A few years ago, someone commenting on a St. Pete Catalyst story about a new retail building in the Skyway Marina District summed up how a lot of Maximo residents felt about their dining options: "fast food, sandwiches and smoothies….not a real restaurant." It wasn't an unfair read. For most of the last decade, the stretch of 34th Street South that borders Maximo Park has been defined by drive-thrus and outparcel chains, the kind of development that fills a strip mall but doesn't give a neighborhood a reason to walk somewhere on a Friday night.
That complaint is now out of date, and not because the chains stopped coming. Huey Magoo's, Jersey Mike's, and Smoothie King broke ground on a new building at 4311 34th Street South in August 2025, with delivery targeted for January 2026, a timeline that has since come and gone. What actually changed the equation is what showed up alongside them: a Mediterranean restaurant on the marina, a tapas concept built around a 1960s Polynesian supper club, and a specialty grocer anchoring a mixed-use project a short walk from the park entrance. For the first time, the answer to "where do we eat" in Maximo doesn't start and end with a counter order.
What's Actually New Along the Corridor
If you haven't driven 34th Street South in the past year, the list of additions is longer than you'd expect for one commercial strip:
- LUMA, a Mediterranean mezze restaurant, opened January 22, 2026, inside the renovated SkyBeach Resort, overlooking the resort's marina.
- SouthSeas Tapas, also at SkyBeach, leans into the property's history as the old Outrigger Inn, a 1960s retreat known for Polynesian dining and exotic cocktails, with a French and Asian-influenced menu built around that legacy.
- Foxtail Coffee Co. and 3Natives Acai Cafe are slated to open in a new retail building fronting Sprouts Farmers Market at Sky Town, the 34-acre redevelopment of the former Ceridian office campus, with Sprouts itself having opened earlier this year.
- Craft Kafe, a local coffee business rather than a chain, is expanding into a second location at 725 34th Street South.
- Huey Magoo's, Jersey Mike's, and Smoothie King round out the counter-service side of the ledger in a new building between the Storage Club and Fifth Third Bank.
None of this happened by accident. Jack Dougherty of Allied Group Holdings, who first bought 14 acres in the district back in October 2020, has said his research turned up demographics similar to more developed corridors like 4th Street, and he wanted in before the rest of the city noticed. That bet is now visible in concrete and stucco, not just in a pitch deck.
What's Been Sitting There the Whole Time
Here's what makes this moment worth noticing rather than just another roundup of new storefronts: the park these restaurants now sit next to has been one of the more significant sites in the city for far longer than any of them have existed.
Maximo Park covers 70 acres and is the largest of St. Petersburg's four identified archaeological sites. University of South Florida excavations there in 1973 recovered shell tools and food remains showing the land was occupied by Native Americans at least 4,500 years ago, during the Late Archaic period. It was part of a larger village that extended along Pinellas Point, with shell middens, at least one burial mound, and a platform mound, and it served as a major town site for the Tocobaga people, descendants of the Safety Harbor culture. The 18-hole disc golf course inside the park, appropriately named the Tocobaga course, runs through that same ground, mixing open fields, palm-heavy jungle sections, and a couple of water hazards that regulars will tell you swallow more discs than they should.
The rest of the park earns its reputation the ordinary way: seven boat ramps, a kayak launch, two playgrounds, a beach along Boca Ciega Bay that will never make anyone's top ten Gulf beaches list but is genuinely loved by the people who fish and beachcomb there, and a one-mile ADA-accessible paved loop trail that winds past a canal, through pine stands, and out to a small fishing dock tucked into the mangroves. None of that has changed. What's changed is what's waiting for you when you finish the loop.
The Two Restaurants That Actually Answer the Complaint
It's worth separating the counter-service additions from LUMA and SouthSeas Tapas, because they're solving different problems for the neighborhood. Huey Magoo's and Jersey Mike's give Maximo residents faster errands and fewer reasons to drive north for a quick meal. That's useful, but it's not what the Catalyst commenter was asking for.
LUMA and SouthSeas Tapas are the first sit-down, chef-driven concepts to land in the district in years, and both are built around a marina view rather than a parking lot. LUMA's menu draws on eastern Mediterranean communal dining traditions paired with Bay Coast ingredients, and it's the third culinary concept to open at SkyBeach since the resort's 2024 relaunch, following SkyBar + Grille and a second location of downtown favorite Paradeco Coffee Roasters. SouthSeas Tapas is leaning into the property's own history, with the culinary team pulling inspiration from vintage advertisements and cocktail menus from the old Outrigger Inn to shape both the food and the name.
For a resident who has watched this corridor cycle through bank branches and storage facilities, that's a genuinely different kind of tenant. A tapas restaurant built around a defunct tiki bar's cocktail recipes is not the sort of thing a strip center attracts by default. It shows up because a developer is betting the neighborhood can support something with a wine list.
What Full Buildout Looks Like From Here
None of this is finished. Sky Town alone is planned to eventually bring 2,084 apartments and 69,000 square feet of retail across six phases once fully built out, with the Sprouts-anchored first phase already open and leasing underway. Alton Skyway, a 619-unit project approved by the city's Development Review Commission this year, will replace St. Petersburg College's former Allstate campus directly across the street, and city commissioners have openly debated whether the district has enough retail to support all the new housing arriving alongside it. One commissioner noted during that debate that more than 47,000 square feet of vacant retail space in the district was still seeking tenants, which is a useful reminder that this transformation is running in phases, not all at once.
What that means for a Maximo resident planning a weekend is straightforward. The disc golf course, the boat ramps, and the trail out to the mangroves are not going anywhere, and neither is the archaeological ground beneath them. What's new is that the walk or short drive back from a morning at the park now ends somewhere with a marina view and a real wine list, not just a drive-thru window. That's a small shift on paper. On the ground, it's the difference between a neighborhood with a park and a neighborhood with a park and a reason to stick around after you leave it.
If you're curious about what else is landing in the Skyway Marina District, or how these changes might affect property values and buying decisions in Maximo and the surrounding coastal Pinellas communities, I'm always happy to talk through what I'm seeing in the market. Aaron Hoffman — Let's Connect.
