The building at 738 SW Pine Island Road has already been through two barbecue concepts. It operated as Sonny's BBQ, then became Texas Tony's Rib & Brewhouse, which closed in 2025. This month, a Japanese concept called Sushi Masa signed the lease for the same 6,723-square-foot space, planning an all-you-can-eat sushi and hibachi menu as its fourth Florida location alongside outposts in Lakeland, Tampa and Pensacola.
If you have lived in South Cape for a while, that address probably does not register as a landmark. It is not on Cape Coral Parkway, where the cameras and ribbon-cutting scissors have been pointed all year. It is one block over, on a stretch of Pine Island Road that has quietly cycled through barbecue twice and is now betting on sushi. And that is exactly what makes it the more interesting story than the one everyone is already telling about South Cape's restaurant boom.
Two booms, not one
The version of this story that gets repeated everywhere goes like this: Bimini Square opened in February, the neighborhood got a shiny new anchor, and restaurants followed. That is true, but it skips over the part that actually explains what is happening on the ground. South Cape's dining growth this year has come from two separate directions that happen to be converging on the same handful of blocks.
The first is the big, capitalized, multi-year development play. The second is smaller operators filling gaps on an existing commercial strip, one lease at a time, without waiting for anyone's grand opening. Understanding which one you are looking at tells you something the ribbon cuttings do not: where the next new place is likely to open.
The anchor, and the restaurant it was supposed to have
Bimini Square is the $125 million mixed-use project that Crown Development built on six acres just west of Four Freedoms Park, and its developer, Larry Nygard, cut the ribbon on February 5 of this year after more than two years of construction. City officials have called it a cornerstone of the South Cape entertainment district, and it is easy to see why: 218 residences, a Lee Health primary care clinic, a marina, and ground-floor retail and dining space all on one waterfront parcel.
Here is the detail most coverage glosses over. When the project broke ground back in 2023, the restaurant announced for the site was Deep Lagoon Seafood and Oyster House, a name Southwest Florida diners already knew. That is not what opened. What actually arrived this year is Bimini Basin Seafood & Cocktails, a new concept from Phelan Family Brands built specifically for this address. Company CEO Grant Phelan described pulling favorite menu items from four of the family's existing restaurant brands, Pinchers, Deep Lagoon, Hogfish Harry's and Keewaydin's, into a single 9,000-square-foot space designed so that diners sitting down do not see the ground, an infinity-edge effect over the basin. Alongside it, a locally owned breakfast and lunch spot called House of Omelets took the sidewalk-facing storefront.
The plan changed between groundbreaking and opening day, which is a useful reminder for anyone tracking what gets announced versus what actually shows up. As of now, both restaurants are open and welcoming guests, according to the city's own development page, even though construction on the marina and restaurant buildout was still finishing on the day Mayor John Gunter cut the ribbon. Gunter's framing at that ceremony was simple: the test for any project like this is whether it makes the city better tomorrow than it is today.
The corridor that did not wait
While Bimini Square worked through two years of permitting and construction, a different kind of restaurant growth was already happening nearby, without a developer's press release attached to it.
Slipaway Food Truck Park & Marina opened on July 4, 2025, at the foot of the Cape Coral Bridge, right where Mandolin Canal meets the Caloosahatchee River. It runs ten food trucks around a central bar called The Helm Bar, with boat slips, more than 1,300 feet of riverfront boardwalk, and recurring events like the Sip & Shop Night Market and Wags on the Water that have made it a regular fixture rather than a novelty. It opened more than seven months before Bimini Square's ribbon cutting, on the same stretch of Cape Coral Parkway that had no marquee development attached to it at the time. It was a group of local investors, including a real estate broker and several Cape Coral business owners, betting on the corridor from the opposite direction.
Further east on Cape Coral Parkway, the same pattern shows up in smaller increments. Hibachi One opened in April, joining an existing run of independent spots that includes Tito's Cantina, Indian Breeze and Jungle Bird. Locals interviewed at the time described the change less as one big event and more as something arriving piece by piece, a new restaurant here, a new option there, until a stretch of road that used to feel like a pass-through started to feel like a destination in its own right.
What the Pine Island Road lease actually tells you
Put those two patterns side by side and the Sushi Masa lease makes more sense. When a strip like Cape Coral Parkway starts filling up, on both ends at once, the next wave of restaurant operators does not necessarily wait for space to open directly on the strip. They look one block over, at buildings that already have restaurant infrastructure, parking, and grease traps installed from a previous tenant. A building that has already hosted barbecue twice is a lower-risk bet for an operator than raw retail space, even if it means giving up the parkway address.
That is the piece a generic "look what's new in Cape Coral" roundup misses. The interesting fact is not that Sushi Masa is coming. It is that Sushi Masa chose a recycled barbecue building over trying to find room on the corridor everyone already associates with South Cape's comeback. If you want a read on where the next opening lands, watch the side streets off the Parkway, not just the Parkway itself.
What is actually happening this month
For residents who want to see any of this in person rather than read about it, the calendar gives you a reason to go this week. South Cape's BaconFest Pub Crawl runs the Cape Coral Entertainment District on August 22, hitting several of the bars and restaurants clustered around the corridor described above. If you are already a regular at Slipaway on a Friday night, or you have been meaning to try the new hibachi spot on Parkway East, the pub crawl is a low-effort way to string a few of them together in one evening.
The takeaway for anyone watching this stretch of the Cape
The headline version of South Cape's year is a single number: $125 million, one ribbon cutting, one anchor development. The more accurate version is that a single corridor grew from both ends at once, an institutional mixed-use project on the west side and a string of independent leases filling in from the east, and the overflow from that growth is now spilling onto side streets that most visitors never think to check.
If you already live near this stretch, that is worth knowing the next time a "coming soon" sign goes up somewhere unexpected. It is probably not random. It is the same pattern that put Sushi Masa into a building that has already survived two barbecue concepts.
Haven Group tracks changes like this across Cape Coral and the rest of Southwest Florida because they shape what a neighborhood feels like to live in, long before they show up in any market report. If you are curious what a specific block near South Cape looks like right now, or want a straight read on how a corridor like this one is trending, Haven Group is happy to talk it through. Contact us for a private consultation.
