Walk the Circle this month and you will notice two kinds of storefronts. Some have new glass, fresh paint, and a sign that says the same name it said before the hurricanes, sometimes with the same family standing behind the counter. Others are still fenced, still rendered only in an architect's drawing, still waiting on a hearing date two years after the water came in. The easy read is that recovery is simply slow and uneven, that some owners had the money and some didn't, that some got lucky and some didn't. Spend an afternoon with the actual timeline of who reopened when, and a different pattern shows up. On St. Armands, the businesses that came back exactly as they were closed within a year or two. The one project trying to come back as something bigger has been in front of the city for nearly three years and still doesn't have a finished building.
That distinction matters if you live on St. Armands, Lido, or Longboat and have spent two years watching this recovery from the inside. It tells you which empty storefront is actually close to opening and which one is a longer story than the plywood suggests.
The Reopening Two Years in the Making
Armel Jewelers has served St. Armands patrons for roughly fifty years, part of a brand that traces back to 1937 in New York under founders Solomon "Sid" and Arlene Melnick. Hurricanes Helene and Milton put four and a half feet of standing water through the store at 22 N. Boulevard of the Presidents, and second-generation owner Michael Melnick has called the rebuild a "long haul," describing a gut renovation where crews "had to tear out everything." The shop is set to reopen this month, with a grand opening planned for later in September, roughly two years after the storms that closed it.
That is the shape of the fast recovery on the Circle: same family, same address, same trade, and a rebuild timeline measured in months and a couple of years, not in city hearings that stretch across multiple calendar years.
The Ones That Never Really Left
A few blocks away, a different kind of change tells a related story. St. Armands Jewelers took over the space that housed Jewelry by Cole, a shop whose namesake goldsmith Stephen Cole Powell began handcrafting fine jewelry in 1974. This wasn't a storm rebuild. It was a straightforward ownership transition, with new owner Mia Tohar Eylon keeping longtime manager Diane DelloRusso and jeweler Gary Goss, who brings 59 years of experience in the trade, at the same 7 N. Boulevard of the Presidents address the shop has occupied for decades. No hearing, no site plan, just a new name on an old storefront.
Down the block, the restaurant everyone on the Circle knew as Le Colonne went through its own version of the same story. When Helene and Milton forced the family to close, Simone Salustri and co-owner Amber Mayner bridged the gap with a food truck called Buonissimo Mobile Italian Kitchen, buying time to gut the space and decide what the reopened restaurant should be. It came back in early January 2026 at the same 22 S. Boulevard of the Presidents address, rebranded as Nōnnō Umberto in honor of Umberto Salustri, with a menu built around seafood dishes like ravioli aragosta. The address didn't move. The footprint didn't grow. Only the name and the menu changed.
A few quick additions round out the list of storefronts that have reopened or arrived new this year:
- Chocolate Emporium, previously a single shop on Anna Maria Island, opened a second location at 28 S. Boulevard of the Presidents, bringing its small-batch truffles and salt water taffy to the Circle for the first time.
- Sarasota Style, a lifestyle and clothing brand celebrating everything Sarasota, held its ribbon cutting on January 14, 2026, at 410 St. Armands Circle.
None of these tenants, whether rebuilding after a flood or simply signing a new lease, asked the city for anything beyond what the address already allowed. That is the common thread, and it is also the reason a St. Armands Residents Association vice president offered a useful way to think about why some owners rebuild quickly while others hesitate. Speaking at a city visioning session about the Circle's future, Chuck Haff, a longtime commercial property investor, put it in terms of risk pricing: if you expect your building to flood every five years, you have to discount your expected profit by roughly 20 percent to account for it, and reducing that risk is what actually unlocks investment.
Restoring what you already had is a bet you can size up quickly. Adding something new to it is a bet that invites the city, the neighbors, and the zoning code into the decision, and that conversation moves on a much slower clock.
The One Project Still Behind the Fence
The clearest test case for that idea sits on the northeastern lip of the Circle, at 24 and 28 N. Boulevard of the Presidents, where Shore Restaurant is trying to come back as something larger than it was.
Shore closed its original 465 John Ringling Boulevard location in late 2024, citing hurricane damage and what co-founder Tom Leonard called a lack of urgency from the city on infrastructure. That original space has since been leased to Tommy Bahama, so Shore isn't simply rebuilding its old address. Instead, the Leonard family is proposing to combine two vacant, storm-damaged parcels into a three-story mixed-use building with more than 17,000 square feet of retail, café, and restaurant space, topped with a residential condominium wrapped around a private pool. A formal site plan landed at City Hall in June 2026, and the case went before Sarasota's Development Review Committee in mid-July 2026. According to the development application, the buildout is targeted for the fourth quarter of 2027, nearly three years after Shore's original location went dark.
The added floor is the sticking point. St. Armands sits in a Commercial Tourist zoning district that has held a hard line against hotels for decades, and while the restaurant and retail space doesn't require rezoning, the residential unit on top has drawn scrutiny from an association that has seen this fight before. Leonard chaired a St. Armands Business Improvement District campaign in 2021 and 2022 that pushed to raise the Circle's height limit from 35 to 45 feet and permit hotels at higher density. The City Commission rejected that proposal by a 5-0 vote in November 2022, and the BID was later disbanded after it emerged the group lacked authority to pursue the zoning change in the first place. A separate hotel-and-market scheme for the Circle's Fillmore parking lot collapsed around the same period after it became clear that municipal bond covenants protected the lot's paid parking spaces.
None of that history is a comment on whether the new Shore concept is a good idea. It's simply the reason a restaurant with deep local roots and real capital behind it has spent close to three years in planning while a fifty-year-old jeweler down the street reopened its doors this month. Restoration moves at the speed of construction. Reinvention moves at the speed of a hearing calendar.
What's Actually on the Calendar This Fall
For residents planning around what's actually open, the fall lineup on the Circle is worth marking down. The 37th Annual St. Armands Circle Art Festival returns on November 14, bringing roughly 200 artists working in sculpture, glass, photography, and jewelry to booths along South Boulevard of the Presidents and inside the Circle itself. Halloween brings the 17th year of Fright Night, the Circle's long-running family Halloween event. The Jaguar Festival d'Elegance rounds out the season with its annual showcase of antique and modern Jaguar automobiles, a fixture of the Circle's fall calendar for years.
Layer that calendar over the storefront map and the practical picture comes into focus. If you're planning a fall evening on St. Armands, Nōnnō Umberto, St. Armands Jewelers, and Chocolate Emporium are open now, and Armel Jewelers joins them this month. The northeastern corner near Madison Drive will stay a construction site for a while longer, and based on the timeline the city has on file, that's likely to remain true through most of 2027.
If you already live on Longboat Key, Lido Key, or St. Armands, none of this changes your address. But it does change how you read a fenced lot the next time you drive past one. The question worth asking isn't how much damage a building took. It's whether the owner is putting back what was there, or asking the Circle to become something it wasn't before.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a property you own nearby, or you're curious how St. Armands' slow, uneven recovery is shaping values on the surrounding keys, Your Global Agents can walk through it with you. Request a complimentary consultation and market valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
