For four years the answer to "what's new" in Lakewood Ranch has been Waterside Place. That is no longer the interesting answer. The interesting answer is what is going up on Professional Parkway, on the Sarasota County side of the community, roughly a mile east of the Waterside town center.
This summer is the first one where a resident's weekly routine can honestly stretch across three separate nodes instead of one. Waterside has matured into the everyday hub. Main Street holds the older weeknight programming. And a genuine entertainment district is finally taking shape around Urban Air, which is the reason the map is worth redrawing.
The Professional Parkway build-out
Urban Air Adventure Park opened last September on Professional Parkway with trampolines, mini-carts, a climbing area, laser tag, battle beams and a ninja course. Owner Michael Tucci's location runs 60,000 square feet, which makes it not just the biggest of the three Urban Airs he and his wife Tracey own across Tampa Bay, but the largest of the roughly 400 Urban Air locations in the country. That single number is the reason the surrounding parcels started moving.
Two projects flanking Urban Air are now under construction. SkyTrack Family Entertainment Center broke ground March 10, directly to the north. Owners Kaleb and Jennifer Alokeh have planned bowling, go-karts, two bars, and a second floor with a corporate event space and an upscale restaurant serving steaks and carpaccio, with fast-casual options like hamburgers on the lower dining floors. Jennifer Alokeh has been direct about the gap they are filling: before Urban Air, the eastern side of the community had almost nothing indoor-entertainment for the July and August heat window.
Directly south of Urban Air, Backyard Social is going in. Owners Mat Baum and John Mann are targeting a mid-November opening, though as of March the foundation had not been poured, so residents planning a Thanksgiving-week visit from family should treat that date as aspirational. The concept is a full bar with permanently parked food trucks in place of a kitchen, live music, and yard games, following the format of the original Fort Myers location.
Across Lakewood Ranch Boulevard, next to Gold Coast Eagle Distributing, Life Time is under construction and slated to open in late 2026. The full entertainment district is expected to be built out by early summer 2027, per Amanda Zipperer, director of property management and leasing for Lakewood Ranch Commercial. For a resident, the practical takeaway is that the summer of 2026 is a construction summer on Professional Parkway, and the summer of 2027 is the one where the district actually functions as a district.
Waterside Place, one year into being a real town
Waterside Place has crossed a threshold that is easy to miss if you drive through it every week. It stopped being a leasing story and started being a neighborhood. Kiddie Academy of Sarasota opened March 2 at 7290 Canon Street, owned by Sanddy and Melodie Marchena, who also run the original Kiddie Academy on Concept Court. The Canon Street location can accommodate up to 204 children between six weeks and 12 years old, which includes a summer camp program, and it is the first location the Marchenas have built from the ground up rather than moving into existing shell space.
Allswell, the gastropub that opened last year in Suite 102 at 7500 Island Cove Terrace, is now the operator to watch. Tory Delaney and Darren Shore moved to Lakewood Ranch from New York City and also own The Malt House, a two-restaurant operation with locations in Greenwich Village and the Financial District. Allswell runs an 80-seat patio and a similarly sized indoor room, and the menu carries the New York bar-food inheritance visibly: roasted bone marrow, carne asada steak tartare and wild mushroom toast among the starters, alongside chicken wings, a Scotch egg, and both a cheeseburger and pan-seared cod on the entree side. Hours are 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven days.
The rest of the food-and-drink map at Waterside Place is now populated enough to be worth committing to memory:
- Deep Lagoon Seafood & Oyster House at 7500 Island Cove Terrace, the anchor lakeside restaurant with hog fish, black grouper, oysters, and outdoor bar seating
- Korê Steakhouse, the Korean barbecue and cocktail lounge concept
- Osteria 500, Italian, and Forked at Waterside, both open and running
- Good Liquid Brewing Company, which hosts trivia every Monday at 7 p.m.
- Florida Provisions Co., which runs bingo Mondays from 7 to 9 p.m.
