Walk south on First Avenue North on a Friday in July and the corner at Second Street North feels different than it did a year ago. The building that used to house Jekyll Brewing is lit from the roof down. A pizza oven glows behind the front glass. Upstairs, a rooftop bar is pouring cocktails to a crowd that spills toward the ocean two blocks east. Next door, the mezcal bar at Oaxaca Club is already three deep.
The story of what is new to eat in Jacksonville Beach this summer is not a list of scattered openings. It is a consolidation. One hospitality group has quietly assembled a three-venue campus on a single downtown corner, and a handful of other operators have taken over rooms that longtime residents will recognize by their previous tenants. If you live here, the useful map is not "new restaurants." It is which addresses changed hands, and what showed up in them.
The Corner That Quietly Became a Campus
The Alder & Oak restaurant in Jacksonville Beach opened July 15 after a friends and family event that drew more than 700 people the night before. The restaurant is at 131 First Ave. N. at the corner of Second Street North and replaced the former Jekyll Brewing, which closed in May 2025. That address matters because it sits directly next to Oaxaca Club, which has occupied 131 First Ave. N. Ste 102 since 2023. Both restaurants share an owner.
The first Alder & Oak opened in January as part of The Hub at 400 Riverside Ave. Mark Janasik owns Alder & Oak, Oaxaca Club, Blueberry Artisan Bakery and the Southern Grounds coffee shops. He heads the Restaurant & Hospitality Investment Group. The Jax Beach location was built out by Atlantic Beach-based RPC General Contractors Inc., the same firm handling several other regional restaurant fit-outs this year.
Here is what actually sits on that corner now:
- Alder & Oak — ground-floor Mediterranean, open at 4 p.m. weekdays and 11 a.m. weekends
- Zorbas — the rooftop bar above Alder & Oak, sharing the same hours
- Oaxaca Club — next door at Ste 102, open daily from 11 a.m.
For a resident planning a night out, the practical implication is that you can now start with a mezcal flight, walk twenty feet to a Mediterranean dinner, and finish upstairs with a rooftop cocktail without moving your car. That kind of density did not exist on this block last summer.
What Alder & Oak Actually Serves
The menu is not a repeat of anything else at the beach. Alder & Oak serves a menu inspired by the cuisines of Turkey, Greece and Italy. It sources products from those countries when possible. Operations partner Eddy Escriba described the concept as leaning into meze, the Mediterranean diet, lots of olive oil, lots of fresh ingredients.
The meze menu includes tzatziki, baba ganoush, roasted cauliflower, assorted dips and spreads, and burrata ($8 to $26). The Jax Beach kitchen also runs four sushi options and two crudo plates that the downtown location does not carry, which is a small signal that the coastal site is being treated as its own concept rather than a copy. Hours run 4 to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 4 to 11 p.m. Friday, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday, with the rooftop keeping the same schedule.
Oaxaca Club, Now Playing a Supporting Role
Oaxaca Club is not new. It opened in March 2023. What is new is the context around it. For most of its life it was the destination on the block. It now anchors one end of a three-venue campus, and its menu reads differently in that setting. The kitchen leans on pan-roasted snapper, grilled octopus, ceviches, moles and quesillo, and the bar carries more than sixty tequilas alongside a house-labeled mezcal. The restaurant was named an OpenTable Diners' Choice pick for 2025.
If you were treating Oaxaca Club as a special-occasion spot, its neighbors just gave you a reason to come more often. The brunch service from 11 a.m. on weekends pairs cleanly with a walk-up rooftop drink next door in the afternoon.
Grouper Shack Took the Bearded Pig's Room
Three blocks west, another familiar address changed hands. Grouper Shack restaurant, bar and market opened Dec. 20 in Jacksonville Beach, its second site in Northeast Florida. It is at 1700 Third St. in the former The Bearded Pig barbecue spot that closed in April.
