For most of the last five years, if you lived behind the gates at Marsh Landing and wanted a memorable dinner, you drove east. The oceanfront clubs, the A1A restaurant row, the hotel dining rooms. West of A1A, along the Intracoastal, the map had a hole in it. Lulu's Waterfront Grille closed in 2021, sat empty, and was eventually demolished. Roscoe Boulevard went quiet.
That hole is closing. And the interesting thing for anyone who already lives here is that the biggest new project in Ponte Vedra Beach isn't going up near the beach. It's going up about five minutes from Marsh Landing's back gate, on the water most of us cross every day without giving it a second thought.
The Roscoe Boulevard Project That Changes the Neighborhood Map
The site at 301 North Roscoe Boulevard has always had the bones. A 1.34-acre parcel on the Intracoastal Waterway, deep enough for a real restaurant with real parking, close enough to Marsh Landing, Sawgrass, and The Plantation that it will pull from all three.
Two concepts are landing there together. Yebo Beach Haus, a South African-inspired restaurant that has run in Atlanta's Buckhead since 2012, is taking the ground floor. Above it, Lions Head Private Members Club will operate as a discreet, dues-based dining club. Atlanta-based True Story Brands, founded by South African restaurateur Justin Anthony, is the operator. The local partner is Shark Tooth Dining LLC, run by Ponte Vedra resident Alex Cranberg, who purchased the property in 2024 for $4.1 million.
The scale is worth pausing on. St. Johns County issued a permit Jan. 20 for the side-by-side projects at 301 N. Roscoe Blvd. along the Intracoastal Waterway at a project cost of $3.14 million. Site plans show a 10,279-square-foot building with 66 parking spaces. Later filings expanded the seat count. The ground-floor Yebo Beach Haus will feature approximately 207 seats, while the second level will house the Lions Head Private Members Club, an exclusive dining experience designed to be elegant, private and thoughtfully curated.
For context, that is roughly the seating capacity of a mid-sized hotel dining room, dropped onto a piece of waterfront that has been closed to the public for half a decade.
The menu concept is worth understanding before it opens. The original Yebo Beach Haus was founded in 2012 in Atlanta, with its menu highlighting New American cuisine, anchored by sushi, seafood and prime steaks, and "flavors reminiscent of Cape Town and South Africa's wine country." True Story Brands runs several sister concepts in Atlanta, including 10 Degrees South, Biltong Bar and the Cape Restaurant & Beach Bar, so the group has thirty years of practice with the format.
The Lions Head half is the more interesting question mark. It is being pitched as a private members' club rather than a hotel dining room dressed up in the language of one. The project will include the Lions Head Private Members Club, described as an exclusive dining venue offering a more discreet hospitality experience. Membership details have not yet been released. Discretion is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and it is worth watching how the dues, sponsorship, and reciprocal privileges get structured once the club goes to market.
Cronk Duch Architecture along with Wolf Design Group will lead the design process, and construction on Yebo Beach Haus and Lions Head Private Members Club is set to begin in early 2026. That means for most of this year, the pull from Marsh Landing's back gate is a construction fence. What replaces it, however, is a two-restaurant complex the size of a small resort amenity, sitting on water we all drive across.
A South African beach house restaurant and a private members' club, dropped onto the Intracoastal, in a location that has been dark since 2021.
That is the sentence that would have sounded implausible in 2023. It is the sentence that describes 2026.
On A1A, Two Smaller Openings Worth Knowing About
The Roscoe project is the headline, but the A1A corridor between Marsh Landing and Old Ponte Vedra has quietly added two smaller places that change weekday routines more than weekend ones.
Black Pearl at Ponte Vedra Pointe
At 880 A1A North, in the Ponte Vedra Pointe Shopping Center, a restaurant called Black Pearl opened this winter with a genuinely unusual concept. Black Pearl, a restaurant concept combining Japanese and Italian cuisines, plans a soft opening Jan. 21 in Ponte Vedra Beach. This creative blend has been thoughtfully crafted to offer something fresh and memorable in a region already rich with great restaurants, and the industry name for the style is Itameshi.
The kitchen is not staffed by newcomers. Chef Abel Chiok has been tapped to create a menu of Japanese-Italian fusion items, a style sometimes referred to as Itameshi, with more than twenty years of experience including at Vidrio in Jacksonville. The dining format layers three experiences under one roof. Black Pearl is launching in phases, with an elegant main dining room and an omakase counter debuting first, followed by the unveiling of a hidden Japanese speakeasy later in the month.
A draft menu released before opening included rigatoni made with edamame, buffalo ricotta and provolone cheese; skirt steak with shiso chimichurri and blistered shishitos, which are small, mild green chili peppers; and black pearl risotto with cuttlefish ink, scallops, prawn and Parmigiano Reggiano. Whether all of those survive service is another question. What matters is that this is not a hotel-lobby sushi restaurant. It is a chef-driven omakase counter with a speakeasy attached, in a strip center that until recently was known primarily for takeout.
Le Petit Paris on A1A
A few doors south, at 830 A1A North, the Jacksonville-based French cafe Le Petit Paris is opening its sixth location. Owner Alex Chezaud started the concept in Mandarin in 2019 and has expanded quickly, with locations now in San Pablo, Atlantic Beach, Southside, and Ponte Vedra.
The detail worth writing down is the hours. Chezaud said the restaurant may open at 7 a.m. to cater to families dropping off children at the nearby Bolles School Ponte Vedra. A pre-eight-o'clock counter that sells actual French pastry is a genuinely useful addition to this stretch of A1A, which for years has forced anyone wanting coffee before school drop-off to choose between Publix and a drive to the beach.
Planning Around Fall at the Concert Hall
While the construction fences go up on Roscoe, the fall calendar at Ponte Vedra Concert Hall at 1050 A1A North is worth pulling into a calendar now. A few dates that stood out from the current schedule, useful if you are hosting fall guests:
- Tue, Sep 15: JET, Down The Moonlit Mile Revue
- Tue, Sep 22: Madeleine Peyroux
- Fri, Oct 2: Mariachi El Bronx
- Sat, Oct 3: Celtic Thunder
- Mon, Oct 12: Edwin McCain
Ponte Vedra Concert Hall is a theatre in the heart of Ponte Vedra Beach, FL, with a capacity of 1,100 people. Small enough that where you sit actually matters, close enough to Marsh Landing that a show is a fifteen-minute round trip rather than an evening logistics exercise.
How the Map Is Redrawing
The pattern across these three projects is easy to miss if you take them one at a time. Read together, they say something specific about where daily life in Ponte Vedra Beach is heading.
The oceanfront side of A1A has been the center of gravity for decades. The clubs, the hotels, the boulevard homes. What is happening now is that the west side of A1A and the Intracoastal edge are absorbing serious capital for the first time in years. A $3.14 million permit on Roscoe. A chef-driven omakase counter in what used to be a quiet strip center. A French bakery calibrating its opening time to school drop-off patterns.
For Marsh Landing residents specifically, this shift is geographically flattering. The back gate onto Palm Valley Road and the A1A frontage are suddenly closer to more of what is worth driving to than they have been in years. The neighborhood did not move. The map did.
If you have been thinking about how your own home fits into a market that is quietly repositioning around you, that is a conversation worth having sooner rather than later. The team at Tyler Ackland lives inside these gates and watches these permits go up in real time. Schedule Your Private Consultation to talk through what a shifting neighborhood map means for your address specifically.