- O&A Coffee Supply and CROP Juice on the morning side
- Kilwins and Duck Donuts for the family walkup
- Tim's Wine Market, the family-run shop's first location in west Florida
The Sunday Farmers' Market at Lakewood Ranch continues to run at Waterside Place with over 100 vendors, and Waterside Park hosts a free outdoor movie on the second Friday of each month, sunset start, sponsored by Grace Community Church.
The July and early-August calendar
The summer programming this year is denser than last year, and two dates in particular are worth putting on a calendar now rather than the week of.
| Date | Event | Where |
|---|---|---|
| July 18 – August 1 | A Taste of the Ranch prix-fixe restaurant weeks, with wine pairings and specialty cocktails at participating Waterside restaurants | Waterside Place |
| Sunday, July 19 | 2026 World Cup Final Watch Party | Premier Sports Campus |
| Every Sunday | Farmers' Market at Lakewood Ranch, 100+ vendors | Waterside Place |
| Every Monday, 7 p.m. | Trivia Night | Good Liquid Brewing Company |
| Every Monday, 7–9 p.m. | Bingo Night | Florida Provisions |
| Second Friday, sunset | Free outdoor family movie night | Waterside Park |
| Tuesday and Friday mornings, 9 a.m. | Adult Tennis | Summerfield Park |
The World Cup Final Watch Party at the 75-acre Premier Sports Campus is the single largest one-off gathering of the summer, and it is the kind of event where the 63,000-plus residents of Lakewood Ranch are going to converge on one location for a few hours. Plan the drive accordingly if the household is not going.
A Taste of the Ranch is the event most likely to change a resident's rotation. Two weeks of prix-fixe menus across the Waterside restaurants gives a real reason to try Allswell, Osteria 500, or Deep Lagoon at a price point that resets the mental math on the town center. The 68-restaurant Sarasota County prix-fixe events have historically pushed 25,000-plus prix-fixe covers, per Sarasota Magazine's coverage, and the Lakewood Ranch version has been growing into a comparable draw.
What this actually means for a Tuesday night
Here is the interpretation a longtime resident should take from all of this. For most of Lakewood Ranch's history, "going out" meant Main Street on the north side or a drive down University Parkway to UTC. Waterside gave the community a second real answer starting in 2022. The Professional Parkway build-out is going to give it a third, and it is doing so in the corner of the community that has grown the fastest residentially.
That has two practical effects worth noticing now, before the district is fully open:
Drive times inside the community are about to matter more than they used to. Waterside sits south of University Parkway; Professional Parkway is northeast; Main Street is north-central. A resident in Country Club East is roughly equidistant to all three. A resident in Lakehouse Cove or Shoreview is anchored to Waterside. A resident in the older Country Club or Greenbrook villages is anchored to Main Street. The Professional Parkway district is going to pull most naturally on the newer Sarasota-side and eastern Manatee-side neighborhoods, which is worth watching if you are the kind of household that plans a weekend around a fifteen-minute versus a twenty-five-minute drive.
The retail mix is finally deep enough to make Waterside a weekday destination, not just a weekend one. The Kiddie Academy opening, the primary care Lakewood Ranch Medical Group facility, and the daily-use tenants like O&A Coffee Supply, CROP Juice, Body Bar Pilates and 3Form Fitness now let a household run a full weekday errand loop without leaving the peninsula. That is a different function than a town center that is mostly a Friday-and-Saturday-night destination, and it is the reason the Farmers' Market on Sundays now feels like a community fixture rather than a promotion.
The quiet story of the summer, then, is not any single opening. It is that Lakewood Ranch has stopped being a master-planned community with one town center and become a master-planned community with three functional nodes, one of which is still under construction. The residents who track this now will be the ones who route their July and August around it most efficiently.
If your household is thinking about a move within Lakewood Ranch, or a shift from a barrier-island second home to a full-time Ranch address, the specific village you land in is going to shape which of these three nodes becomes your default. That is a conversation worth having in person. The team at Greco Real Estate works across Sarasota and Manatee County and knows the practical differences between a Shoreview address and a Country Club East address on a Tuesday night. Book an appointment when the timing is right.
