Walk down Central Avenue on a Tuesday night this September and you'll pass the five-story building at 551 Central with its lights on, its sign lit, and its ground floor doing real business. Order a reuben and it's the truth: this is Central Park St. Pete, the food hall that took six years to build and finally opened its doors back in February. What you won't find, seven months later, is the food hall that got promised. Twelve of the fourteen concepts announced for this building are still not serving the public. The taqueria isn't open. The modern Asian restaurant with its street food sibling isn't open. The ice cream counter, the smoothie bar, the pizza spot, all still coming.
That gap between the headline and the storefront matters if you live within walking distance of Central Avenue, because it changes how you should be spending a Tuesday night this fall. The building isn't the story right now. What happened around it while it finished its second floor is.
What "open" means on a random Tuesday
Central Park's rollout has always been staged rather than sudden. The first phase launched February 19, when Palm Avenue Deli and Constellation Burger began serving takeout and delivery only, from 5 to 10 p.m. Four days later, on February 23, the building added a soft opening layer: Central Bar and its self-serve beer wall, plus a health-focused café called Strawberry Fields. Downstairs, a 22-seat cocktail parlor called The Winfield opened beneath the main floor.
That's the version of "open" that's held through the summer. By the most recent local reporting, two of the fourteen planned food concepts, Palm Avenue Deli and Constellation Burger, are the ones actually cooking on the ground floor. The main bar pours. The Winfield seats a small crowd if you can get in. The rest of the building, including the rooftop Asian restaurant that was supposed to anchor the top floor, is still under construction inside a structure that's been fighting delays since before ground broke.
Some of that is genuinely not the developer's fault. The building sits inside the former Woolworth space, a structure pushing a century old, and the project ran into COVID-era shutdowns, hurricane damage, and structural integrity issues with the building itself before vertical construction even started. Six years between groundbreaking and a soft opening is a long timeline, but it's also the timeline a 100-year-old building imposes on anyone trying to gut and rebuild it five stories at a time.
Here's the practical breakdown for anyone deciding whether tonight is a Central Park night:
| Status | What's there |
|---|---|
| Live now | Palm Avenue Deli (pastrami, reubens, matzo ball soup), Constellation Burger, Central Bar and beer wall, The Winfield (basement cocktail parlor) |
| Still not open | The taqueria, the high-end Asian restaurant and its street food counterpart, ice cream, smoothie, and pizza concepts, additional bars, the rooftop restaurant |
If you're planning a night out around the idea that Central Park is now a finished food hall with six kitchens to choose from, you'll be choosing between two kitchens and a bar. That's a different evening than the marketing suggests, and it's worth knowing before you build a plan around it.
The neighborhood's calendar doesn't wait for one building
St. Petersburg's fall food calendar isn't contingent on this address finishing its buildout. The SHINE St. Pete Mural Festival returns downtown this fall, drawing crowds to the same Central Avenue corridor Central Park sits on, regardless of how many of its kitchens are running. And the marquee food event of the season isn't happening inside that building at all. SAVOR St. Pete returns to Vinoy Park November 7 and 8 for its fourteenth year, presented by the City of St. Petersburg, Visit St. Pete-Clearwater, and Publix, with Chef Lee Aquino of Birch & Vine hosting a lineup of local and national culinary talent along the waterfront.
Neither of those depends on Central Park's rooftop restaurant opening on schedule. They're proof that this neighborhood's food identity was never going to hinge on one five-story building finishing its rollout. It's built from dozens of smaller openings happening in parallel, most of which moved faster than the headline project.
While the fence stayed up, Central Avenue kept cooking
In the same stretch of time Central Park has spent finishing two floors, several other addresses within a fifteen-minute walk went from construction to fully booked.
Fusillo Italian Pasta opened at 905 Central Avenue in early March, just a few blocks from Central Park, with build-your-own pasta bowls running $13.50 to $15.50. It was serving customers within weeks of its build finishing, no phased rollout required.
Jimmy's, the longtime Ybor City taco spot known for birria and shrimp tacos on handmade tortillas, opened a second location this year at 2534 Central Avenue in the Grand Central District, inside the former home of The Foundry vintage furniture store. The original location won Best Guacamole and Best Ybor City Restaurant in Creative Loafing Tampa Bay's 2025 Best of the Bay awards, and the St. Pete shop runs the same menu.
Down on Beach Drive, Isu opened in the basement of Fortu, sharing ownership and a management team with the restaurant upstairs. The menu reads as Japanese-Peruvian Nikkei and izakaya at once, built around raw fish and ají peppers, and it opened with none of the multi-year buildup Central Park carried.
In Tierra Verde, chef Jason Ruhe and his wife Hope Montgomery run Sea Worthy Fish + Bar, the third restaurant in a network that also includes Brick & Mortar downtown and Pulpo Kitchen + Lounge in Grand Central, all built around whole fish broken down in-house daily from local fishermen and trusted fishmongers.
And over the summer, Mei, a French-Nordic Japanese kitchen, opened in the old Bento space downtown. Tampa Bay Times food critic Helen Freund wrote that it has stepped up the city's fine-dining game.
None of these restaurants needed a six-year construction timeline or a phased public rollout. They opened, they staffed up, and they started taking reservations. That's the more accurate picture of how this neighborhood actually eats right now: distributed across a dozen addresses that moved at normal speed, not concentrated inside one building that's still finishing its second act.
The other food story that almost didn't get an ending
There's a second story from this year that says something similar from the opposite direction. The Chattaway, a south St. Pete institution operating for 75 years at 358 22nd Avenue South, was reported under contract back in March, with the expectation that the city's longest-running restaurant would close after the sale. The sale went through. The closure didn't.
A local ownership group led by real estate investor Cullen Mahoney chose to keep The Chattaway running instead of shuttering it, bringing on Ferg's Sports Bar owner Mark Ferguson and Shrimpy's Waterfront owner John John Delladonna to help operate it. Four people with deep roots in this market decided a 75-year-old restaurant was worth keeping alive rather than converting into something else.
That's the pattern worth noticing across both stories. The big, headline-driven anchor project has taken six years and is still not finished. The quiet save of a beloved institution happened because people who already had restaurants in this market recognized what was worth protecting and moved on it fast.
What this means if you already live here
If you're deciding how to spend a fall evening downtown, treat Central Park St. Pete as what it currently is: a bar with two kitchens and a basement lounge, not the finished food hall the February headlines described. Order the reuben, grab a seat at The Winfield if you can, and don't build your whole night around a building that's still waiting on its rooftop restaurant.
For everything else, the corridor already has what you need. Walk to Fusillo for pasta, cross into Grand Central for Jimmy's tacos, or head to Beach Drive for Isu. Watch for SHINE this fall and put SAVOR on the calendar for the first weekend of November. The next wave of concepts at Central Park will land eventually. Until then, this neighborhood was never waiting on one building to tell it how to eat.
If you're the kind of resident who pays attention to what's opening on your own block, you're also the kind of resident who notices when a neighborhood's momentum shifts in ways that matter for more than dinner plans. When you're curious what that shift means for the value of your own place in this stretch of St. Pete, the team at Blume Group is glad to walk through it with you. Get a Free Home Valuation whenever you're ready to see where things stand.
