Walk the intersection of Ocean Boulevard and Avenida Messina on any Friday night and it looks like the Village at its most varied. Steaks at Summer House. Fish tacos at The Hub. A cocktail on the porch at The Cottage. A game on at MVP. Poke bowls a few doors down. Five menus, five vibes, five reasons to pick one over another depending on what you're in the mood for.
Except you're not really choosing between five businesses. You're choosing between concepts built by the same two people.
One intersection, one ownership group
Chris Brown and Mike Granthon run Above the Bar Hospitality Group, and between them they own Beach Club, The Hub Baja Grill, The Cottage, Summer House Steak & Seafood, MVP (My Village Pub), and, as of this year, Siesta Poke. That's six operations clustered around the same few blocks of Siesta Key Village, all reporting to the same two partners.
It didn't happen overnight. Brown moved to Sarasota in the early 1990s after his parents retired here and spent his early years in the wholesale car business before moving into commercial real estate. Granthon came to Florida by way of Washington, D.C., where he'd attended junior high and high school after growing up in Peru. The two connected over a shared interest in hospitality and real estate, and once they had one property working, they started buying the ones next to it.
Beach Club came first, a Siesta Key night spot that's been open since 1947, long before Brown or Granthon arrived on the island. The Hub Baja Grill followed in 2008, opened in what had been a real estate office. The Cottage came next, built into an actual pecky-cypress cottage that had been moved to Avenida Messina from the beach. Summer House Steak and Seafood opened in March 2018 as the pair's most ambitious project yet, a 155-seat dinner-only room with steaks that start at $50 and a design nod to a Siesta Key landmark that stood on the same site decades earlier. MVP opened more recently, in the space that Napoli's Italian Restaurant used to occupy at 5200 Ocean Boulevard, built specifically to fill a gap the partners had noticed: Siesta Key didn't have a real sports bar.
How the corner filled in
The restaurants get the attention, but the real story is in the buildings around them. In 2014, Brown and Granthon bought eight separate buildings along the Village's main stretch, not just the ones they'd turn into restaurants.
That purchase is why:
- Morton's Siesta Market now sits in what used to be the old Siesta Market building
- Siesta Village Liquors occupies the former Siesta Key Hardware space
- The Sea Shanty and Meany's Mini Donuts buildings also came with that same 2014 deal
Put the restaurant openings next to the building purchases and you get a group that doesn't just operate five or six concepts. It owns the real estate under most of the Village's busiest corner, which is part of why MVP going into the old Napoli's space read less like a new tenant moving in and more like a landlord filling in the last open storefront on a block it already controlled.
The new arrival that didn't fit the pattern
This past season, the Village picked up two new restaurants at once, and they tell two different stories about how the place actually grows.
Siesta Poke opened in late August at 5204 Ocean Boulevard, next door to Made in Rome Organic Gelato. It's a build-your-own poke and açaí bowl concept, and it's the newest addition to the Above the Bar roster, joining Beach Club and MVP among the group's restaurants that stayed open through last fall's recovery period. Same ownership, same playbook, one more storefront.
The Duo Doner & Deli is the other new arrival, and it's not part of that group at all. It opened at 5049 Ocean Boulevard in the Siesta Center, run by chef Jakub Skoczylas and his wife Maja Rakowiecka. Skoczylas trained under a Michelin chef in Sweden before working stints in Croatia and the U.K., then landed in Sarasota as an executive sous chef at Founders Club before he and Rakowiecka opened their own spot. Their menu leans on Turkish doner kebabs, a recipe Skoczylas describes as a five-day double marinade he picked up from friends in the U.K., alongside breakfast sandwiches, smash burgers, and coffee. In August, Sarasota Magazine named it one of the best new restaurants in Sarasota, the kind of recognition that goes to the food, not the ownership structure behind it.
So the Village's two newest openings sit about a block and a half apart, and one of them expands a six-restaurant portfolio while the other is two people who moved from Poland and built something from scratch. Both are doing well. Neither is competing with the other in any way that matters to a customer standing on the sidewalk trying to decide where to eat.
What this actually means if you eat here every week
None of this changes what any of these restaurants tastes like or what a meal there costs. What it does explain is a pattern longtime residents have probably noticed without naming it: the five original Above the Bar concepts never really compete with each other on price or crowd. Summer House owns the $50-steak dinner crowd. The Hub owns the casual fish-taco lunch. The Cottage owns the porch-drink category. MVP owns game day. That's not an accident of five different owners each finding their niche. It's one ownership group deliberately building five non-overlapping reasons to walk down the same block, backed by a staff of more than 200 people who move between properties as needed.
It also means the Village's restaurant turnover isn't one thing. When Above the Bar opens something new, like Siesta Poke, it's an established operator filling a gap in a portfolio it already controls, block by storefront. When an independent like The Duo Doner & Deli opens, it's a genuinely new voice finding space in a Village that most people assume is fully spoken for. Both keep the corner interesting. They just get there by completely different routes, and knowing which is which tells you something real about how much actual variety exists behind the different paint colors and different menus.
If you've lived here long enough to have a go-to order at three of these places, you've been loyal to two people's business decisions more than you probably realized. That's not a complaint. It's just the kind of detail about this island that doesn't show up until you start asking who owns what.
I track this stuff because it's part of what makes Siesta Key worth paying attention to, whether you're deciding where to eat tonight or wondering what's actually happening a few blocks from your front door. If you're curious what any of that means for your own address on the island, Shane Lewis puts together a free instant home valuation, no restaurant ownership required.
