The Restaurant Corner Near Pelican Marsh Kept Losing Tenants. Then It Stopped.
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
How many restaurants can one storefront burn through before a neighborhood stops expecting the next one to last?
At 2355 Vanderbilt Beach Road, Suite 200, the answer was at least six. Havana Blue Cuban Cuisine & Lounge came and went. So did Salsa Cuban Restaurant & Lounge, French Folies, The Basin, and Absinthe. A brief run as Paradise Golf barely registered before that closed too. If you live in Pelican Marsh and cut through the Galleria Shoppes at Vanderbilt on your way to CVS, you've watched that corner unit change its sign more often than most people change their air filters.
It stopped rotating on December 3, 2025, when Aufieri & Martinez Argentinian Steakhouse opened there. It's the first local concept for owners Walter Rolando Aufieri and Daniel Martínez, built around traditional asado, wood and charcoal grilling of Prime Angus beef, with steaks running $34 to $82 and a tomahawk for two at $159. One restaurant lasting through a full season doesn't sound like news. But set against that unit's history, it's the first tenant in years that has made it past its opening month without another closure notice.
The steakhouse wasn't an isolated repair job. It was one piece of a corner that spent 2025 rebuilding almost entirely.
The Cave Bistro & Wine Bar closed in May 2025 after seven and a half years, with owner Jim Dixon citing personal health issues in the email he sent to patrons. The adjoining Naples Wine Collection, a retail shop his daughter Brandie Dixon had started in 2013 before The Cave opened in 2017, kept running for a few more months on its own. Both spaces sat as one of the more visible vacancies at the center through the fall.
They didn't stay empty long. Rudy Ambrosi, a longtime Naples resident who had operated an Italian specialty market in East Naples for five years, leased both units in late October 2025 and opened Ambrosi & Sons there by spring 2026. The market side, at 2343 Vanderbilt Beach Road, Units 602 and 604, sells imported pastas, sauces, flours, and other goods from small Italian producers. The adjoining wine bar pours nearly twenty Italian wines by the glass through a dispensing system built for tasting pours as well as full servings. Ambrosi's family also continues a five-generation tradition of knife sharpening that traces back to New York's Lower East Side in the early 1900s, a detail that has nothing to do with wine and everything to do with why the shop feels different from a standard retail buildout. A pasta and prepared-foods program is planned next, along with a wine club.
Down the row, The Good Pour leased the entirety of the newly built 1000 Building behind the CVS pharmacy outparcel, more than 7,000 square feet for what will be the sixth location of the Florida-based wine and spirits chain. That's not a single tenant filling a single suite. That's a retailer betting its whole regional expansion on one corner of North Naples.
The smaller openings tell the same story in miniature:
PJ Hill, the leasing manager for the Shoppes at Vanderbilt, told Naples Press the center had climbed from roughly 90 percent occupancy to full capacity. For a retail property built fifteen years ago, that's not a slow backfill. That's a corner that went from a stretch of well-known vacancies to fully leased inside of about a year, while most of the people driving past it were paying attention to something else.
That something else was probably Mercato, a few minutes down Vanderbilt Beach Road, where the Piazza expansion has been in the news so many times that a lot of what's still searchable treats it as a future event.
Here's what actually happened. The project was announced in 2024, delayed past its original fall completion date, and didn't break ground until July 23, 2025. That's the part that gets recycled in write-ups that make the expansion sound current. What those write-ups miss is that construction finished months ago. Mercato unveiled the completed Piazza on November 5, 2025, at a community event called Deep Blue Debut that drew several hundred people and raised more than $20,000 for the Guadalupe Center, which supports underserved families in Immokalee.
The finished space is 6,700 square feet, more than triple the original 3,000-square-foot Piazza, with a covered, raised stage and a retractable screen for outdoor movies. It has now run a full winter and spring season of programming. If your mental picture of that space is still orange construction fencing and a half-built stage, you're not out of date by a few weeks. You're out of date by close to a year.
One thing at the Galleria Shoppes at Vanderbilt hasn't needed reinventing: the Vanderbilt Farmers Market, listed in regional farmers market directories as North Naples' largest year-round market, with more than 80 vendors in season selling produce, seafood, baked goods, and prepared foods behind the CVS pharmacy every Saturday.
The market is running its shorter summer schedule, 8 a.m. to noon, through September 12, 2026. Last year's fall season opened October 4, and if this year follows the same pattern, the longer 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. hours should be back within a few weeks of the summer cutoff. If you've been skipping Saturday mornings because the summer schedule felt too abbreviated to bother with, that window is closing soon.
None of this required a single splashy grand opening covered by every outlet at once. It required about a year of individual leases signing quietly, one at a time, at two properties most Pelican Marsh residents already pass through for reasons that have nothing to do with dinner plans. The corner that used to be a punchline about restaurant turnover now has a steakhouse closing in on its first anniversary without a closure notice, an Italian market and wine bar with a five-generation family story behind the counter, and a wine retailer big enough to lease an entire building. A few minutes away, the gathering space Mercato spent over a year publicizing has already hosted a full season of the programming it was built for.
The map most people carry around in their heads updates slower than the neighborhood does. That's true of restaurant corners, and it's just as true of a housing market, which is a large part of why local, current information matters more than it looks like it should.
If you're weighing what a specific pocket of North Naples is actually worth, right now, based on what's really there rather than what a listing photo suggested six months ago, Cheena Chandra can walk you through it. Let's connect.
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