Drive down Atlantic Boulevard toward The Corner this month and you will see permit signs where Ragtime Tavern's patio used to be. Head the other direction on Mayport Road, past Hanna Park, and you will find a different kind of construction fencing going up outside a retail plaza that most residents drove past for years without a second look. These are not the same story. One corner of town is trading a beach bar for something considerably larger and more formal. The other is getting its first real gastropub in a stretch that has never really had one. Same town, same season, two different bets on what people here want to eat and where they want to eat it.
The Corner trades a beach bar for a 264-seat steakhouse
Ragtime Tavern held down its spot at 299 Atlantic Blvd, right where Neptune Beach and Atlantic Beach meet, for more than 40 years. Over the decades it grew from a small dining room into a complex that eventually included Salud and its own Taproom & Brewery. That run ended in January 2025, one month after the property sold to Kelly Cos. of Southern California.
The Ragtime sale was not an isolated move. The previous owner, SPB Hospitality, had already closed A1A Ale Works in St. Augustine in May 2024, and Kelly Cos. went on to close Seven Bridges Grille & Brewery in Tinseltown just months after buying it, shuttering that spot in June 2025. Two acquisitions, two closures. Whatever Kelly Cos. wanted from those deals, it was not the restaurants that came with the buildings.
What replaces Ragtime is a different kind of operator entirely. Permits filed in January 2026 show plans for Grafton & Fleck's Steakhouse, a new concept from Jeff McCusker and Bob Fleckenstein, the pair behind River & Post in Riverside and River & Fort in St. Augustine. These are not outside investors flipping a beach property. They are local restaurateurs with a track record in this exact market, and the scale of what they are proposing says something about how they read the demand at The Corner. The submitted plans call for a first-floor dining room with 158 seats plus a 20-seat private dining area, and a second-story rooftop addition adding 42 open-air seats and 44 more under cover. Add it up and the new building is planned for 264 seats across three distinct spaces, more capacity than Ragtime built up over four decades of organic expansion, arriving on day one. As of late March 2026, the city's permitting department was still reviewing the application, so groundbreaking has not been confirmed, but the ambition behind the filing is not in question.
Two miles up Mayport Road, a different kind of bet
While The Corner trades up in scale and polish, the other end of town is getting something it has simply never had. Spliff's Gastropub, known for burgers, rice bowls, and a signature mac and cheese, received a building permit on April 1, 2026, for a $467,606 build-out of 4,260 square feet in the Reef Retail Shopping Plaza on Mayport Road. Plans show at least 134 seats inside and 48 more on a patio. This will be the chain's third location in the Jacksonville area, joining its original Downtown spot on East Forsyth Street and a Bayard-area location in Durbin Crossing Shoppes.
The site matters as much as the concept. The plaza sits at the entrance to the Reef Oceanside Apartments, a 456-unit complex, and the whole stretch sits near Kathryn Abbey Hanna Park and Mayport Naval Station. This is not the tourist-facing, walkable core that Beaches Town Center has cultivated for years. It is a corridor that grew around apartments, retail, and a naval base, and until now it has not had a sit-down concept built specifically for people who already live or work nearby rather than people passing through on vacation.
Two openings, two theses. The Corner bet says: build bigger, build nicer, and residents and visitors alike will fill three dining rooms. The Mayport Road bet says: there is already a dense, non-tourist population here, and nobody has bothered to give them a proper gastropub yet.
What was already there before either project broke ground
Beaches Town Center did not need convincing that upscale dining works. Coop 303 already runs two floors of dining with a top-floor Living Room Lounge built around specialty cocktails and a live DJ, and The Grande has been repositioning nightlife in Atlantic Beach with a more polished, high-energy format. The steakhouse fits neatly into a corridor that was already leaning that direction.
Mayport Road's existing lineup looks different. Independent, casual spots like Dano's Diner and Sub Cultured have anchored that stretch for a while, serving the neighborhood without much fanfare or foot traffic from outside it. Spliff's is not replacing that scene so much as adding a bar-and-patio option that did not exist before, in a spot picked specifically because 456 new apartment units moved in next door.
Where the town still gathers without a receipt
Not everything that defines daily life in Atlantic Beach involves a kitchen. The Atlantic Beach Arts Market, an artist co-op gallery on Mayport Road, stays open seven days a week from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and runs a rotating slate of art classes alongside its vintage market. The market's own materials describe more than 100 participating artists, a notably higher number than the 70-plus that some regional visitor guides list, which is worth knowing if you are trying to gauge how big the space actually feels when you walk in.
Outdoors, Dutton Island Preserve and Kathryn Abbey Hanna Park remain the two places locals default to when they want water, trails, or open space without needing a reservation or a menu. Neither has changed this year. In a stretch of town where two restaurant projects are reshaping what people expect from a night out, the preserve and the park are the constant that both new developments sit around, not the other way around.
Same town, two bets, one thing in common
What ties The Corner's steakhouse to Mayport Road's gastropub is not proximity. It is timing. Both projects moved through permitting within the same three-month stretch of early 2026, both are backed by operators with multiple locations elsewhere in Jacksonville, and both are betting on a version of Atlantic Beach that did not quite exist five years ago: dense enough near the naval station and the new apartments to support a gastropub, and established enough at the beach to support a 264-seat steakhouse with a rooftop. Residents on either end of town are about to find out which bet pays off first.
If you already call Atlantic Beach home and you are weighing what a next move here or nearby might look like, whether that is upsizing, downsizing, or just curious what your street is actually worth in this market, Eric Womack Properties knows this corridor block by block. Let's Connect.
