Two New Restaurants Landed Near Pelican Marsh This Year. They Are Not the Same Kind of New.

The path out of Pelican Marsh toward Vanderbilt Beach Road hasn't changed. Cyclists still cut through under the same canopy of live oaks, past the same lakes where herons work the shallows toward evening. What has changed is what's waiting at the end of that path, on two different corners of one intersection.

Head east across US-41 and you land in Mercato's Piazza, where a courtyard that's spent all of 2026 rebuilding its lineup just added two new tenants. Head south instead, into the far end of The Pavilion shopping center, and you land at a restaurant that spent fifteen years under one chef's name before becoming something else entirely last spring. Same walk. Two very different definitions of "new."

What Landed in the Piazza

Mercato's central courtyard has spent this year filling storefronts that sat empty or moved on from older concepts. The most talked-about addition is Violí, a Greek-and-Italian restaurant from DineAmic Hospitality, the Chicago group behind LÝRA in the West Loop's Fulton Market district. Owners David Rekhson and Luke Stoioff built the concept around chef Athinagoras Kostakos, a winner of Greece's version of Top Chef, and gave him a patio filled with pink flowers and string lights.

A few of the details worth knowing before you book:

• Address: 9110 Strada Pl. #6145, Naples
• Hours: Sunday through Thursday, 3 p.m. to 11 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 3 p.m. to 1 a.m.
• Happy hour: 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. daily
• Patio: roughly 1,500 square feet

The pastitsio and the charred octopus have already built a following. The sokolatopita, a dark chocolate cake layered with hazelnut praline, tends to close out the table.

Joining Violí this year was Waxin's, a concept that blends the warmth of a Swedish bistro with the casual sophistication of an American gastropub, another new occupant in the Piazza's expanding footprint. Between the two, Mercato has doubled down on what it's always done well: import a proven concept from somewhere else and let it find its footing in Naples.

That's not a knock. It's a pattern worth naming, because it tells you what kind of "new" you're actually getting when a restaurant opens inside Mercato's courtyard. These are well-capitalized concepts with a track record built somewhere else first, then transplanted here.

Across the Intersection, a Different Kind of New

Walk the other direction, toward The Pavilion at 885 Vanderbilt Beach Road, and you'll find Amber Cove, which spent fifteen years operating as KC American Bistro under chef-owner Keith Casey before he sold the restaurant in the spring of 2025. The buyer was Tim Herman, a hospitality veteran with more than 40 years running properties including LaPlaya Beach & Golf Resort, The Inn on Fifth, Caesars Palace, and The Venetian in Las Vegas. Herman brought in chef Jehad Alsharabini, who had worked under him previously at Baleen, and repainted the dining room navy blue for a nautical theme built around Gulf seafood: miso-glazed Chilean sea bass, Faroe Islands salmon, and 32-hour braised short ribs served under a cloche of applewood smoke.

Amber Cove opened in early May 2025. This past May it marked one year in business, celebrating with a locals-only early dining window from 4 to 5:30 p.m. and a running promotion called Winesday, where a 9-ounce pour costs what a 6-ounce pour usually does. In January, Gulfshore Life named it one of Southwest Florida's Best New Restaurants for 2026, a recognition that landed eight months after the restaurant had already opened. That gap matters if you've been sorting through "best new" lists to decide where to eat this season. By the time a restaurant makes a year-end feature, it's usually already found its rhythm.

One restaurant asked a Chicago hospitality group to bring its Fulton Market playbook south. The other asked a hotelier who had spent four decades in Naples to reinvent a space he already understood.

That's the real difference between the two directions out of Pelican Marsh this year. Mercato's Piazza gives you a concept built somewhere else and scaled here. The Pavilion gives you a room built by someone who has been solving this stretch of Vanderbilt Beach Road's dining problems since before Hurricane Ian.

The Third Sunday Still Belongs to the Cars

None of this has touched the one ritual that's stayed fixed all year. Cars & Coffee 239, hosted by the Paradise Region Gruppe Porsche club, still runs on the third Sunday of every month on Mercato's Piazza. The format hasn't moved. Owners park on the display lawn, a different local musician plays the Piazza stage each month, and a rotating local charity benefits from the gathering, from Laces of Love to Pace Center for Girls to SNIP Collier County. Curated VIP lawn parking still runs on a fifty-dollar donation to whichever nonprofit is featured that month, and Collier County Sheriff's deputies still work both entrances, on Vanderbilt Beach Road and at US-41, the same posts they've held for years.

If you've skipped it because it sounded like a car show, it isn't really one. It's closer to a monthly neighborhood gathering that happens to have several hundred cars parked around it, and it's one of the few things on the Mercato calendar that this year's restaurant turnover hasn't touched.

What Hasn't Moved Inside the Gate

The changes outside Pelican Marsh haven't required anything to change inside it. The golf club, a Robert von Hagge design carrying Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary certification, still runs its own dining room and its own calendar of member events. Center Court, the community's tennis and pickleball complex, still operates with a full-time director and the same open-play schedule regulars have relied on for years. The walking and biking paths through the Cocohatchee Strand preserve, part of the 133 acres set aside inside the community's more than 1,000 acres, haven't been rerouted.

The one piece of Pelican Marsh infrastructure that has actually broken ground this year sits at the community's own front door. The Community Development District's new guard gate at the US-41 entrance began construction in April 2026. It's a small project by Naples standards, but it's the only physical change on this side of the intersection this year. That makes the contrast with Mercato and The Pavilion a little sharper: the neighborhood itself is holding steady while everything just outside its gates keeps turning over.

Two Directions, Two Kinds of Evening

None of this is really about picking a favorite restaurant. It's about knowing, before you leave the house, which kind of night you're walking into. A reservation at Violí is a reservation with a concept that's already proven itself somewhere else and is still settling in here. A seat at Amber Cove is a seat with a chef and an owner who built the room specifically around what this stretch of Naples actually wants to eat.

Both are a short walk or an even shorter bike ride from the same gate. That's the part worth remembering the next time someone asks what's new near Pelican Marsh. The honest answer isn't one restaurant. It's two different theories about what "new" should mean here, sitting on opposite corners of the same intersection, both reachable without ever starting your car.

Laurie Bellico has worked Naples' gated golf communities long enough to know that a neighborhood's daily rhythm, not just its home prices, is what keeps people here year after year. If you're curious what your Pelican Marsh home might be worth in today's market, or just want to talk through what's changing in the neighborhood, reach out to Laurie Bellico.