Ask a longtime South Howard regular who owns the block and most will name restaurants, not the people who run them. That's the gap worth closing. Walk South Howard Avenue today and the storefronts look familiar enough from a car window. Get out and look at who's actually behind the door, and the picture changes fast. A handful of operators now control a surprising share of the strip, while one of its most talked-about projects has been "opening soon" since before some current SoHo regulars signed their first Hyde Park lease.
Here's the actual state of the block as of September 2026, sorted by what's real, what's not, and what tells you something about how this corridor works.
The Three Doors Under One Roof
Start with the consolidation, because it's the least visible change and the most structural one. Disser Hospitality now operates three concepts within a five-minute walk of each other on South Howard: Sunset Rodeo, Good Luck Chuck's, and Howard & Platt.
Good Luck Chuck's took over the space at 410 S Howard Ave after SoHo Saloon closed in March 2026, ending a 14-year run at that address. The new concept leans harder into live music in the same footprint. A few blocks away, Howard & Platt opened in the TC Choy's building, a space that had sat dark for years before Disser brought it back into rotation.
"As South Howard continues to evolve, we're excited to bring Tampa another fresh, elevated hospitality concept," the company said when SoHo Saloon's closure was announced.
That's the polished version. The practical version is that a resident who used to think of South Howard as a strip of independent bars is now, whether they clock it or not, mostly choosing between rooms run by the same handful of people. Reservation systems, hours, and service standards are converging because the ownership already has.
What Actually Opened This Year
Set the consolidation aside and look at raw openings, because two of them matter more than the headline suggests.
The Landon opened in late March 2026 in the former 717 South space on Bayshore Boulevard, one of the most recognizable restaurant addresses in the city. New American fine dining, new name, same iconic corner. And on July 28, 2026, Ralph Lauren opened a 2,300-square-foot boutique at 1609 W Snow Ave, next to Buddy Brew and beside J. McLaughlin. It's the only full-line Ralph Lauren store in the Tampa Bay area, and it filled a space that had sat empty for more than a year after the old Wine Exchange closed.
Here's how the block actually breaks down right now:
| Address | Used to be | Now (or coming) | Status as of September 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 410 S Howard Ave | SoHo Saloon (14 years) | Good Luck Chuck's | Open |
| TC Choy's building, S Howard | TC Choy's (vacant for years) | Howard & Platt | Open |
| Former 717 South, Bayshore Blvd | 717 South | The Landon | Open, March 2026 |
| 1609 W Snow Ave | Wine Exchange (vacant 1+ year) | Ralph Lauren | Open, July 28, 2026 |
| 1504 S Howard Ave | CopperFish (closed 2014) | The H steakhouse | Announced 2023, still not open |
| 1350 S Howard Ave | Fresh Kitchen (burned 2024) | Joe & The Juice | Rezoning pending, targeting 2027 |
| 1719 W Kennedy Blvd | Ducky's Sports Lounge | Fresh Kitchen's new flagship | Under construction, largest location for the chain |
Read that table left to right and the pattern is obvious. The addresses that turned over fast, Good Luck Chuck's, Howard & Platt, The Landon, Ralph Lauren, all had one thing in common: an operator with capital already in motion and no need to solve a parking problem first. The two that haven't opened share the opposite problem.
The Restaurant That Still Isn't There
The H steakhouse is the most useful case study on the entire strip, because it shows exactly what stalls a South Howard project versus what moves one.
The concept was first announced for 1504 S Howard Ave, the former CopperFish site, back in 2023. The parent company, H And H Food Services, submitted renderings and design plans that year, describing a nearly 8,000-square-foot flagship seating 185 guests, with a patio just over 1,000 square feet. Co-owner Ahmet Ozhamurkar told a Tampa outlet at the time that the location would be something like a flagship for the brand.
"The important thing is that we purchased the land," Ozhamurkar said. "So we can make everything from scratch."
Owning the land outright should have made this one of the faster builds on the corridor. It hasn't. The project was originally pointed at a second-half-of-2024 opening. As of the most recent reporting available in 2026, it still hasn't opened, more than three years after the initial announcement. If you've been hearing about a Turkish-inflected steakhouse coming to Hyde Park since before the pandemic fully receded, you're not misremembering. It just genuinely has not happened yet.
Compare that to the other stalled project on the strip: Joe & The Juice, working to redevelop the parcel at 1350 S Howard Ave where the original Fresh Kitchen stood before a July 2024 fire destroyed it. That site is small, 0.08 of an acre, and reporting on the project has been direct about the holdup: parking, not concept, is the central issue in the rezoning approval, the same constraint that limited the original Fresh Kitchen's on-site capacity. The Denmark-based chain is aiming for a 2027 debut, which on this corridor should be read as a target, not a promise. Anyone who has watched South Howard long enough knows that a stated opening date sliding by two quarters is closer to the rule than the exception once parking becomes the sticking point.
Meanwhile, Fresh Kitchen itself didn't wait around for its old lot to get sorted. It's rebuilding a mile and a half north at 1719 W Kennedy Blvd, in the former Ducky's Sports Lounge space, at more than 4,000 square feet, making it the chain's largest location. That's a company that looked at a stalled South Howard rezoning and decided the faster path to reopening ran through a different address entirely.
What This Changes About Your Evening Walk
If your default route runs somewhere between Swann and Bay to Bay, the strip you're walking past hasn't physically moved, but who answers the phone when you call for a table has changed more than the storefronts suggest. Three of your options now route back to one operator. A fourth address that's been empty or half-built for years finally has a tenant with land in hand and a fire's worth of insurance money behind the decision to relocate rather than wait.
And if you've been telling out-of-town friends for the past two years that there's a great new steakhouse "coming soon" to Hyde Park, it might be worth checking before you promise a reservation. The land is bought. The renderings exist. The doors are still closed.
For a longer look at how this corridor's retail and restaurant demand actually behaves, our post on how South Tampa's lifestyle drives neighborhood retail demand digs into the pattern from the commercial side. And if you're curious how South Howard fits into the broader map of South Tampa's commercial corridors, we've mapped that out too in where South Tampa works.
South Howard rewards the people who actually walk it instead of assuming last year's map still holds. If you're trying to make sense of what a specific storefront on this corridor is actually worth, or what a stalled rezoning like the one at 1350 S Howard means for a property near it, that's exactly the kind of read Alan J. Kronenberg does for a living. Let's Connect.
