Drive down Coral Ridge Drive today and the storefront that sat dark for most of last year is loud again. Ember & Vine opened at 5920 Coral Ridge Drive on August 3, taking over the old Angelo Elia space inside Sawgrass Center, and its opening-week promotion (a free cold brew or drip coffee every morning from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.) just wrapped this past Sunday. The coffee itself comes from 360F Roasters, a roastery based right here in Coral Springs, which tells you something about how this new wave of restaurants is choosing to source.
That single opening looks like a nice local story on its own. It isn't isolated. Since the start of the year, Coral Springs has added or announced close to a dozen restaurants, and almost none of them are scattered randomly across the city's grid of strip malls. They're stacking into two specific stretches: the Sawgrass Center corridor along Coral Ridge Drive, and the University Drive and Sample Road intersection downtown, where a $250 million redevelopment called Cornerstone has spent seven years turning a dead shopping plaza into the city's first real walkable block. If you live here, that split matters more than any single opening, because it changes where you actually go on a given night, not just what's available.
Sawgrass Center Filled In Fast
Ember & Vine is run by Eddie Pozzuoli Jr. and his wife Christina, whose company, P Hospitality Management, already operates Eddie & Vinny's Coastal Italian and Dear Olivia in the area, along with Corvina Seafood & Grill, Prezzo in Boca Raton, and Amante's in Deerfield Beach. The group is also opening an Eddie & Vinny's location in Palm Beach Gardens this fall, so Coral Springs isn't a side project for them. It's part of a real, growing Broward County footprint, and they picked the former Angelo Elia site specifically for its visibility inside Sawgrass Center rather than building somewhere new.
Ember & Vine wasn't the only thing to land on that stretch of University Drive and Coral Ridge Drive this year. Flora's Italian Eatery, run by the family behind Flora Fine Foods, opened across from the Florida Panthers IceDen with an Eataly-style setup of food stations, market goods, and an upstairs bar. A few blocks north, two Indian restaurants opened within weeks of each other in March: Jalsa Indian Modern Kitchen soft-opened at 2238 N. University Drive in the space that used to be Honest Indian Vegetarian Restaurant, serving both vegetarian dishes like palak paneer and chana masala alongside chicken tandoori and a seafood butter masala with lobster and shrimp options. Harmony Indian Cuisine, after roughly a year of planning, opened in Maplewood Plaza near Coral Square Mall.
What's notable about this cluster is that none of it required a subsidy. This is private leasing activity responding to foot traffic that was already there from the IceDen, Coral Square, and daytime office workers along University Drive. Restaurants moved into empty storefronts because the corridor was already busy enough to support them.
What $250 Million Bought Two Miles East
Downtown is a different story, and a much longer one. The Cornerstone project sits on the former Coral Springs Financial Plaza, a commercial center built in 1974 that had been quietly falling apart for decades at the southwest corner of University Drive and Sample Road, one of the most trafficked intersections in a city of more than 130,000 residents that has never had a real downtown. Developer Rod Sheldon of Predesco Property Investments bought the roughly seven-acre site for about $16 million in 2018 through his affiliate La Boca Partners, after previously developing the Pei Wei and Chase Bank down the street.
"After 25 years of talk, downtown Coral Springs with shops, restaurants, entertainment, hotel, and other uses will become a reality."
That's what City Commissioner Dan Daley said when the project was approved, and it took most of those seven years for the first phase to actually deliver. Modera Coral Springs Phase I, the south block, opened in mid-2023 with 351 apartments and 14,600 square feet of retail. Tacocraft Taqueria and Tequila Bar has been open there since August 2024, functioning as the corridor's proof of concept.
Phase II, the north block, is more than double the retail footprint at 32,280 square feet, and it's where the real momentum sits right now. Mitch's Downtown Bagel Cafe reopened at 3334 N. University Drive this spring after closing its previous Coral Springs location years earlier. Owner Adam Shidlofsky told local reporters the return felt personal:
"Coral Springs is where I grew up, so it's a homecoming for us."
Paris Baguette, Gary Rack's FarmHouse Kitchen, Let's Chill Ice Cream, and a Rumble Boxing studio round out the rest of that block's leasing.
Big Whiskey's American Restaurant and Bar is the tenant most locals are actually waiting on. The Missouri-founded chain, with roughly two dozen locations across the Midwest and South, will take the ground floor of the north Modera tower with a 200-plus seat, sports-focused layout and a menu built around more than 120 whiskeys. Owners Steve and Jackie Swanson, who also run several IHOP franchises through their Nosnaws Corporation, received a $100,000 reimbursable Community Redevelopment Agency grant on April 27 to help build it out, and told the CRA board to expect roughly six months of construction from that date, which puts a realistic opening somewhere in the fourth quarter of this year. It will be the chain's second Florida location after one opened at Sawgrass Mills Mall in Davie back in January 2025.
Mojo Donuts is the other name people keep asking about, and it has not opened yet. The shop, planned for The Walk on North University Drive, has been in the middle of renovations and interior design work with no grand opening date announced, according to the most recent local reporting. When it does open, expect the brand's signature lineup, things like the Guavecito and Mr. Mojo Rising, plus a Donut 4 Change program that rotates monthly proceeds to local nonprofits including the Broward Health Foundation and the Humane Society of Broward County.
That same April 27 CRA meeting quietly funded two other projects worth knowing about if you're tracking the corridor's momentum. Runyon's received $77,505.50 to renovate its roof and awnings, and the owner of a nearly 50-year-old shopping center on West Sample Road got $92,311.50 to redo the parking lot and modernize the facade. Neither grant matches Big Whiskey's award, but together they show the same pattern: the city is using redevelopment dollars to clean up storefronts around the anchor project, not just fund the anchor itself.
Two Corridors, Two Different Nights Out
Here's the practical shift. A year ago, going out in Coral Springs usually meant picking one restaurant and driving straight to it. Now the city has two distinct, walkable pockets that each support an entire evening on their own.
| Corridor | What's There Now | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Sawgrass Center (Coral Ridge Dr.) | Ember & Vine, Flora's Italian Eatery, Jalsa Indian Modern Kitchen, Harmony Indian Cuisine | Open |
| Downtown Cornerstone (University & Sample) | Mitch's Downtown Bagel Cafe, Tacocraft, Paris Baguette, Gary Rack's FarmHouse Kitchen, Let's Chill Ice Cream | Open |
| Downtown Cornerstone / The Walk | Big Whiskey's, Mojo Donuts | Under construction, no confirmed opening date |
Sawgrass Center works as a daytime-into-evening loop: coffee at Ember & Vine in the morning, a market run at Flora's in the afternoon, dinner at one of the Indian spots at night, all within a few minutes of each other on foot or a short drive. Downtown Cornerstone is still assembling its own rhythm around the Modera towers, and once Big Whiskey's and Mojo Donuts finish construction, it will have the density to support a full weekend without leaving that one intersection.
Neither corridor is finished. Big Whiskey's buildout runs into the fall. Mojo Donuts hasn't set a date. But the pattern is already clear enough that it's worth knowing which stretch of University Drive you're actually headed to before you decide what kind of night you're having.
If you've watched this same intersection sit half-empty for years and are now wondering what a genuinely walkable downtown does to property values on the streets around it, that's exactly the kind of question The Gobin Group fields from Coral Springs homeowners regularly. Reach out for a home valuation if you're curious what this stretch of redevelopment means for your own address.