The format is different than what the room used to hold. Grouper Shack offers fast-casual dining where customers order and pay at a main counter and staff brings bar orders and meals to the tables. Owner Nathan Stuart described sourcing that shifts with what local commercial fishermen are landing that week, calling out wahoo and sheepshead as recent runs. The attached retail piece, called The Marketplace, is set to sell portioned fish, oysters and crab legs to prepare at home, plus spices and rubs, oyster shuckers and gloves, branded t-shirts and hats. Hours are 10:30 a.m. daily, closing at 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 10 p.m. on the weekend.
The read for a resident: 1700 Third Street is no longer a barbecue destination. It is a same-day catch board and a place to buy a pound of oysters on the way home.
Bella Vista A'mare, Further Up Third
Continue north on Third Street and another named tenant is stepping into a full-service Italian slot. Bella Vista A'mare sits at 3011 3rd St N, Jacksonville Beach, with roughly 125 seats inside and a full bar. Expect elevated Italian from Giovanni and Alysha Prignano, more emphasis on composed dishes while keeping Roman-style pizza. Full-service with a curated beverage program. It fills a gap in the Third Street lineup that had been leaning fast-casual and seafood for years, and it gives the Prignanos more room to work than their previous format allowed.
The Wider Ring, Mayport to the Town Center
Two more openings sit outside the beach town core but close enough to change a weekend plan.
North of the pier, in Atlantic Beach, the city issued a permit April 1 for Spliff's Gastropub to build-out in the Reef Retail Shopping Plaza along Mayport Road in Atlantic Beach. Bemar Services Inc. of Jacksonville is the contractor for the $467,606 project to renovate 4,260 square feet of space at 2755 Mayport Road. The concept calls itself "A Food and Drink Joint," Spliff's serves burgers, sandwiches, rice bowls, its signature macaroni and cheese, salads, sides, beer drafts and cans, and other drinks. Plans show interior and patio seating.
Further west, the Beach Boulevard corridor added its first Cook Out. The 3,355-square-foot restaurant is located at 14016 Beach Blvd., east of Hodges Boulevard in the Beach Haven area, which formerly housed Freddy's Frozen Custard & Steakburgers. This one is a chain expansion, not a local concept, but it is worth flagging because the drive-thru queue reshuffled traffic on Beach Boulevard the week it opened.
How to Actually Plan a Weekend Around This
The practical value of these openings is not that there are more restaurants. It is that the map got denser in specific spots. A working plan for a Saturday now looks like this:
| Time | Where | What Changed |
|---|---|---|
| 11 a.m. | Oaxaca Club brunch, 131 First Ave. N. | Same restaurant, new neighbors on both sides |
| 2 p.m. | Grouper Shack market, 1700 Third St. | Take home portioned catch for Sunday |
| 5 p.m. | Zorbas rooftop, above Alder & Oak | New rooftop bar, walk-up seating |
| 7 p.m. | Alder & Oak dinner, ground floor | Mediterranean meze, sushi and crudo not on the downtown menu |
| 9 p.m. | Bella Vista A'mare bar, 3011 Third St. N. | Full bar, Roman-style pizza until close |
None of that requires driving between stops. The walking distance from 131 First Avenue North to 3011 Third Street North is under a mile.
A Note on What This Means for the Block
Restaurant clusters shape residential blocks in ways zoning maps do not capture. When three venues under one owner concentrate on a single corner, foot traffic patterns shift, and the surrounding two-block radius starts to feel more like a walkable district than a strip of independent addresses. For homeowners on the streets nearest First Avenue North and Second Street, the summer of 2026 is when that shift becomes visible on a Friday night. Whether you welcome it or plan around it, it is now part of what living in downtown Jax Beach means.
If you are thinking about how the beach's dining and walkability story is affecting the value of your home, or you are eyeing a move to a block that suddenly has this kind of energy, Lesia May is happy to talk through what buyers are asking about right now. Let's Connect.
