Walk Fifth Avenue South this week and the avenue is doing its September thing: half-empty patios, a few regulars at the bar inside Vergina, servers restocking for a season that hasn't quite arrived yet. It looks, more or less, like it always looks in mid-September. But this particular lull is deceptive. More has changed on this street since last fall than in any recent year, and almost none of it is finished.
The temptation with a story like this is to run a list. New restaurant here, reopened restaurant there, done. That misses the actual news. The restaurants that opened this year didn't open into a season. They opened into an empty room, in July heat, with no snowbirds to prove themselves against. This fall is the first time any of them will face the crowd the avenue is built for. And the one project everyone on the street has been talking about since last October, the one with a name borrowed from Monaco, isn't part of this season at all. It's still a hole in the ground.
The Reopening That Already Had a Season Behind It
Start with the restaurant that looks new but isn't, exactly. BiCE Ristorante closed in the fall of 2025 for a full interior renovation and reopened at 300 Fifth Ave. S. on December 22, 2025, timed to the global BiCE brand's approach to its 100th anniversary, tracing back to the Milan trattoria Beatrice "Bice" Ruggeri opened in 1926. The Naples location, owned jointly by the Ruggeri family and Naples restaurateur Stefano Frittella, got a redesign from the New York and Treviso-based Sinfonia Group: a sculptural white bar, navy velvet stools, hand-painted scenic wall panels, a terrace expanded to more than 80 seats.
By the time it reopened, BiCE had already missed most of the 2025-26 winter push, but it caught the back half, which means something the newer arrivals on the avenue don't have. It has already been tested once. Regulars who wanted their old veal parmigiana back got it, according to reporting on the redesign, after an initial menu update met resistance and the kitchen drew back toward the dishes people remembered. Whatever friction existed between the new room and the old following, it worked through most of it during a full season already. This fall is BiCE's second act in the space, not its first.
The Ones That Opened Into an Empty Room
Everything else that's genuinely new on the avenue arrived this year with no season behind it at all. Here's what actually opened, and when:
- Barrio Taqueria, 539 Fifth Ave. S., opened in February 2026 next to Grace & Shelly's, in a retail unit that was most recently a real estate office. Owner Sal Muñoz, who also runs Unidos on U.S. 41, built the menu around esquites, birria tacos, and empanadas designed to undercut the avenue's typical check size without cutting corners on technique.
- All Too Well Gourmet Sandwiches launched February 12, 2026, at the corner of Fifth and Eighth, in a space that used to be the Toad Hall extension of the Wind in the Willows antique shop. Chef Mitchell Jamra, whose family has run delis and butcher shops for generations, brought a Chicago sandwich concept south.
- Tiny Kitchen Empanadas opened at 524 Park St., a block off Fifth, in late spring 2026. It's a family operation, owner Alejandro Veiga running the front with his wife Samantha Skarl while his mother, Chef Marta Veiga, runs the kitchen, serving Argentine street food that grew out of the family's farmers market business.
- Rodizio Grill, a Brazilian churrascaria with more than 25 locations nationally, brought tableside meat service to 795 Fifth Ave. S.
- Ce Soir, a French-inspired room at Bayfront just off the avenue, marked the U.S. debut of the Canadian hospitality group Aiden Hospitality.
None of these are large rooms. None have the institutional weight of a national steakhouse chain or a mall developer's ten-year lease. They're owner-operated, which is exactly why the timing matters more than the openings themselves.
Why an Empty Room Is the Real Test
Fifth Avenue South's own Business Improvement District has been fairly open about what's happening here. Executive director Meg Stepanian has described the avenue's push toward more counter-service and lower price points as a deliberate complement to its high end, not a replacement for it, a way to keep the street's economics resilient across a wider range of visits. That's a fair read of the intent. But intent and execution are different questions, and execution gets tested by volume.
A room that opens in February or June is finding its systems, its staffing rhythm, its ticket times, against a fraction of the traffic it will see in January. Barrio's opening-week hours were11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m., with future hours "may be expanded," according to reporting at the time, which is the kind of hedge a business makes when it genuinely doesn't know yet what demand will look like. That's not a criticism. It's just the honest position every one of these places is in right now. This fall, when the sidewalk tables fill back up and reservations start moving on Friday nights, is when Barrio, All Too Well, Tiny Kitchen, Rodizio Grill, and Ce Soir all get their real answer. La Salière, Frittella's Italian room at 360 12th Ave. S. that soft-opened November 7, 2025, already has one full season logged. Everyone else is still finding out.
The Corner That Isn't Part of the Season at All
Here's what makes the avenue's 2026 story more interesting than a simple opening tally: the project generating the most anticipation on Fifth Avenue South right now hasn't opened, and won't for a while.
Casa Avenue 31, planned for 472 Fifth Ave. S. between Del Mar and Osteria Tulia, is Frittella's most ambitious project on the street, a three-story mixed-use building replacing the single-story home of La Pescheria, the Italian seafood restaurant that had operated there since December 2018. The Naples Design Review Board approved the plan in October 2025. The restaurant itself will echo Frittella's Monaco original, and the building will carry three condominiums above it, including a third-floor penthouse.
But approval isn't construction. Building permits weren't expected until January or February 2026. The existing tenants, La Pescheria and two retail units, stayed through the end of May 2026 before demolition could begin. Frittella laid out the math himself in reporting from Gulfshore Business:
"I'm hoping to start in June or July. A maximum of 18 to 20 months, it should be ready."
Construction on that timeline puts a realistic opening somewhere in late 2027 or early 2028, not this winter, not next winter, but the one after. Which means the corner of Fifth Avenue South that everyone keeps asking about will spend this entire season, and probably next season too, as an active construction site between two of the avenue's better-known restaurants. If you're planning a fall or winter visit expecting to walk past a finished Casa Avenue 31, adjust that expectation now.
What This Means for Your Fall Calendar
If you live here and you're mapping out where to eat once the season turns over, the useful distinction isn't new versus old. It's tested versus untested. BiCE and La Salière have each already carried a full winter's worth of reservations and know what that pressure looks like. Barrio, All Too Well, Tiny Kitchen, Rodizio Grill, and Ce Soir are about to find out for the first time, which is worth knowing if you're the kind of diner who prefers a kitchen that has already found its footing, or exactly the opposite, if you'd rather be part of a small room's first real season on the street.
And if you walk past 472 Fifth Ave. S. and see fencing where a restaurant used to be, that's not a delay worth worrying over. It's simply not on the menu yet, for this year or, most likely, the next.
The Third Street South Farmers Market keeps running every Saturday morning, 7:30 to 11:30, the way it has since 1994, regardless of what's opening or under construction two blocks over. That's worth remembering too. The avenue changes its restaurant lineup more or less constantly. The rhythm of the neighborhood around it does not.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property on or near Fifth Avenue South, from a condo overlooking the avenue itself to a cottage a few blocks into Old Naples, Karen Van Arsdale has spent decades tracking exactly this kind of street-level change and how it shapes the neighborhood long after the scaffolding comes down. Schedule a private consultation to talk through what's actually happening on the ground here, not just what's on a listing sheet.
