Waterside Shops Is Rebuilding Its Dining Side, One Corner at a Time
October 8, 2026
October 8, 2026
Waterside Shops lost two of its most casual food stops in the first half of 2026. Brio Italian Grille closed in April, and Häagen-Dazs closed at the end of May. Three new restaurants are taking their place: a seafood and steak house with nightly jazz, a seafood restaurant from Phoenix, and a 174-seat dining room under a glass atrium. Each one is larger and more focused on dinner than what it follows. One of them is open now.
So at the center closest to Pelican Bay, this season falls between two versions of Waterside. The dinner reservations are partly in place. The places you could walk into after an errand have mostly gone, and the remaining replacements are still behind construction barricades on the north side of the property.
Eddie V's Prime Seafood opened on June 7 at the southwest corner of the center. Its address is 765 Seagate Drive. The building is a heavily renovated former bank office on the corner of Seagate Drive and Myra Janco Daniels Boulevard. At 9,991 square feet, it is a freestanding restaurant larger than the Brio unit it effectively replaces as the center's main sit-down dinner.
Eddie V's is part of Darden Restaurants. Its menu centers on seafood flown in from around the world and hand-carved prime steaks. Waterside's announcement says its wine list has more than 300 labels and has been recognized by Wine Spectator, and the V Lounge has a live music trio every night. The restaurant's own location page lists dinner hours, so plan it as an evening outing rather than a lunch stop.
Eddie V's opened first because its building was already standing. The other two restaurants need a full interior rebuild in one case and new construction from the ground up in the other, both on the opposite side of the mall. Tim Aten's summer report in Naples Press describes construction on that side as "readying two other dining destinations."
The best way to follow the changes is space by space. Each closing this year has a named replacement, and they don't all lead to more food.
| Former tenant | Closed | Replacement | Use | Latest timing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brio Italian Grille, 7,617 sq ft | April 2026 | Buck & Rider | Seafood restaurant | Early 2027 |
| Häagen-Dazs and L'Occitane en Provence, 1,356 sq ft combined | End of May 2026 | Love Shack Fancy | Fashion, beauty and home retail | Holiday 2026 |
| Nordstrom, closed 2020 | 2020 | RH Naples | Galleries plus a 174-seat restaurant and wine bar | Near the end of 2026 |
| Former bank office | n/a | Eddie V's Prime Seafood | Seafood and steak house | Opened June 7, 2026 |
The Häagen-Dazs row is the one that changes the casual side of Waterside the most. Its unit and the L'Occitane next door were combined into a 1,356-square-foot suite on the mall's eastern edge for Love Shack Fancy. Waterside describes the brand as "a global fashion, beauty, home and lifestyle brand." None of the new restaurants announced so far takes over that walk-up dessert role.
Retail is shifting around the same eastern edge. Vuori is now open at 5475-7 Tamiami Trail N, close to Sephora. Vuori and Anthropologie are going into inline space Pottery Barn left when it joined Williams Sonoma in a two-story outparcel on the northwest corner of U.S. 41 and Seagate Drive. On June 11, Dior moved out of its store-within-a-store at Saks Fifth Avenue into its own 6,000-square-foot boutique. Waterside lists Piranesi for fall 2026, Peter Millar for late 2026, and TWP for early 2027.
The old Brio space is now behind barricades while crews convert its 7,617 square feet into Buck & Rider. The restaurant comes from Hi Noon Hospitality, and Naples will be its first location outside the Southwest. When Waterside announced it in April, founder and CEO Adam Strecker gave a year-end target:
"Bringing Buck & Rider to the Gulf Coast feels like a natural fit for us, and we're looking forward to opening just before the end of the year."
That date has since changed. On August 22, 2026, the Naples Daily News reported that Buck & Rider is now aiming for early 2027, and the Naples Press summer update gives the same target. The brand's own Naples page still uses earlier 2026 wording. The August reporting is newer, and early 2027 is the date to plan around.
Earlier local reporting on the menu lists Gulf seafood such as stone crab, yellowtail snapper and grouper. It also lists raw-bar selections, sushi, scallops, mussels, crab cakes, steaks and cocktails. Next to Eddie V's, that gives Waterside two seafood-led dinner restaurants where Brio's Italian grill used to be. The company is posting construction updates on Instagram at @buckandrider_naples, which is likely the earliest place a firm date will show up.
The biggest single project at Waterside is at 5489 Tamiami Trail N. That is where Nordstrom stood until it closed in 2020, and where Jacobson's was before it. RH, the former Restoration Hardware, is building a one-story retail space of 29,382 square feet there. According to the architectural plans Gulfshore Business reviewed, the project will have six skylit galleries linked by landscaped courtyards, glass-roofed walkways, and outdoor seating areas with fountains and palms.
The restaurant sits at the center of that plan: a 4,143-square-foot, full-service restaurant and wine bar with 174 seats beneath a long glass atrium. An earlier concept in Naples Press called for a rooftop restaurant. The approved plan puts the dining room on the ground floor, surrounded by the galleries.
Naples-based DeAngelis Diamond is the builder. The summer report describes progress every day and says RH "hopes to open near the end of this year." RH had not formally announced an opening date as of the last statement its representatives gave the local press, so treat year-end as a goal.
If both projects hit their targets, the restaurant scene this fall depends on the calendar:
Since Waterside's walk-up options have shrunk this year, two September openings along the Vanderbilt Beach Road and Immokalee Road corridors are worth knowing about. Sour & Dough Artisan Bakery opened in September at 893 Vanderbilt Beach Road, Unit 58, in The Pavilion, with indoor and covered outdoor seating. Just Salad opened its first area location on September 1 at 960 Immokalee Road, Suite 200, in Granada Shoppes.
At Waterside, True Food Kitchen and California Pizza Kitchen are still the most casual sit-down choices. BrickTop's covers the time between lunch and dinner. Until RH and Buck & Rider open, Eddie V's is the only one of the three new restaurants taking reservations.
At Cheena Chandra, we follow changes like these on Seagate Drive closely because they shape daily life near Pelican Bay. If you're comparing addresses close to Waterside, or wondering how the RH project and the restaurant changes affect your part of the neighborhood, let's connect.
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