"It's too big," Commissioner Jon DePreter told his colleagues in May, describing a monument sign proposed for the corner of Anastasia Boulevard near the neighborhood's lion statues. He compared it to a two-car garage. He said it looked more like a condo placard than a neighborhood marker. He was outvoted 4 to 1.
The sign itself is a minor footnote in a busy year for the St. Augustine City Commission. But the argument underneath it, whether Davis Shores has earned a marker loud enough to be seen from a moving car, showed up again a few months later in a very different form: two restaurants with a combined three decades of history in this city both decided, independently, that Anastasia Boulevard was worth building for rather than just occupying.
The building that outgrew its own reputation
Blackfly opened at 108 Anastasia Blvd. and spent nearly 14 years there, becoming one of the boulevard's fixed points alongside Odd Birds and O'Steen's. In December 2025, the building at 410 Anastasia Blvd., formerly a Mellow Mushroom, sold for $3.625 million. Blackfly was named as its new tenant, with the move planned for early February 2026, into a 5,770-square-foot building on a 0.42-acre lot.
That is not a lateral move. A restaurant leaving its original storefront for a building that sold for $3.625 million is making a specific bet: that the corridor can support a bigger room, more covers, and whatever comes next. The site draws year-round tourism and dense local foot traffic, and it sits minutes from downtown, the beaches, and the Bridge of Lions. Blackfly didn't need convincing. It had already spent 14 years finding that out on its own.
The address that crossed the bridge
The more surprising move belongs to The Floridian, which spent years at 72 Spanish Street in the historic downtown before closing that location and starting construction on a custom-built home at 485 Old Beach Road, on Anastasia Island, about a mile south of the Amphitheatre. Owners Genie and Jeff McNally were targeting an early June 2026 reopening for the flagship, but they didn't leave the boulevard empty in the meantime. Two smaller concepts kept the McNally name active on Anastasia Boulevard while the main restaurant was under construction:
- Bea's Fine Foods + All Day Café, at 9 Anastasia Blvd., named after Genie's grandmother, serving breakfast, full-service lunch, coffee, and a nighttime supper club with small plates and cast-iron pizzas.
- Jefe's Fish Wagon, a food truck parked at 100 Anastasia Blvd. at Hornski's Brewery, built around customizable burritos, sandwiches, and bowls with a backroad fish-camp attitude.
That's the part worth sitting with. A restaurant leaving the historic district, the most tourist-dense, highest-foot-traffic real estate in the city, for a residential side street on Anastasia Island isn't chasing overflow business. It's choosing a neighborhood on its own terms, then filling the gap it left behind with two more concepts rather than one. The Floridian didn't downsize its presence on the boulevard when it moved its flagship. It expanded it.
What the sign fight actually settled
Back to the sign. The design uses lettering pulled from a historic Davis Shores sales brochure and sits near Davis Shores Park, close enough to the lion statues that visitors crossing the bridge will see it before they see anything else. It's funded entirely through private donations, then donated to the city once installed, no tax dollars involved.
Mayor Nancy Sikes-Kline, who lives in Davis Shores herself, argued the sign had broad neighborhood support and that a 100-year-old historic community deserved the recognition. Other commissioners pointed out that similar monument signs already exist in West Augustine and Vilano Beach without causing confusion about where one neighborhood ends and another begins.
DePreter's objection wasn't really about signage dimensions. It was about proportion, whether a hundred-year-old residential neighborhood needs to announce itself at highway scale. The commission decided it does. Two restaurants, betting real capital on the same half-mile of pavement, had already reached the same conclusion without a vote.
The corridor stopped renting the extra room
For most of its history, Anastasia Boulevard functioned as the release valve for downtown St. Augustine: the place a concept moved when it needed more parking, a bigger kitchen, or lower rent than Spanish Street or Aviles could offer. That's still partly true. But a restaurant doesn't settle into a building that just sold for $3.625 million if it's planning to move again in five years, and a downtown institution doesn't build custom from the ground up on Old Beach Road unless it expects to be there for the next chapter of its business, not just the next lease term.
The businesses on this stretch of Anastasia Boulevard are no longer treating Davis Shores as the overflow lane. They're treating it as the address.
If you've been meaning to try Bea's before The Floridian's main dining room reopens, or you're curious what Blackfly's new dining room looks like at five times the square footage, The Newcomer Group keeps a running list of what's changing along Anastasia Boulevard as it happens. Stop by and ask us what's next on the block.
