The doors at 1997 Kentucky Avenue opened at 4:30 on a Thursday afternoon, and by five o'clock there wasn't a clear path to the bar. People were holding mango mojitos in one hand and stromboli bites in the other, angling for a look at the new fifty-by-sixty-foot tiki hut that now anchors the property. At five, Chris Musovski and Meri Musovska cut the ribbon on Grove City Bar & Grill, and the room did the thing a good ribbon cutting does: it made a building that had existed in some form for years suddenly feel brand new.
Except it wasn't brand new. That's the part worth sitting with if you live anywhere near Placida Road.
"I've done a lot of work here, every day for almost two years," Chris Musovski said, describing the stretch of time between taking on the space and finally getting to open its doors to the public.
Two years of daily work on a building most of Grove City had already started calling by its finished name. That gap between when a place starts existing and when it gets its grand opening tells you something true about how business actually gets built in this corner of Englewood, and it starts with a name that's been waiting around a lot longer than three years.
A name older than the building
In 1896, three brothers named Nichols came down from Chicago with a plan to turn this stretch of Southwest Florida into a citrus empire, a grove town thick with lemon trees. The plan didn't survive its first hard freeze. An unseasonable cold snap killed the citrus crop, and the brothers pivoted their pitch from farmland to something that would prove much more durable: a Florida winter resort town. That second pitch worked. The first one didn't. What's left of it are two names that outlived the groves themselves: Lemon Bay and Grove City.
That history comes by way of Englewood historian Diana Harris, and it's the kind of detail that explains why "Grove City" was worth naming a bar and grill after in the first place. It isn't a marketing flourish borrowed from a beach town somewhere else. It's a label that has been sitting on this exact stretch of road since a 130-year-old business failure, still doing its job long after the thing it was named for stopped existing.
So when a new ownership group needed a name for a building whose future was genuinely uncertain, they didn't invent one. They picked up a name that had already survived one failed venture and put it on the door of another attempt.
Three years, one ribbon
Here's the timeline, as best it can be pieced together from public filings and local reporting:
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1896 | Nichols brothers attempt a citrus grove town on the site that becomes Grove City |
| May 2023 | Grove City Bar & Grille LLC is filed with the State of Florida, principal address 1997 Kentucky Avenue |
| End of 2023 | The building's future is still uncertain, but new owners have named it after the neighborhood's own history |
| 2024 | A 50-by-60-foot tiki hut is added, roughly doubling the property's seating capacity |
| Early-to-mid 2026 | Regular customers are already leaving reviews and ordering off a new menu, months before any formal announcement |
| September 10, 2026 | Official grand opening and ribbon cutting, hosted with the Englewood Chamber's "Let's Eat" program |
That's a three-year run from paperwork to ribbon, and it's worth noticing what happened in the middle. The restaurant didn't sit dark the whole time waiting for a ceremony. By spring of this year, people were already showing up, ordering off a menu that includes a calamari plate finished with banana peppers and gorgonzola, thin-crust pizzas running from a straightforward margherita up to a pepperoni hot honey, and a bowl of nachos built on house-made chili. The place had already found its regulars before the Chamber ever showed up with scissors.
What the September 10 event actually marked wasn't day one. It was the moment the building finally matched what it had already become, tiki hut, historic photography, full staff, and all. If you've driven past this stretch of Kentucky Avenue over the last couple of years and wondered why a sign kept saying "coming soon" long after cars started showing up in the lot, that's the answer. Grove City doesn't rush its openings. It builds them in public, one season at a time, and saves the ribbon for whenever the whole thing is finally ready to be looked at.
The walls do double duty as an archive
The tiki hut isn't just bigger than the original building. It's decorated with photographs that have nothing to do with tiki bars anywhere else in Florida, because Chris Musovski didn't buy them from a decor catalog. He asked Tom Newton, founder of the Englewood REVIEW, to dig through old archives for vintage Englewood photos, and those images now hang on the walls alongside the new construction.
What's on those walls includes shots of old Dearborn Street from decades before the current wave of restaurants and shops arrived, images of Buchan's Landing Royal Casino, a piece of Englewood's past most current residents have never heard of, and family photographs belonging to the Platts and Parkses families, names that show up in the town's history well before Grove City Bar & Grill ever existed as a concept. Musovski told Newton he was proud that a piece of the REVIEW's own archive now lives permanently inside the restaurant.
It's an unusual choice for a business built around a 100-guest tiki bar and mango mojitos. Most new restaurants decorating around a "local" theme buy reproductions or generic beach signage. This one went and found the actual photographs of the actual families who lived here, and hung them where regulars eat lunch on a Tuesday.
Grove City's small business wave this September
Grove City Bar & Grill isn't opening in isolation. The Englewood Chamber's events calendar for this same stretch of September shows a run of ribbon cuttings happening back to back: Abel's Marine held its own ceremony a day earlier, a Veteran's Plaza event followed the next morning, and Sandbar Tiki & Grille has one on the books later in the month. Whatever is happening on this stretch of Placida and Kentucky right now, it isn't a single restaurant's story. It's a run of small businesses opening or reopening within a few weeks of each other.
A few doors up Placida Road, that same pattern of persistence shows up in miniature at 2550-D, a small storefront that's cycled through a string of concepts over the years, Donna's Naked Foods Co., Lynne Miller's GramCracker Eats & Sweets, a Connecticut transplant named Nick Miklos running Larry's Lunch Box out of the same four-burner kitchen. These days it's Sebastiano's Deli & Bakery, known locally for its cannoli, still turning out the kind of comfort food that tastes like it came from somebody's mother's stove. Different owners, different names, same small kitchen, same neighborhood habit of feeding itself well.
That's the pattern worth noticing if you already live here. Grove City doesn't get new business energy in dramatic bursts. It gets it the way this bar and grill got its grand opening, slowly, through people who stick around long enough to earn the name on the door.
Why this matters if you're already here
None of this changes anything about property values or the market. It's just what's true about this stretch of Englewood this month: a bar that took three years to open properly finally has its ribbon cut, a deli with four different names over the decades is still turning out cannoli, and a Chamber calendar packed with September openings suggests Grove City has more energy in it than a single new tiki hut. If you're local, that's reason enough to grab a Grove City Calamari and see the old Dearborn Street photos for yourself before the next round of regulars claims all the good seats at the bar.
If you ever want to talk about what's happening in this part of Southwest Florida beyond the restaurant scene, from waterfront listings to what a particular block is actually like to live on, the Florida Living Team is easy to reach and happy to talk shop, no obligation attached. Let's Get Started.
