Fort Myers Beach Is Back Before the Pier Is

A friend who has owned on Estero Boulevard since before Ian mentioned something last week that stuck with me. He said he keeps waiting to feel like the island is really back, and he keeps checking the pier construction fence to see if that's changed. Meanwhile his wife had already been to three new restaurants that month and didn't think twice about any of them.

That gap is the actual story right now. The island's slowest, most visible rebuild and its fastest, most lived-in recovery are running on two completely different clocks, and if you only watch the one everybody talks about, you'll miss that the other one already finished.

Two clocks, two speeds

The clock everyone watches is infrastructure. The pier. Times Square. The big anchor projects that show up in news coverage because they're expensive, contested, and slow. As of March 2026, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was still reviewing the county's plans to rebuild the pier, and developer Shlomo Melloul, who owns two parcels facing it, was openly frustrated that construction hadn't started more than three and a half years after the storm. That clock moves in fiscal years and federal review cycles.

The clock nobody talks about is dining, and it has already lapped the other one. On the south end, Santini Plaza, once a dead strip after Ian, has restaurants open and locals treating it like a neighborhood spot again. Legno Italian Kitchen is one of the new tenants, and its owner has described the community support since opening as immediate. A longtime snowbird visitor told a local TV crew she now bikes down to Santini rather than driving miles off-island for a meal, which is the kind of small logistical detail that tells you a place has actually reopened rather than just reappeared on a map.

If you're gauging the island by the fence around the pier, you're measuring the slow clock. If you're gauging it by where you can get a table on a Tuesday, you're measuring the one that matters for daily life, and that one already said yes a while ago.

The first ballot since before the storm

Here's a number that says the same thing more precisely. The Fort Myers Beach Observer's 2026 Best of the Beach Awards was the first reader poll the paper has run online since before Hurricane Ian. Thousands of readers voted. That's not a minor detail. A publication doesn't bring back a popular-vote readers' poll until there's enough of a business base, and enough resident interest, to make the results mean something.

The winners read like a functioning restaurant scene, not a recovering one:

• Snug Harbor Waterfront Restaurant on Old San Carlos Boulevard took best restaurant, best seafood, and best calamari
• Grace's Trattoria at the Lani Kai Island Resort won best new restaurant
• The Whale took best sports bar, best wings, and best bloody mary
• Doc Ford's Rum Bar & Grille won best burger
• Pink Shell Beach Resort was named best hotel and best view
• The Fort Myers Beach Chamber of Commerce won best community organization

The Pink Shell's general manager noted the resort had its best revenue year on record heading into this one, and credited part of that to more businesses and residential properties coming back online around it, plus a rough winter up north that pushed more visitors south. Snug Harbor's owner still runs his boat out to the Gulf each morning and picks up shrimp from Erickson & Jensen before service, the kind of routine that only exists once a restaurant has settled back into normal operations rather than surviving week to week.

What actually broke ground at Times Square

Compare that to the physical heart of the island. Times Square, the commercial core across from Lynn Hall Memorial Park, sat in limbo for roughly three years after Ian, propped up by food trucks and pop-up vendors while property owners and the town argued over how to rebuild under new flood elevation and zoning rules.

The first permanent structure to actually clear approval wasn't a hotel or a big mixed-use complex. It was an ice cream shop. In December 2025, the Town Council unanimously approved a three-story building on the former Kilwins site for property owner Carlos Chavez, who also owns Bella Mozzarella next door. The ground floor will house his existing mobile ice cream concept, rebranded as a storefront called Meli's Ice Cream Shop, with a one-bedroom residence for his family on the two floors above.

That's the whole first win. Not a landmark. A family business converting a food truck into a building with an apartment on top. Melloul's much larger three-story vision for his own parcels nearby, with a rooftop bar and retail space, is still working through the same approval process, and he's said outright that he's ready to build and simply waiting on the pier to move so the rest of the district has a reason to follow. The order of operations at Times Square has turned out to be smallest project first, and everything bigger queued up behind it.

If you live here, that tells you something practical: don't expect the square itself to feel finished soon. Expect it to keep filling in one modest, code-compliant building at a time, the same way Santini Plaza did on the south end, restaurant by restaurant rather than master plan by master plan.

The calendar already knows the island is open

Events are a good test of whether a place is functioning, because organizers only commit to them when they trust the infrastructure to hold up. Fort Myers Beach's summer and fall calendar reads like an island that passed that test months ago.

Mullet Madness, the town's signature summer crawl, ran its 2026 edition on July 25 with roughly a dozen participating businesses, from Snug Harbor and Smokin' Oyster Brewery to The Whale, whose owner also organizes the event through the business group What's Up FMB. It's grown enough in three years that Beach Observer coverage now treats it as a returning tradition rather than a novelty.

The bigger date on the books is the Island Hopper Songwriter Fest, running September 18 through 27 this year. It's a 10-day, four-location festival that moves from Captiva Island to Cape Coral to downtown Fort Myers before closing out its final weekend on Fort Myers Beach, with more than 60 free performances from BMI-affiliated singer-songwriters spread across beach bars, resort pools, and sunset cruises.

Here's what's on the island's calendar for the rest of the year, according to the Town of Fort Myers Beach's official events list:

None of those are new events invented to manufacture a comeback story. They're the same civic calendar the island has run for decades, picking back up on schedule. That's a quieter kind of proof than a ribbon cutting, but it's the kind residents actually feel.

What this means if you already live here

The pier will get rebuilt on its own timeline, and that timeline runs through federal review boards, not neighborhood sentiment. Times Square will keep filling in slowly, one small approved building after another, the ice cream shop before the rooftop bar. Neither of those facts should be the thing you use to judge whether the island has recovered, because they're measuring construction, not community.

The more honest gauge is the one you can check yourself this week. Is there a wait at Snug Harbor on a Friday. Did Legno's tables fill up at Santini. Are the September festival venues already locking in performers. By that measure, Fort Myers Beach isn't waiting to come back. It came back in the order that mattered most to the people who live here first, and the rest of the island is still catching up to match it.

I've spent 17 years working on homes before I ever sold one, and I still think the health of a place shows up in details like these before it shows up in any headline. If you're weighing what's happening on this island, whether that's where to eat this month or what a property near Santini or Times Square might be worth given how the area is filling back in, I'm happy to talk it through. Reach out to Michael Kussmann any time, no pressure, just a conversation about the place you actually live.