If you live on the Islands, you already know the Village is small on paper. One curved commercial block on East Davis Boulevard, no traffic lights anywhere on the way in, and a set of tenants most residents can list from memory. What's changed in the last eighteen months is the density of that block. The same short strip between Barbados and Biscayne now holds two independent Italian kitchens, a standing wine window, a Miami-roasted coffee bar, and a new café from a proven Tampa operator that's still finishing its build. For a neighborhood that spent years sending its weekend traffic across the bridge, that's the story worth paying attention to.
The block, read left to right
East Davis Boulevard between Barbados and Biscayne is doing more work than a strip its size usually does. A quick census of what's currently open or coming, in the order a walker would pass them:
- Oggi Italian at 236 E Davis Blvd, a family-run kitchen where the mozzarella is hand-pulled every morning and the marinara is made in house
- Buchette Spritz Bar tucked next to Oggi's entrance, built around an Italian-style buchetta wine window
- Spartaco's Kitchen, opened in 2024, run by a family from Rimini serving Emilia-Romagna dishes
- Thai Island, still one of the strip's steadiest dinner rooms
- Farrell's on the Island, the neighborhood sandwich and ice cream counter
- TeBella Tea, the after-workout matcha stop
- DI Coffee Bar, pouring Panther Coffee out of Miami
- The Cork Room, wine bar with small plates
- Anchor Tavern, the island's happy-hour default
- Bake 'n Babes, the dessert shop responsible for the Freak Shakes
- 220 East, a locally owned American kitchen that has held the same corner for 24 years
- Little Palm Cafe, coming soon to 205 E Davis Blvd
That's twelve rooms across roughly two blocks, and every one of them is independent.
What's actually new
The freshest name on the strip is Little Palm Cafe at 205 E Davis Blvd, whose website currently reads coming soon. The operator is Christopher Rivas, the Tampa Bay restaurateur behind Little Tina and Urban Cantina, which is useful context for anyone deciding whether to walk over the first weekend or wait for the reviews to settle. Plan-review paperwork put the project on the block roughly a year ago, and the corner it's taking sits directly in the row that already holds Thai Island, Farrell's, Grecian Island, and Plum Tree.
The second name to know if you haven't already tried it is Spartaco's Kitchen. The family behind it is originally from Rimini in the Emilia-Romagna region, and they built the menu around that geography specifically:
Blessed by the east with the Adriatic Sea, and by a mere 30-45 minutes of hills and low mountains on the west, all that translates into great seafood like calamari, shrimp, scallops, clams, mussels, and much more.
Regional Italian on a block that already had an Italian anchor is not a duplication. It's a split.
Two Italian kitchens, two different questions
Oggi and Spartaco's now sit within a two-minute walk of each other, and it's worth being honest about how differently they read. Oggi's owner has described the room as the island's shared dining room, the place you go "to get a bowl of pasta" and see people. The menu leans on hand-pulled mozzarella, house-made marinara, and the kind of Sunday-supper Italian that reliably fills a table of six.
Spartaco's is narrower. It's a family operation cooking one region, and the seafood side of the menu skews toward what the Adriatic actually produces rather than the generic Italian-American canon. If you're feeding kids after the pool, Oggi. If you have out-of-town guests who want to know why you actually chose to live here, Spartaco's. And if you want a glass in between, the Buchette Spritz Bar built around the wine window next to Oggi's entrance handles the in-between hour without asking you to commit to a table.
A Saturday that stays on the island
The practical consequence of a denser Village is that a full weekend day no longer needs the Davis Islands Bridge. Here's a version that uses only what's already inside the neighborhood boundary:
- Morning coffee at DI Coffee Bar, which pours Panther Coffee from Miami's small-batch roastery
- A walk down to Davis Islands Dog Beach at the south end, the only off-leash saltwater beach in the city
- A loop back up through Marjorie Park and the Marjorie Park Municipal Yacht Basin, watching whatever's rigged at the Davis Islands Yacht Club
- Lunch counter stop at Farrell's on the Island, or a sandwich to eat on a bench at Peter O. Knight Airport, where the runway sits close enough to watch the single-engine traffic
- Afternoon at the Sandra Freedman Tennis Complex or the Roy Jenkins pool
- A drink at the Cork Room or Anchor Tavern before deciding which Italian room is winning the night
- Dessert at Bake 'n Babes on the walk home
Nothing on that list requires a car. It's the kind of day the Village map was actually laid out for in the 1920s, back when D.P. Davis was building the archipelago from Tampa Bay dredge and planning a self-sufficient community on top of Little Grassy Key and Big Grassy Key.
What's happening off the strip
Two civic threads are worth tracking as a resident this summer.
The first is the wastewater treatment plant at the south end of the island. In March 2026, Eric Weiss, Director of the City of Tampa's Wastewater Department, met with residents at the invitation of the Davis Islands Civic Association to walk through the city's plan to upgrade and modernize the plant with the goal of reducing the odor issues that periodically affect the neighborhood. The Davis Islands Civic Association is the group publishing the timeline, and their updates page is where the actual project cadence lives.
The second is the ongoing Peter O. Knight water distribution project, which the City of Tampa lists as a roughly $960,000 upgrade to the water system serving the airport end of the island. It's small enough that most residents won't notice the work, but it's part of the reason the perimeter road around the airport periodically has crews on it.
Neither of these is dramatic. Both matter more than another restaurant opening if you're planning to be here in five years.
The one date to hold on the calendar
At the end of January, the Gasparilla Pirate Fest flotilla comes up the channel between Davis Islands and Harbour Island on its way to the Convention Center. If you have out-of-town guests visiting annually, the seawall running along the west side of the island is one of the better free vantage points in the city for watching the invasion boats stage. It's a January note, not a summer one, but it's the reason people who move here start telling their families to book flights for the last weekend of the month.
The pattern to notice
None of the new arrivals on the Village strip are chains. Little Palm Cafe is coming from a Tampa Bay operator with two other cafés under him. Spartaco's is a single family cooking one Italian region. Oggi is still hand-pulling its own cheese. The Buchette Spritz Bar is built around a piece of Florentine architecture that most Florida strips would never bother with. That's the character of the block right now, and it's the reason a walkable weekend on the Islands reads differently in 2026 than it did even two years ago. If you already live here, the practical takeaway is that the strip has quietly become deep enough to support a full day without leaving. If you have friends who keep asking what's changed, this is what to tell them.
For residents thinking about what all this density means for the long-term shape of the neighborhood, or for anyone weighing a move within the Islands, the team at 360 Realty knows the block, the streets that branch off it, and the waterfront lots behind them. Contact us when you want a local read on what's actually happening on the ground.
