Who Owns Siesta Key Village Now, And What's Happening At The Bridge
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
Cross the South Bridge onto Siesta Key on any given Sunday and you'll pass the same colorful jumble of buildings that's greeted drivers for decades: the Boatyard restaurant, a row of parasail boats tied up at the dock, a jet ski counter that's been renting since before half the island's current residents moved here. Keep going another mile and a half and you'll hit Ocean Boulevard, where the corner that used to be Napoli's Italian Restaurant is now something else entirely.
Both of those places changed hands this year. Neither changed the way most people assume.
The old Napoli's space, at the corner of Avenida Messina and Ocean Boulevard, is arguably the busiest intersection in Siesta Village, and it's now home to My Village Pub, a sports bar built by Mike Granthon and Chris Brown, according to reporting from Siesta Sand. That name might already sound familiar if you eat out on the Key with any regularity. Granthon and Brown, operating under a company called Above the Bar Hospitality Group, already own the Beach Club, Summer House Steak & Seafood, the Cottage and the Hub Baja Grill on the island, plus Smokin' Joe's downtown and Mad Moe's Pub and Grill in Osprey.
MVP wasn't even their first move on that particular corner. A few years earlier, the same partners bought a cluster of buildings that once housed the Sea Shanty, Meany's Mini Donuts and Siesta Key Hardware. Morton's Siesta Market now runs out of the main building, and Siesta Village Liquors occupies the old hardware store space. Add the pub, and Granthon and Brown control most of what anchors that intersection, restaurant, bar, market and liquor store included.
Their newest venture sits just down the block. Siesta Poke, the group's build-your-own poke and açai concept, has already been named one of Sarasota Magazine's best new restaurants in the city, per coverage from Siesta Sand. But not every new storefront in the Village belongs to the same portfolio. A few doors down, the Duo Doner & Deli is the work of chef Jakub Skoczylas and his wife Maja Rakowiecka, an independent bet on Turkish doner and grab-and-go breakfast rather than another line item in a larger group.
Meanwhile, the island's best-known seafood name is expanding in the opposite direction, off the Key entirely. Scott Dolan has run Big Water Fish Market on Midnight Pass Road for about 15 years. This summer he opened a second concept, Happy Clams and Hams, on Bee Ridge Road, sharing a plaza with Southern Steer Butcher so customers can grab fish and meat in one stop, according to reporting in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. It's the same instinct as Granthon and Brown's, just pointed inland instead of at the next available lease on the Key.
Now go back over the South Bridge, to the plaza most people know simply as the Boatyard, after the restaurant that anchors it. In February, Sarasota County commissioners voted 4-1 to buy the 2.04-acre property at 1500 Stickney Point Road for $18.1 million, with total project costs authorized up to about $21.36 million once demolition and construction are factored in, according to reporting from Your Observer. That's not a small line item. It's the largest acquisition in the 21-year history of the county's Neighborhood Parkland Acquisition Program.
The site includes 700 feet of bay frontage, 390 feet of canal access and more than 33 boat docks, which is the kind of math that made Commission Chair Ron Cutsinger tell fellow commissioners, "You only get one chance to buy a property like this, they don't come along very often." Right now, that frontage sits behind a working commercial plaza: the Boatyard restaurant, a financial planning firm, an insurance agency, a boat club, a jet ski rental counter, an ice cream shop. The county's plan calls for demolishing some of those buildings to make room for a public park with a fishing pier, kayak launch, picnic shelters and possibly a waterfront restaurant of its own.
The tenant with the most at stake is Siesta Key Watersports, which has operated at 1536 Stickney Point Road for 20 years, offering parasailing, jet ski rentals, boat rentals and sunset and dolphin cruises. Owner Shawn Fontana told commissioners the business draws more than 40,000 guests a year, employs about 20 people and pays over $100,000 annually in sales taxes.
"Our continued presence helps preserve public access, economic stability and community continuity in alignment with the county's goals."
County staff have said one building near the end of the canal, along with a lighthouse structure tied to Siesta Key Watersports, could be candidates for preservation rather than demolition. But nothing here is finished business. The county's own timeline has already slipped once. Commissioners were expected to close on the property by midyear, then delayed the final vote this spring to work through more questions, according to WWSB. Whatever you see next time you cross that bridge is still, technically, up for debate.
Put those two stories side by side and you get a useful picture of how Siesta Key actually changes hands. In the Village, ownership is concentrating. A small number of names keep adding storefronts to what they already control, and even the exceptions, like the Duo Doner, are individuals betting on one new lease rather than building a group. At Stickney Point, ownership is headed the other way entirely, from a private plaza with two dozen tenants toward public land with none. Same season, same two miles of island, opposite direction.
None of that touches the parts of Siesta Key that run on their own clock regardless of who signs the lease. The Drum Circle started in 1996, when a man named David Gittens gathered a dozen friends on Siesta Beach to mark the vernal equinox. Thirty years later it still happens every Sunday, about an hour before sunset, just south of the main pavilion near lifeguard stands three and four, drawing hundreds of people on an ordinary week and closer to a thousand during season, according to the Siesta Key Chamber of Commerce.
The Farmers Market runs the same day, Sunday mornings from 8 to noon in the Village, rain or shine, whether the corner behind it is a pub, a market or something not yet built. Neither of those rituals depends on a single owner. That's part of why they've outlasted every version of the Village's storefronts that came before this one.
The rest of the fall calendar is worth marking down now, while it's still weeks out rather than tomorrow:
None of this changes what Sunday looks like on the beach. But it does mean that the next time you're waiting on a table at whatever now occupies the old Napoli's space, or sitting in bridge traffic wondering when the demolition crews show up at Stickney Point, you're watching two different theories of ownership play out on the same island, in the same season.
If you keep track of what's actually changing here, who owns the Village's corners and what happens to the gateway everyone drives through without a second thought, so does Monica DeSomma. Let's connect the next time you want a straight read on what's really going on around Siesta Key.
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