Walk the corner of Cape Coral Parkway and SE 9th Place today and every storefront is lit, every patio has chairs out, and the rooftop above the corner unit has string lights running along its rail. A year ago, most of that same block was finished concrete and glass with nothing behind the windows. Four restaurants now fill The Cove at 47th. Seed & Bean has been open the longest; the other three opened in an order you'd not guess if you were just looking at the buildings.
What actually got built here
The Cove at 47th is a $103 million mixed-use development from Flaherty & Collins Properties, tucked into Cape Coral's South Cape entertainment district. The building itself, 327 apartments over roughly 19,000 square feet of ground-floor retail and restaurant space, officially opened in September 2024. For a while after that, the apartments filled up faster than the storefronts beneath them did. The last of the three later-opening restaurant spaces wasn't fully open until this past March, a year and a half after the building itself welcomed its first residents.
A public parking garage went in nearby too. Cape Coral cut the ribbon on a two-story, 125-space facility last October, built through a partnership between the South Cape Community Redevelopment Agency and Flaherty & Collins. The first hour is free, the second runs $2, and each additional hour after that is $1, up to a $20 daily cap, with event parking flat at $15. If you've been circling the block looking for a spot on a Friday night, that garage is the answer.
The order nobody would have predicted
Here's the sequence of the three later-opening restaurants, dated:
Oak & Stone opened first, on December 17, 2025. Oak & Stone was already an established Gulf Coast concept: it debuted in Sarasota in 2016 and this was its eighth location. Its Cove at 47th space seats 200 and centers on a self-pour tap wall with close to 50 rotating craft options, plus an indoor-outdoor bar, a private dining room, and a rear social courtyard. That's not a small build. It opened first anyway.
Big Nick's Barbecue followed about five weeks later, on January 26, 2026. This is the company's second Southwest Florida location, and a real upgrade from the first: the original Fort Myers spot is a converted, to-go-only drive-thru, while the Cove location seats guests indoors and on a backyard patio, pours beer and wine, and smokes its meats in-house for up to 16 hours at 200 degrees. Co-owners Tim Collier, Erik Flett, and Tim Fisk expanded the menu here too, adding tacos, smoked sausages, collard greens, and desserts sourced through Ben E. Keith out of Fort Worth. Collier and his partners had 327 apartment units of built-in foot traffic sitting right above the restaurant, and they still landed second.
Aqua Seafood, Steaks & Raw Bar was last of the three later-opening restaurants, opening March 17, 2026, a delay of a few months from its own original December target. The rooftop skybar that anchors the space didn't open until March 28, eleven days after the dining room, because it was waiting on an elevator certificate. Founder Gordon Stojkoski had already done this three times, first on Fifth Avenue South in Naples in 2011, then in Bonita Springs, then in North Naples. Cape Coral was his fourth Aqua, and it was still the one that took longest to get the doors open. When it finally did, there was no ribbon cutting and no marketing push. It filled up anyway. As Gulfshore Business reported, Stojkoski's read on the delay was blunt:
"If I knew then what I know now, I definitely would have come to Cape Coral sooner."
The pattern across all three openings is consistent. The restaurant with the most practice, Oak & Stone, moved fastest. The restaurant making the biggest leap in format, Big Nick's going from drive-thru to sit-down, came next. And the restaurant carrying the most novel, most complicated feature, that rooftop bar and its elevator requirement, took the longest, even with three working blueprints already sitting a short drive away in Naples and Bonita Springs.
What's actually on the block now
Seed & Bean Market rounds out the four tenants and has been open the longest of the group. According to Cape Coral's own economic development office, it's Florida's first cannabis café and CBD marketplace, now operating out of its largest location yet at 2,800 square feet, with 128 indoor seats and room for up to 70 more on the patio. It's also the only tenant on the block serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner in a single continuous stretch, alongside craft CBD drinks and a grab-and-go counter.
Oak & Stone's menu leans into scratch-made comfort food: artisan pizzas, Philly cheesesteak egg rolls, wings, and a weekend brunch service, all built around that self-pour wall. Big Nick's keeps its low-and-slow barbecue at the center, brisket, pulled pork, ribs, turkey, smashburgers, with the newly added tacos and sides rounding it out. Aqua brings the same Mediterranean-leaning seafood and steak menu it's served at its other three locations, along with a raw bar, tableside whole fish, and now a rooftop view of the Parkway to go with it.
Cape Coral's economic development page now describes the whole 19,000 square feet as fully tenanted and operational. That's a real milestone for this stretch of South Cape. The three later-opening restaurant spaces took eighteen months to fill, in an order nobody watching the construction would have called in advance; now you can grab tacos at Big Nick's, walk next door for a beer at Oak & Stone's tap wall, and finish the night on Aqua's roof, all without moving your car out of that new garage.
If you've been meaning to check out the corner and kept waiting for it to feel finished, it is now.
Integrity Realty of Florida, led by broker Jordan Musumano, keeps a close eye on Cape Coral block by block, not just the listings on it. If you're curious what a particular corner of the city is really like to live near, or what else is changing nearby, Let's Connect.
