On St. Armands Circle, the Real Fight Is One Floor Above the Restaurants

Walk the Circle on a Tuesday night right now and you get two versions of St. Armands at once. At 22 South Boulevard of the Presidents, Nōnnō Umberto is loud, packed, and smells like ravioli aragosta. Three hundred yards away, at the corner of North Boulevard of the Presidents and Madison Drive, the old Shore Restaurant building sits stripped to its concrete and steel, waiting on a permit. Both of those facts are true on the same block, on the same night. That contrast is the story, but not in the way most write-ups of "the new St. Armands" tell it. The interesting part isn't which storefronts are open and which are gutted. It's that the fight over what gets built on that gutted corner has almost nothing to do with the restaurant that's supposed to go there, and everything to do with a single, still-undecided line in the city's zoning code.

What actually came back

Nōnnō Umberto is the clean win. The family behind the longstanding Italian restaurant formerly known as Le Colonne kept it alive during the worst of it by running a food truck, Buonissimo Mobile Italian Kitchen, while the brick-and-mortar space sat closed after hurricanes Helene and Milton flooded the Circle in 2024. When they reopened under the new name in January 2026, honoring patriarch Umberto Salustri, the soft opening pulled more than 250 people through the door on night one and roughly 800 over the first week, according to co-owner Amber Mayner.

A few doors down, a Pinchers seafood location is on its way into existing retail space, which matters more than it sounds like it should. Nobody had to ask the city for a height variance or a density bump to make that happen. It's simply a business filling a storefront that already exists, at the scale the Commercial Tourist zoning district already allows. That's worth holding onto, because it's the version of "coming back" that everyone on the Circle agrees on.

What's still just steel and studs

The Shore site is the harder case, and the reason has a number attached to it. The two buildings at 24 and 28 North Boulevard of the Presidents are valued at roughly $800,000 and $1.3 million. Under FEMA's so-called 50% rule, any renovation to a structure in a flood zone that costs half or more of that assessed value has to bring the entire building up to current flood code, not just the part being touched. Sarasota's own deputy building official told the project's consultants flatly that this build couldn't come in under that threshold, which means there was never a version of this project that stayed small. Owner Tom Leonard is treating that as a floor rather than a ceiling: flood panels rated for roughly $500 per linear foot, a full three-story rebuild, and a target buildout date in the fourth quarter of 2027.

Demolition on the first building started with a permit issued in March 2026, and by May the first two floors were down to bare concrete and steel. That's the physical progress. The regulatory progress has been slower, and that's where this stops being a story about one restaurant.

The argument that isn't about Shore at all

Here's the part a menu review won't tell you. On July 20, 2026, the Sarasota City Commission took up an agenda item asking staff to define a new land use category: the condo hotel, a building of individually owned units with full kitchens that also gets managed and rented like a hotel. The immediate trigger was downtown Sarasota, where a definitional gap has let a couple of projects market residential floors as short-term rental inventory. Commissioners voted unanimously to have staff study how cities like Miami, Orlando, and Las Vegas regulate the hybrid, but the item hadn't resurfaced by the commission's August 3 meeting, meaning it's still an open question as of this writing.

The reason that matters on St. Armands is that the same definitional fault line runs straight through the Shore proposal. Its site plan originally described a residential third floor above the restaurant and retail floors, a use residents have long argued is a hotel room in every way except zoning language. St. Armands Residents Association president Chris Goglia put the mechanism plainly in an interview earlier this year:

"We know a short-term rental, a weekly rental, can make as much money in one week as a year-round rental can make in a month."

The commission's July decision explicitly did not settle whether St. Armands' Commercial Tourist district would even appear on the table of zones where a condo hotel use is permitted. That single detail, whether the letters "CT" show up in that table, is the thing worth watching more closely than the restaurant's construction schedule. Since then, Shore's third floor has been redrawn on paper as a single home rather than multiple residential units, a change that looks less like a design decision and more like a bet on which way an unwritten rule will eventually break.

Why this keeps happening on this particular block

None of this is new to the Circle, which is part of why residents react to it so fast. In 2022, the St. Armands Business Improvement District pushed a plan to raise the height limit from 35 to 45 feet and allow hotel density of 150 units per acre. A resident survey found 75 percent of those polled opposed the height increase, and the City Commission rejected the proposal 5 to 0. The same tension resurfaced this spring in two city-run visioning sessions at Mote Marine's Keating Education Center, one in February and a follow-up in April, where roughly 150 stakeholders ranked their priorities for the district. Flooding and traffic topped the list, but so did a degraded tenant mix and vacant storefronts, both tied directly to how slowly the FEMA math lets anyone rebuild.

The St. Armands Residents Association, founded in 1951 and representing about two-thirds of the roughly 250 households on the Key, has kept a public record of every one of these fights on its own site, from the 2022 height proposal to the current density debate. It's a useful place to watch if you want the primary documents instead of the recap.

What's actually on the calendar

Underneath the zoning fight, the Circle's ordinary rhythm hasn't paused. January brought the Century of Cars parade and show, marking 100 years since both St. Armands Circle and the Sarasota Yacht Club were founded in 1926, with 175 vehicles running from Main Street down to St. Armands Circle Park. The fall stretch ahead looks like this:

• The St. Armands Fall Festival of the Arts runs October 17 and 18, free admission, with artists from Florida and beyond setting up an outdoor gallery along the Circle.
• Fright Night, the neighborhood's storefront trick-or-treat event, returns for its 18th year on October 31.
• Exotic Cars on the Circle, sponsored by Ferrari Drivers SRQ, typically lands in early September and stays free to walk through.

None of that depends on how the third floor at Shore eventually gets classified. But if you live on St. Armands, Lido, or Bird Key, that's the detail to keep an eye on over the next several months, because whatever gets written into the zoning table this time won't just apply to one corner. It applies to the next one, too.

If you're weighing what any of this means for a home on the Circle or nearby on Lido and Bird Key, that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground context the Argelia Vidal Team tracks block by block. We're happy to talk through what's actually happening in this corner of the barrier islands, whether you're comparing it to Siesta Key's own post-storm rebuild or just want a straight answer about a specific address. Let's connect.