"When is the restaurant supposed to open in the Olde Naples Building on Third Street?"
A reader identified only as J.L. asked that in the Naples Press's long-running "Tim Aten Knows" column this July. It wasn't a new question. Some version of it has been showing up in that same column since at least 2023, when the column was already chronicling permit and parking fights over the same address, more than a year after the city had issued a permit to convert the century-old space from a former grocery store into a restaurant and kitchen. By this summer, the honest answer had changed. The project wasn't delayed anymore. It was over.
What makes that ending worth understanding isn't the vacancy itself. Third Street South has had an empty storefront at that corner since 2006. What changed this year is that the building came closer to opening than it had in two decades, then ended the same week the neighboring Olde Naples Hotel opened. The reporting establishes that timing, and the landlord has not publicly explained the decision.
Four Years, One Signed Lease, No Restaurant
The tenant was Rick Doody, a seasonal North Naples resident who co-founded the Columbus based Bravo Brio Restaurant Group in 1992, took it public in 2010, and sold it for roughly $100 million in 2018. His family has run Lindey's, a restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, for 43 years. He signed a lease with the Camalier family, who have owned the 1921 building at Third Street South and Broad Avenue for more than four decades, back in February 2022. The plan was a high end Italian American steakhouse called JoJo's Bar, in a building that had sat empty since Fantozzi's, a neighborhood deli and wine shop, closed there in 2006.
The building itself came with a problem no lease could fix. It predates Naples' incorporation and its modern parking code, which makes it a legal nonconforming structure with no on-site parking. When Doody applied for outdoor dining permits in 2023, the City Council denied the request over exactly that issue. Doody's side didn't drop it. Through a state process called FLUEDRA, a special magistrate named Derek Rooney reviewed the case and, in a report issued that December, concluded the city's 2023 denial had been unreasonable and recommended a compromise.
The City Council heard that recommendation on February 5, 2025, and rejected it anyway, unanimously. Doody has said he initially misread the unanimous vote as approval, only to learn from Chris Camalier that the council had gone the other way. He didn't hide his confusion afterward, telling a reporter he didn't understand the council's reasoning at all.
The Call That Ended It
The hotel next door, meanwhile, was finishing construction. When Olde Naples Hotel opened to guests on May 15, 2026, Doody got a phone call from Chris Camalier telling him the family was considering a different direction for the restaurant space. Four days later, on May 19, a termination letter arrived ending the lease outright. Doody has said he was shocked and dismayed given how much time and money he'd put into a project he'd been working on for more than four years. The Camalier family has not said publicly what, if anything, replaces JoJo's Bar. As of late July, according to Naples Press, the corner remained exactly what it had been for most of the last twenty years: a historic building with no restaurant in it.
What Else Opened Around That Corner
The Camalier family owns the hotel as well as the building, and the hotel wraps around two sides of it. Olde Naples Hotel's first phase, roughly 50 of a planned 109 rooms, opened to guests on May 15, on the block where Naples was founded in 1889. A formal ribbon cutting followed on June 11, with Naples Mayor Teresa Heitmann and Anne Camalier cutting the ribbon together, according to Florida Weekly's coverage of the event. Inside, Annie's Bistro, Bar & Bakery has been running since opening day, with murals by local artist Janine Wesselmann, a piano, and a room that shifts from morning coffee to full evening bistro service. It's open to non-hotel guests, which by fall has made it one more option within walking distance of the Third Street South Farmers Market, the Saturday morning market that's run behind Tommy Bahama since 1994 with close to 60 vendors.
The pattern holds a few blocks north, too. The Naples Beach Club, now operating as a Four Seasons Resort, launched last fall and began moving in its first residential owners earlier this year. Two of its restaurants, HB's and Sunset Bar, were rebuilt on their original footprints as tributes to the property's history, right down to matching the old striped awnings. A third, The Merchant Room, opened in December 2025 under chef Gavin Kaysen, a two time James Beard Award winner making his first move outside Minnesota. The resort's Tom Fazio designed golf course is slated to open this fall.
Together, the hotel, Annie's, the resort's dining rooms and the golf course make this a season of openings around Olde Naples. The Olde Naples Building is the one address in that group where a restaurant was planned and has not opened, after a project that ran through four years of permitting and a lease that ended in May.
What's Actually On The Calendar This Fall
None of that changes what the street looks like walking down it right now. Third Street South's Autumn Sidewalk Sale runs Thursday, October 15 through Sunday, October 18, a French themed weekend that leans into the corridor's Bon Marché heritage, according to the event listing on Third Street South's own site. Merchants stay open late, restaurants fill the sidewalks, and the four day stretch functions as the unofficial start of the season along the avenue. It happens every year, and this year it happens on a block where one storefront, the oldest and most written about one, still sits behind construction fencing with no announced plan.
That's not a complaint about the neighborhood's momentum. If anything, it's the opposite. A corridor that filled a new hotel, relaunched a beachfront resort's dining program, and kept its longest running Saturday market running without missing a week doesn't need one more restaurant to prove it's working. The question Tim Aten's column has fielded since 2023 has a different form now. With the JoJo's Bar lease terminated in May, days after the neighboring hotel opened, what the Camalier family plans for the 1921 building at 1148 Third Street South remains unannounced.
Sara Anderson keeps an eye on these blocks year round, not just when a for sale sign goes up. If you want the next update on that corner, or on anything else changing along Third Street South this season, Sara Sells SWFL is a good place to ask.
