is. The beach is still two blocks past the last restaurant table on any given street. What changes is how much of the neighborhood residents will see finished, rather than fenced, over the next two months. A long-promised golf course finally taking tee times. A hotel restaurant on a block that predates the rest of downtown by more than a century. A stretch of Fifth Avenue South where the addresses stayed the same and almost everything else didn't.
If you've been watching one of these projects from your own street and want to know when the fencing actually comes down, Tom & Sue Weidlich keep a running list of what's opening in Old Naples and when. Book an appointment and we'll walk you through what's actually finished versus what's still promised for later this year.
