Siesta Key Village Got Two New Restaurants. Only One of Them Is Actually New.
September 24, 2026
September 24, 2026
Walk down Ocean Boulevard this month and you'll notice two fresh signs. Siesta Poke opened at 5204 Ocean Boulevard in late August, building bowls with ahi tuna, salmon, or grilled chicken over rice or quinoa. A few doors down at 5049 Ocean Boulevard, The Duo Doner & Deli started serving Turkish-style doner kebabs, gyros, and breakfast sandwiches to go. Sarasota Magazine named the poke spot one of the best new restaurants in town this past August, and both places have drawn the kind of early buzz that makes a slow walk through the Village turn into an hour of window-peering.
Here's what most people strolling past won't clock: one of these openings is a genuinely new business run by someone who's never owned a restaurant on the Key before. The other is the newest concept from the same two men who already own most of the corner you're standing on.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because it explains something residents have probably felt without naming. The Village always seems to have a new place to try, and it never seems to lose its footing. That's not luck. It's ownership structure.
If you eat or drink at the intersection of Ocean Boulevard and Avenida Messina, there's a good chance your money is going to Chris Brown and Mike Granthon. The two became partners in 2005 when Brown bought The Beach Club, a bar that's been running since 1947, and kept Granthon on as general manager. What started as one nightclub grew, piece by piece, into a company they eventually named Above the Bar Hospitality Group.
The Hub Baja Grill came next in 2008, tucked into a former real estate office. The Cottage followed in 2011, built inside an actual moved-in cottage of pecky cypress. In 2018 they opened Summer House Steak & Seafood, a dinner-only steakhouse with a 1,000-gallon fish tank, named as a nod to a beloved 1970s Siesta Key restaurant of the same name. My Village Pub, known around town as MVP, filled the long-vacant corner where Napoli's Italian Restaurant once stood, opening in 2019 as the Key's first true sports bar. In January 2024, Brown bought the Boatyard property on Stickney Point Road for $8.9 million, adding a waterfront restaurant and marina complex on the mainland side of the south bridge to the portfolio.
Granthon has described the strategy plainly. Give each concept its own identity, he told a reporter, so a week on the Key can feel like a cruise with a different restaurant every night, all within walking distance. It's a fair description of what's actually happened. Five restaurants, a nightclub, and a marina property, all under one roof of ownership, each dressed up to look like a different business entirely.
Brown's footprint extends past the restaurants too. He owns the buildings that house Morton's Siesta Market and Another Broken Egg Cafe on Avenida Messina, which means even some of the businesses that aren't Above the Bar concepts are still paying rent to the same landlord.
Which brings us back to the poke bowls. Siesta Poke is the latest creation from Brown and Granthon, filling a gap their other five concepts never touched. Summer House is steak and seafood, The Hub is Mexican, The Cottage is eclectic seafood with an Old Florida bent, MVP is sports bar food, and The Beach Club is a dance floor with a bar. None of them were fast, healthy, and built around a build-your-own bowl. Siesta Poke closes that gap, and it does it in a space designed around a mural of Siesta Key Beach and a digital ordering board, aimed squarely at the beachgoer who wants something quick between the sand and the shower.
It's a smart addition to the roster, and it's worth appreciating on its own terms. It's also, structurally, more of the same. The ownership behind six-plus operations on the Key just found a seventh way to serve the same customer base that already knows their name.
The Duo Doner & Deli is a different story, and it's the more interesting one if you actually live here. It's owned by chef Jakub Skoczylas and his wife, Maja Rakowiecka, neither of whom had a stake in any existing Village business before this year. Skoczylas is a native of Poland whose career took him through Sweden, Croatia, and the United Kingdom before he landed in Sarasota, where he worked as executive sous chef at the Founders Club prior to opening his own place. The couple built the Duo Doner around a gap nobody else had filled either: a spot for a quick breakfast, lunch, or dinner built around Turkish doner kebabs, the dish many Americans know better as a gyro, served on pita, wrapped, or over a bowl.
Two new food businesses opened in the same few weeks on the same short stretch of Ocean Boulevard, and only one of them represents an outside chef finding room to build something of his own on a corner that a single company has spent nearly twenty years consolidating. That's the part worth knowing if you live here. New signs on Ocean Boulevard don't always mean new competition. Sometimes they mean the same operator found one more niche. Every so often, though, someone from outside gets in, and when they do, it tends to be because they found a gap that even a six-restaurant portfolio hadn't covered.
Not everything about the Village runs through a single ownership group, and that's worth sitting with too. The Siesta Key Farmers Market sets up in the Village every Sunday morning, rain or shine, selling produce, crafts, and prepared food from vendors who rotate through on their own schedules. The Siesta Key Drum Circle gathers on the beach every Sunday evening around sunset, an unplanned, unowned tradition that's been drawing dancers and musicians together for years with no admission fee and no corporate sponsor.
The fall calendar brings its own rituals that belong to the whole community rather than any single business:
None of these need an ownership stake to exist. They run because residents and a rotating cast of businesses show up and do them again each year. That's the other half of what makes the Village feel the way it does. The restaurant scene concentrates ownership in a way that's easy to miss until you look closely, but the rituals that structure the actual rhythm of a season here, the market on Sunday morning, the drum circle at sunset, the scarecrows in October, belong to everyone who shows up.
If you've wondered why Siesta Key Village manages to feel both consistent and always a little new, this is the answer. A small number of owners keep adding concepts to a corner they've spent two decades building, which gives the Village its polish and its predictability. Meanwhile, an occasional independent chef finds the one gap that corner hasn't filled yet, which is what keeps it from feeling like a chain. Understanding which kind of new you're looking at, consolidation or genuine entry, tells you more about how this neighborhood actually works than any list of best restaurants ever could.
For more on what makes this stretch of the Gulf Coast worth knowing, from the Village's food scene to the beach itself, Siesta Key's neighborhood guide covers the details that matter to the people who live here.
If you're weighing a move to Siesta Key or just want a second opinion on how a neighborhood like this actually functions day to day, Julie Shaw knows this stretch of the Gulf Coast from the inside. Let's Connect.
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