What's New on East Davis Boulevard in Davis Islands

Walk East Davis Boulevard on a Tuesday morning and the block between Barbados and Biscayne Avenues still looks like it always has: a run of low storefronts, a few golf carts angled into diagonal spots, someone's dog waiting outside while its owner orders inside. Nothing about the Village has gotten bigger. It can't. There are only so many storefronts between those two cross streets, and that number hasn't changed in years.

What has changed is who's behind the counters, and in one case, how far that counter has traveled.

The strip that can't expand

Davis Islands Village isn't a shopping center with room to grow. It's a fixed run of blocks on East Davis Boulevard, the same commercial stretch that's held the neighborhood's restaurants, cafes, and small shops since long before anyone reading this moved in. When a new concept wants in, something else has to move out first. There's no adjacent parcel to develop, no second phase. That constraint is the reason the Village still feels like a village and not a strip mall, and it's also why every new opening here means a previous tenant is gone.

Which makes the last two years unusual. The turnover hasn't slowed the Village down. If anything, the block has been busier with new names than it's been in a while, even as its best-known business started opening doors somewhere else entirely.

DI Coffee Bar's exit ramp

DI Coffee Bar opened in 2014 at 214 E Davis Blvd, started by Ramon Perez and his wife Marilyn as a side project alongside their day jobs building homes. It became the kind of place where the Friday Night Jazz series draws a crowd and where regulars know the barista by name. For a decade, if you wanted DI Coffee Bar, you came to Davis Islands. There wasn't another option.

That changed in April 2025, when Perez opened a second location in Seminole Heights, taking over the former Cake Cuties Bakery space on North Central Avenue. He didn't make an event of it.

Perez told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, "We didn't push it. No soft opening, no grand opening, we just opened the doors."

The Seminole Heights shop did five times the business Perez expected in its first week. By January 2026, he was telling Creative Loafing Tampa Bay about a third location on the way, this one inside the lobby of TECO's new headquarters at Midtown Tampa, an 18-story office tower called Midtown East, targeted to open that February. The Midtown location can't replicate everything from the original, no live music or alcohol given the office-lobby setting, but the core menu travels: espresso drinks, teas, the toast-heavy breakfast lineup that made the Davis Islands shop a regular stop for people on their way to work.

So the business that put its name on Davis Islands, literally, the "DI" is short for the neighborhood, no longer needs the island to operate. It's become a citywide brand while its flagship stays exactly where it's always been, on the same block, serving the same regulars.

What's filling the gaps instead

Meanwhile, the Village itself hasn't gone quiet. If anything, the last two years have brought more new, independently owned concepts to East Davis Boulevard than the strip has seen in a while, and none of them are chains.

Oggi Italian, already one of the Village's longest-running kitchens, opened a spinoff next door at 236 E Davis Blvd called Buchette Spritz Bar. It's built around an Italian-style wine window, the kind where you order a spritz or a glass through an opening in the wall rather than sitting down for a full meal. The owners described it on Instagram as their "modern Buchette Del Vino, where tradition meets innovation in the world of wine." It opened to the public on Mother's Day and has since become the kind of stop people make before or after dinner elsewhere on the block, not instead of it.

A few doors down, Spartaco's Kitchen opened in 2024 as a small, family-run restaurant built around dishes from Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy, a regional focus that's rare enough in Tampa that it stands out even on a block that already has two well-regarded Italian spots.

And there's a third name worth watching, even though it hasn't opened yet. Plan review paperwork filed with the city shows Little Palm Cafe heading into 205 E Davis Blvd. The concept comes from Tampa Bay restaurateur Christopher Rivas, who also created Little Tina and Urban Cantina elsewhere in the city. As of this writing the cafe's own site still says simply "coming soon," so there's no confirmed opening date or menu yet, but the paperwork puts a real address behind it, and it would join a stretch that already includes Thai Island, Margaritas Mexican Restaurant, Plum Tree, Farrell's on the Island, and Grecian Island Restaurant.

Here's the shorthand version of what's actually turned over on the block recently:

• Buchette Spritz Bar (236 E Davis Blvd) — wine-window spinoff of Oggi Italian, opened Mother's Day
• Spartaco's Kitchen — family-run Emilia-Romagna cuisine, opened 2024
• Little Palm Cafe (205 E Davis Blvd) — filed by restaurateur Christopher Rivas, opening date not yet set

None of these are outposts of something bigger. Each one is a local operator betting on a two-block strip that can't grow past its own footprint, at the same time the Village's most successful export is proving that a Davis Islands concept can survive, even thrive, somewhere else entirely.

The parts that haven't moved

It's worth saying plainly that most of what makes the Village feel like the Village hasn't changed at all. The seawall along the island's eastern edge still functions the way it always has, less like infrastructure and more like a place people end up on weekend evenings without quite planning to, walking dogs, dangling legs over the edge, watching the sunset come in over the city. Roy Jenkins Pool still fills with kids every summer the way a public pool is supposed to. The golf cart parade still happens every December, fireworks still go off on the Fourth of July, and none of that depends on which restaurant occupies which storefront in a given year.

That stability is exactly what makes the turnover on East Davis Boulevard worth noticing rather than shrugging off. The Village isn't reinventing itself. It's doing the opposite: staying precisely the same size, the same two blocks, the same walkable stretch between two cross streets, while individual operators cycle through it and at least one of them expands beyond it. A coffee shop that opened as someone's side project eleven years ago is now inside a downtown office tower serving people who may never set foot on the island at all. The block it started on, meanwhile, keeps finding new small operators willing to bet on a footprint that can't expand.

That's not a story about growth. It's a story about a very small, very fixed commercial strip proving unusually durable as a launchpad, for both new arrivals like Buchette and Spartaco's, and for the rare local business that outgrows its own neighborhood without ever leaving it behind.

If you're weighing what life actually looks like day to day in a place like Davis Islands, that kind of detail tends to matter more than a glossy overview ever could. Heidi Odio and the Odio Team spend enough time in South Tampa's waterfront neighborhoods to notice these shifts as they happen, not after the fact. If you have questions about Davis Islands, the Village, or anywhere else in Tampa Bay, reach out any time.