The Floridian Left Anastasia Boulevard. The Family Behind It Didn't.
If you drive Anastasia Boulevard on your way to the Bridge of Lions most mornings, you've probably clocked at least one change this year. Maybe it was the new sign at 410, or the fact that a building you used to associate with pizza now smells like a wood-fired grill. What you might not have connected is that these aren't separate stories. They're the same story, told from two different storefronts, and the version most people have pieced together gets the ending wrong.
Here's the short version people tell each other: the Floridian left the neighborhood. That part is true. What usually gets left out is that the family who ran it didn't leave at all. They just moved their name a mile south and put down a second set of roots closer to home, right on the boulevard, while everyone was watching the wrong door.
Blackfly spent thirteen years at 108 Anastasia Boulevard, a stretch of frontage the restaurant leased but never owned. That changed at the end of 2025, when Blackfly's ownership group bought the building two and a half blocks east at 410 Anastasia Boulevard, the space Mellow Mushroom had occupied for more than a decade, for $3,625,000. Blackfly closed briefly to make the move and reopened in the new location in early 2026, and by late summer it was running full dinner and weekend brunch service there, taking reservations most nights of the week.
The move wasn't about escaping the old spot. Co-owner Vaughn Cochran told the St. Johns Citizen the goal was to rebuild the same feeling in a bigger shell, down to recreating the restaurant's pizza oven from scratch because the original couldn't be moved. As Cochran put it, the challenge was simply to move the feeling they already had. That's a small detail, but it tells you something about how this stretch of the boulevard actually works: the restaurants that survive here aren't chasing reinvention. They're trying to hold their ground while the ground under them changes owners.
Here's where things stand on the boulevard right now, address by address:
The Floridian had been a Spanish Street fixture since 2010, and when the McNally family, Jeff and Genie, announced they were leaving downtown for a custom-built space near St. Augustine Beach, it read like the neighborhood losing a restaurant. What actually happened is closer to the opposite. Before The Floridian ever closed its Spanish Street doors, the McNallys opened a second concept right on Anastasia Boulevard: Bea's Fine Foods + All Day Café, at 9 Anastasia Blvd, just south of the Bridge of Lions, named for Genie's grandmother. It opened in August 2025 with breakfast pizza, frittatas, and a nighttime supper club menu, and it has stayed open and busy since, closed only on Tuesdays.
So while The Floridian itself relocated to 485 Old Beach Road, a custom 4,000-square-foot building with 120 seats that finally opened in early June 2026, the family's footprint on Anastasia Boulevard actually grew rather than shrank. The flagship left. The neighborhood cafe stayed and became, in effect, the family's calling card on the boulevard itself.
There's a third piece to this that's easy to miss if you're not watching closely: Jefe's Fish Wagon, the McNallys' seafood food truck that had been parked at Hornski's Brewing Co. at 100 Anastasia Blvd since the previous August, went quiet on May 25, 2026, so the team could focus on getting The Floridian's new location open. As of the most recent reporting, whether the truck comes back is still undecided. If you've been wondering why the burrito bowl setup you used to grab after work disappeared from Hornski's lot, that's the answer, and there isn't a firmer one yet.
The part of this story that's easiest to overlook is the empty middle. When Blackfly bought 410 Anastasia Blvd, that building's previous tenant, Mellow Mushroom, didn't just quietly close up shop somewhere else on the boulevard. According to Visit St. Augustine's own listing, the Anastasia Island location is now marked permanently closed, and the company has said only that it plans to open a new location somewhere nearby, with no address or timeline made public since that announcement.
Meanwhile, Blackfly's old building at 108 Anastasia Blvd, the one it leased for thirteen years before buying its own place down the street, went up for sale for $2,795,000. Whether that space has found a buyer or a new tenant isn't something the public record has settled yet. What's clear is that a busy stretch of frontage that used to house one of the boulevard's longest-running restaurants sat, for a stretch of 2026, without an obvious next chapter.
That gap matters if you live here, because it's the kind of thing that changes the rhythm of a walk down the boulevard without changing the boulevard's reputation. The corridor still reads as "full" from a distance. Up close, there's at least one storefront mid-transition and one chain still house-hunting for its next spot.
Against all of that reshuffling, it's worth naming what stayed exactly where it was. Osprey Tacos and Old Coast Ales are still neighbors at 300 Anastasia Blvd, sharing the same outdoor seating they always have, running the same laid-back taco-and-craft-beer combination that's made them a fixture for anyone who lives north or south of the boulevard's split. If you've been avoiding the boulevard because it feels like everything is in flux, that pairing is proof it isn't. Some of the anchors held.
That's really the piece worth carrying away from all this. Davis Shores sits on both sides of Anastasia Boulevard, and for a lot of residents the boulevard itself functions less like a road and more like a shared front porch, the place you end up for dinner without planning to. This year, more of that porch changed hands than it looks like from a single drive-through. A restaurant that felt permanent for thirteen years turned out to be a tenant. A restaurant that felt like it was leaving turned out to be expanding somewhere you'd already walked past. And one building is still sitting there, waiting to tell you what's next.
If you've skipped the boulevard for a season, it's worth a slower pass than usual. The version you remember and the version that's actually there right now aren't quite the same street.
Whenever you're ready to talk about what's changing in Davis Shores, or anywhere else along St. Augustine's coast, Lighthouse Realty is happy to walk through it with you. Contact Us.
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