The Same Kitchen Group Just Bet on Cleveland Street Twice

Walk the corner of Cleveland Street and Fort Harrison Avenue and the first thing you notice is the clock. For as long as most current downtown regulars can remember, the four faces mounted above the old Peoples Bank Building sat still, a fixture from the building's 1930s heyday that had gone quiet somewhere along the way. This summer, master horologist David Boyd spent roughly 700 hours over five months bringing the copper mechanism back to life, and when it was switched back on, more than 3,000 people showed up at that intersection to watch.

That's a big turnout for a clock. It makes more sense once you realize the clock was never really the point. It was the marker for something bigger that's been happening building by building along Cleveland Street, and the detail that tells you this is more than a facelift is who's choosing to open there, and how many times.

The clock was the easy part

Getting a 1930s clock running again is its own kind of specialized work, but the harder job was the building underneath it. The Peoples Bank Building went up after the Great Fire of 1910 and was rebuilt into a Mediterranean Revival landmark in the 1920s, complete with a colorful terra-cotta facade. Bringing that facade back required an estimated 45,600 hours of labor from about 80 craftspeople, working from archival photographs to recreate individual panels and friezes, then casting, glazing, and kiln-firing each piece using the same traditional methods the originals used a century ago.

That's the kind of investment a developer only makes if they're confident something is going to fill the space once it's finished. In this case, two things are.

One operator, two buildings, same block

Here's the detail that separates this from a typical downtown restaurant announcement. Streetlight Taco, the Michelin Bib Gourmand taqueria that opened its original location in South Tampa in January 2024, is taking the ground floor of the restored Peoples Bank Building at 432 Cleveland Street, with an opening targeted before the end of 2026. That alone would be a solid get for any downtown corridor. What makes it different here is that the same company, Tastes Pretty Good Hospitality, had already announced a second Clearwater restaurant two weeks earlier: Rippers, a deep-fried hot dog concept going into the restored 1914 Telephone Building at 534 Cleveland Street, just a few doors down.

A single restaurant group testing a neighborhood with one location is a bet. The same group opening a second, different concept a few doors from the first, before the first one has even served a customer, is something else. It says the operator isn't hedging. Nick Reader, the company's CEO, put it simply when Rippers was announced: "We started in Tampa as a love letter to the city we grew up in." The fact that Cleveland Street got picked for a repeat is the part locals should notice.

Here's what's actually landed, or is about to, along that stretch of Cleveland Street:

Notice that last row. Nubo Café, a Ukrainian bakery serving from-scratch comfort food and European baked goods, isn't a rendering or an announcement. It's already open and serving customers on Cleveland Street right now, which means if you want a preview of where this corridor is headed, you can get a pastry there this week rather than waiting for a groundbreaking.

The number that separates this from a rendering

Downtown redevelopment plans are easy to announce and hard to finish, which is why the numbers behind this one matter. The Cleveland Street Alliance, the organization coordinating the restoration and leasing work along the corridor, says the district's redevelopment footprint runs about 567,000 square feet, with more than 72,000 square feet currently under active renovation and another 112,000 square feet planned for the next phase. Since April 2026, the group has pulled 50 permits for projects ranging from historic restoration to new construction, and says the roughly $200 million in private investment behind the work has come with zero government incentives, subsidies, or grants attached.

Permits pulled and square footage under renovation are the kind of numbers that separate an active construction site from a plan still waiting on financing. Fifty permits in five months is a corridor where cranes and scaffolding are the normal state of things, not the exception.

The most ambitious piece still standing in the concept stage is EVO Entertainment's proposed $50 million, 83,000-square-foot family entertainment complex planned for the corner of Cleveland Street and Myrtle Avenue. As of this spring, the city of Clearwater confirmed it had not yet received a formal development application for the project, though right-of-way vacation applications and a demolition permit request for the existing building on the site were already in motion. Worth knowing if you're tracking the corridor's next chapter, but it's a different stage of certainty than a restaurant that's already announced an opening window.

Why this particular week is worth a walk downtown

If you've been meaning to see any of this in person, the calendar just handed you a reason that doesn't require waiting for a single storefront to open. The 47th Clearwater Jazz Holiday returns to Coachman Park October 15 through 18, a few blocks from the Cleveland Street construction. This year's lineup includes Chris Botti and the smooth jazz trio of Kim Waters, Jeff Kashiwa, and Steve Oliver on the festival's cool jazz night, Sheila E. and Arturo Sandoval for feel-the-rhythm night, Larkin Poe and Big Sam's Funky Nation for blues and brass, and Dumpstaphunk closing things out with a tribute to Sly and the Family Stone. There's also a tribute set worth knowing about if you're a jazz fan with local ties: Tampa's ARConnection is playing a Chick Corea tribute called "Fires of Forever," honoring the jazz legend who called Clearwater home until his death in 2021.

Admission gets you close to the main stage, but the festival also keeps its long-standing free viewing area at Coachman Park's Sunset Bluff, along with two smaller stages in the Lower Plaza and Promenade Pier that are open to all festival attendees. It's an easy excuse to park downtown, walk Cleveland Street on the way in or out, and see for yourself which storefronts are still scaffolding and which ones, like Nubo Café, are already pouring coffee.

What this actually means if you live here

None of this changes what your street looks like tomorrow morning. It does mean the corridor a few blocks from most Clearwater neighborhoods is in the middle of a stretch where new things are opening roughly monthly rather than yearly, and where the businesses choosing to bet on it are doing so more than once. That's a different kind of signal than a single restaurant taking a chance on a cheap lease. Whether you end up there for tacos, hot dogs, a Ukrainian pastry, or four nights of jazz in October, Cleveland Street right now is worth walking rather than driving past.

If you're watching what's happening in your own Clearwater neighborhood and want a read on how any of this connects to home values or timing a move, the team at Paradise Home Team knows this stretch of Pinellas County block by block and is always glad to talk through what it means for you.