"We couldn't be more excited to begin this next chapter in Naples and become part of the local community."
That's Adam Strecker, CEO of Hi Noon Hospitality, talking about Buck & Rider's first location outside the Southwest, which is going into the building Brio Tuscan Grille just vacated after filing for Chapter 11 twice in five years. It's a tidy line for a press release. It's also, if you live close enough to Waterside Shops to treat it as your backyard, the wrong way to think about what's actually happening there.
Waterside Shops sits on Seagate Drive at Tamiami Trail, opened in November 1992 and built in part to serve the Pelican Bay community taking shape around it. For most of the last two decades it has felt like a fixed quantity: Saks Fifth Avenue, a rotating cast of boutiques, a handful of restaurants that came and went without changing much. That's not what's happening in 2026. Every space that's turned over this year turned over because a national retailer or a legacy restaurant failed there first, and everything replacing it is a concept with no direct twin anywhere else in the region. Read the departures and arrivals side by side and the pattern is hard to miss.
What Left, And What Took Its Place
| Space | What left | What's replacing it |
|---|---|---|
| Former Nordstrom (74,591 sq ft) | Closed 2020, part of a 16-store national shutdown | RH gallery, 29,382 sq ft with a glass-atrium restaurant |
| Former Barnes & Noble | Closed July 2024, corporate pivot away from mall formats | Williams Sonoma and Pottery Barn, relocated from their old inline spaces |
| Former Williams Sonoma inline space | Vacated by the brand's own choice in January 2025 to move | Christian Dior flagship, with Brunello Cucinelli next door |
| Former Brio Tuscan Grille | Chapter 11 in August 2025, its second filing in five years, after nearly 20 years at the address | Buck & Rider, targeting late 2026 |
| Former Bank of America Private Bank | Building demolished to the steel frame | Eddie V's Prime Seafood, opened June 7, 2026 |
Look at the Nordstrom line first, because it tells you something the others don't. RH's new gallery is less than half the square footage of the department store it's replacing. That's not a downsize born of desperation. The plan calls for six separate galleries connected by planted courtyards and glass-roofed walkways, built around a full-service restaurant and wine bar under an elongated glass atrium. Waterside isn't backfilling a vacant box with whatever retailer will take the space. It's building something smaller, more particular, and centered on a sit-down dining room in a location that used to sell shoes and handbags.
Two Bankruptcies, Then A Different Kind Of Restaurant
Brio's exit deserves its own line because it shows how far the property's owner, The Forbes Company, was willing to let a legacy tenant fail before replacing the format entirely. Brio held the same Waterside address for almost 20 years and had already filed Chapter 11 once before the 2025 filing that finally ended its run. Two bankruptcies at the same location is not a landlord protecting a beloved local institution. It's a chain that stopped working, twice, before anyone acted.
What's going in instead isn't another Italian chain hoping for a better outcome. Buck & Rider is Hi Noon Hospitality's first location outside the Southwest, a seafood-forward concept built around an open kitchen and daily-flown ingredients, arriving in Naples before it exists in any other East Coast market. That's a deliberate expansion choice by a company based in Arizona, not a regional chain testing whether Naples can support a fourth location.
Three Restaurants, No Overlap
Here's the detail that separates this round of change from an ordinary tenant reshuffle: Eddie V's, Buck & Rider, and the restaurant inside RH's new gallery don't compete with each other for the same table.
Eddie V's, which opened June 7 at 765 Seagate Drive, is Darden Restaurants' luxury seafood and steak brand, the sixth Eddie V's location in Florida and the first anywhere in Southwest Florida. Darden also owns the Capital Grille, a North Naples fixture since 2008, and it would have been simple to treat the two brands as redundant. Instead they're positioned differently on purpose. Capital Grille reads as a quieter, more traditional chophouse. Eddie V's is built around its V Lounge, with live music trios performing nightly and a wine list recognized by Wine Spectator, aimed at a livelier evening rather than a formal one. The restaurant itself runs 9,896 square feet with patio seating, three private event rooms, and valet service, on a lot where the old bank building was demolished down to its steel frame to make room.
Buck & Rider will land more casually, with an open kitchen and indoor-outdoor flow built around fresh seafood rather than a formal steak program. And the restaurant taking shape inside RH's gallery is something else again: a wine bar and dining room folded into a home-furnishings showroom, the kind of format that doesn't have a direct comparison point anywhere else in Naples.
Three restaurants opened or opening within months of each other at the same shopping center, and none of them are chasing the same customer on the same night. That's not how a property fills space when it's simply trying to keep the lights on.
The Timeline, If You're Planning Around It
- Eddie V's Prime Seafood: open now, dinner service 4 to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 4 to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday, with happy hour in the V Lounge daily from 4 to 6:30 p.m.
- Buck & Rider: under construction in the former Brio space, targeting a late 2026 opening
- RH gallery and restaurant: permits issued in 2025, targeting late 2026, no confirmed opening date yet
- Christian Dior and Brunello Cucinelli: both buildouts underway in the space Williams Sonoma vacated in January 2025
- Williams Sonoma and Pottery Barn: already relocated into the two-story building that replaced Barnes & Noble
What This Actually Changes If You're Two Minutes Away
If Waterside has been your default for a Tuesday dinner or a quick errand between Saks and the parking garage, the practical shift is timing, not geography. Eddie V's has been open since early June, which means the walk-in window that exists before a restaurant works out its rhythm during the first snowbird season is closing. Reservations at new rooms tend to get harder to land once the winter crowd arrives and teaches a kitchen what it can charge and how long a table will wait. If you've been meaning to try it before season, the next few months are the stretch to do it.
Buck & Rider and the RH restaurant are still far enough out that there's no rush, but worth knowing they're coming so a fall or winter reservation doesn't catch you off guard by a room you didn't know existed. And if Dior or Brunello Cucinelli weren't previously on your radar at Waterside, they will be by the time their buildouts finish, in the same footprint that used to hold Williams Sonoma's housewares.
None of this changes how close Waterside sits to Pelican Bay or how easily it fits into a resident's week. It does mean the mall a Pelican Bay homeowner has walked to for twenty years is being deliberately rebuilt around a different set of names, not refreshed with the same categories in new paint. That's worth knowing before the season starts, whether you're deciding where to eat this week or simply trying to keep up with what's changed in your own neighborhood.
For more on what makes Pelican Bay itself work day to day, including the club and beach access that sit alongside a walk to Waterside, see our look inside Pelican Bay's lifestyle. If you're weighing Pelican Bay against its closest neighbor, our Pelican Bay or Park Shore comparison breaks down how the two fit different routines.
Whether you already call Pelican Bay home or you're weighing a move to be closer to mornings like this one, Rigsby Team knows this stretch of Naples block by block. Request a Private Consultation to talk through what's changing here and what it means for you.
