What's New at Fishermen's Village: A Local's Guide to Punta Gorda's Waterfront Reset

For years, a walk down the pier at Fishermen's Village followed a familiar script. Harpoon Harry's on the first floor. The Captain's Table upstairs. The Pier off to the side. If you lived in Punta Gorda, you knew which door to open depending on whether you wanted flip-flops or a tablecloth. That script is gone. In the span of about six months, four restaurants are changing hands, changing names, or opening from scratch inside the same complex at 1200 W Retta Esplanade. Four hundred jobs, three brand-new concepts, one returning legacy operator, and a fully rebuilt deck are all landing between February and late summer 2026.

This isn't a normal turnover cycle. It's a coordinated reset of the Village's dining floor, and the interesting part isn't the ribbon cuttings. It's who is behind them, why they all landed in the same year, and how the mix reshapes a regular week for anyone who lives inside a few miles of the Harborwalk.

The 2026 opening timeline at a glance

Compressing this many openings into one calendar year at a single complex is unusual anywhere. In Punta Gorda, it's the biggest shift the Village has seen in a generation.

The Islands: the one that's already changed your Tuesday

The Islands Kitchen & Cocktail House is the concept locals have actually had time to form an opinion about. It took over the former space of The Pier, a 6,000-square-foot waterfront room that was undergoing extensive renovations before reopening as The Islands. It reopened on Feb. 5 to lines out the door and hour-long waits for its expansive harborfront vista, open to breezes and outdoor seating when the weather permits.

Ownership matters here because it explains the menu. The hometown team is Amber and Dan DeCarlo of Punta Gorda, who also own Village Outfitters and Harborwalk Resort Wear in Fishermen's Village, corporate partner Dan McKay from Ohio, and Executive Chef Partner David McCleery of Port Charlotte. The DeCarlos already run two of the Village's retail anchors, so this is the same family doubling down on the same pier rather than an outside operator parachuting in.

The kitchen leans harder than the old Pier ever did. Chef McCleery describes it as an island approach to ultra-fresh seafood, swimming one or two days before it's plated, along with high-quality beef and the Village's only sushi. On the steak side, there's a reserve Australian Wagyu filet surf and turf with char-grilled octopus, a short rib burger, and a 32-ounce dry-aged Wagyu tomahawk carved tableside for four. A tableside tomahawk was not something the Village menu had before. That's the shift in a sentence.

Castaways and Latitude 26°: one operator, two very different rooms

The first-floor and upstairs spaces at the prow of the pier are being handled together, which is part of why they've drawn the most local attention. Kelly Evans Draper, former president of Smugglers Enterprises, has leased the spaces previously occupied by Harpoon Harry's and The Captain's Table to create two new restaurants: Castaways and Latitude 26°. Draper isn't a newcomer to this pier. She spent years running the operations she is now redesigning.

Upstairs comes first. Tidewater Group plans to open Latitude 26° upstairs in mid-January, though more recent reporting has it landing in early April. Expect a room built for occasion dining: coastal flavors, premium seafood, expertly cut steaks, craft cocktails and a curated wine list, served in a polished dining room wrapped 180 degrees in glass and sunset views, lively but not loud, with every plate designed to feel special but unfussy.

Downstairs is the opposite energy on purpose. Castaways is a dockside, open-air, 400-seat bar and grill, casual, loud in only the best way, and built for flip-flops, boat shoes and one more round at sunset. The floor plan itself is being redrawn. The place has been completely reopened, with the bar now halfway down the middle of the dining room, and the deck is being rebuilt for outdoor seating, so there will be about 100 seats outside and 220 or so inside. If you remember the old Harpoon Harry's bar hugging the wall with its back to the water, that single change tells you what Draper is optimizing for.

One nod to the past is staying. A small game area, a nostalgic feature of Harpoon Harry's, will remain.

Leroy's Fish Shack, Bee & Co., and ästhetik

The three quieter additions round out the picture. Leroy's Fish Shack continues its interior buildout, with owner Lee Richardson previously saying he hoped to open during this year's tourist season. On the retail side, Bee & Co., a cosmetics shop, and ästhetik spa & skincare, a Punta Gorda business from 212 West Virginia Ave., will open locations at Fishermen's Village. The ästhetik move is worth noticing on its own. A downtown business is choosing to plant a second flag on the waterfront, which suggests the operator sees enough year-round foot traffic at the Village to justify it.

Why four at once, and what it says about the pier

Openings of this size don't usually cluster. The Punta Gorda Chamber of Commerce framed the scale in blunt terms: a new restaurant opening that hires 100 people is unusual and signifies new investment, job creation, economic momentum, a vote of confidence in the local market, and here four new local restaurants are opening within months and a few yards of one another, creating upwards of 400 total jobs. To put that in scale, The Islands has already brought more than 100 new employees aboard and still seeks more line cooks; Latitude 26° and Castaways will hire a total of 250 for their April and May launches; and Leroy's expects to hire 50 and be open by summer.

Two threads tie the group together. First, hometown operators. The DeCarlos already run retail inside the Village. Draper spent years running the two spaces she's now rebuilding. ästhetik is a Punta Gorda address moving to a Punta Gorda address. The reset isn't being driven by outside capital looking for a Florida trophy. Second, differentiation. The four concepts don't compete with each other. Sushi and tomahawks at The Islands. Sunset fine dining upstairs at Latitude 26°. A 400-seat casual dock bar at Castaways. A fish shack from Richardson. If you were designing a pier from scratch to give a resident a reason to come back four different nights of the week, this is roughly the mix you'd draw up.

What actually changes for people who live here

The practical differences are small and specific.

• Sushi at the Village. Until The Islands opened, if you wanted sushi you were driving. That's no longer true.
• A real Wednesday-night option upstairs. Latitude 26° is aiming for the anniversary and out-of-town-guests slot that The Captain's Table used to hold, with a glass-wrapped room and a wine list to match.
• A bigger, better-oriented casual bar. Castaways is adding roughly 100 outdoor seats compared to what was there before, with the bar physically turned to face the water instead of a wall.
• A second retail reason to walk over. Two new storefronts join the 30-plus already inside the complex, which sits at the western end of the 2.5-mile Harborwalk that runs from Trabue Park.
• Hiring, if you want it. Roughly 400 jobs are being filled locally between now and late summer.

The larger point for anyone who lives in Punta Gorda is that the pier is being rebuilt as a place with distinct rooms for distinct nights, rather than one big dining option and its upstairs cousin. That's a real change in how the Village works, not a marketing refresh.

Wander down before the April and May openings and you'll see the deck rebuild happening in real time. Wander down after and the Village you knew for the last decade will effectively be a different place.

If you have questions about the neighborhoods around downtown Punta Gorda, from the streets closest to the Harborwalk to the canal communities that use the Village as their front porch, the team at Bobbie Leahey has spent our careers walking these blocks. Let's Get Started.