The stretch of coastline you can see from the north end of Gordon Drive has been under construction, in one form or another, since 2022. This August is the first month in three years when a Port Royal resident can walk into a finished dining room on that beach and order a drink at the bar their grandparents knew.
That is the quiet news of late summer 2026. The louder news is what has not opened yet, and how quickly the fall calendar is going to compress once it does.
What is actually back at the beach
The Naples Beach Club, A Four Seasons Resort opened to the public on November 17, 2025, roughly four years after the original 1946 Naples Beach Hotel came down. For residents here, the details that matter are the two names that came back: HB's on the Gulf, rebuilt on its original footprint, and Sunset Bar, revived with the same open-air posture and a lighter, tropical-leaning menu.
The third dining room to know is new. The Merchant Room, off the lobby, is led by two-time James Beard Award winner Gavin Kaysen, whose Minneapolis restaurants set the reference point for what a French-inflected Gulf menu looks like at this tier. It is the first fine-dining anchor to open on this beach since the Watkins family stewardship ended.
The reopening restored public access to more than 1,000 feet of Gulf shoreline and the two landmarks that anchored it before the storm.
A few things worth setting straight before September. The spa, at 30,000 square feet, is running in-room only until the full facility opens later this year. The Tom Fazio golf course is a 2026 debut, with the redesigned layout stretching to 100 acres. The Wager gastropub, the Picture House cinema, and Market Square's bowling and game rooms are staged for the back half of 2026, per the resort's own opening announcement.
The Port Royal Club: fall, not summer
The single most consequential neighborhood project has slipped by a season. The new Port Royal Club clubhouse was originally targeted for a summer 2026 grand opening in the club's own project brochure. Current reporting places the opening in the fall.
That is not a soft date. It is the difference between a member walking through the doors in August with the beach empty and walking in during October with the season already tightening. The roughly $100 million rebuild, approved by Naples City Council in August 2024 and executed by Suffolk Construction on a Hart Howerton design, adds a three-level clubhouse with indoor and outdoor dining, a Gulf-front infinity pool, a new deck, and a two-story garage. Champalimaud Design, the same firm behind the Four Seasons interiors up the road, is shaping the finishes.
The practical read, whether or not you are a member: the two most consequential rooms on this beach, HB's and the new clubhouse, will not have overlapped as fully open destinations until October at the earliest. Whichever week the ribbon cuts, that is the week the waterfront changes character for the year.
The Waterside wave, in the order it will land
Three sizable rooms are queued at Waterside Shops. Local reporting has verified all three timelines, and they arrive in a specific order that matters if you want a table before Thanksgiving:
- Eddie V's Prime Seafood — Targeted for summer 2026 on the redeveloped outparcel at the southwest corner of Waterside. First Darden concept at this tier in Naples, with the brand's raw bar, hand-carved steaks, a 300-plus wine list, and nightly live music in the V Lounge.
- Buck & Rider — Late 2026. The Arizona brand's first location outside its home state, with an open kitchen and expansive raw bar. CEO Adam Strecker cited personal Southwest Florida ties in choosing Naples for the debut.
- RH Restaurant — Late 2026, at the center of Restoration Hardware's new glass-atrium gallery on the former Nordstrom site. Brio Italian Grille permanently closed at Waterside in April 2026, and the redevelopment cleared the outparcel for larger, destination-oriented tenants.
Three destination-scale rooms opening at one address inside six months is not a re-tenanting. It is a repositioning. Reservations at Waterside on a Friday in February will not behave the way they did in February 2026.
The summer-only pricing that resets in October
Restaurants that stay open through the off-season price for the people who stayed. That pricing goes away the week season starts. Two examples worth acting on before Labor Day:
Chops City Grill, at the top of the downtown steakhouse tier, is running 25 percent off entrees and steaks through the summer. On a room that ordinarily prices at the top of the downtown market, that is a full-menu reset for the quarter, not a coupon.
Heyday Cookshop, at 4691 Tamiami Trail N. at Neapolitan Way, opened in April as the second Naples concept from Kayla Pfeifer, a James Beard Emerging Chef semifinalist and Food Network Chopped Champion. She is also chef and co-owner of Bicyclette Cookshop. Independents lock in their reservation rhythms during precisely this window, before high season teaches them what they can charge. If Heyday is not on your rotation, August is when you get in without asking twice.
For a shorter drive, Claypot Turkish Restaurant at 4910 Tamiami Trail N. is a fast-casual room where the cooking is done in actual clay pots. Papa Joe's Trattoria replaced Zen Asian BBQ under the same ownership in North Naples. Same address in each case, different restaurant.
One weekend, mapped
If you want to compress the whole picture into two days, before the calendar tightens:
- Saturday morning. The Third Street South Farmers Market runs 7:30 to 11:30 a.m. through the summer, five minutes from the north end of Gordon Drive.
- Saturday late afternoon. Sunset Bar. Order something citrus, sit at the rail, and watch the light on the Gulf you have not seen from a finished bar since September 2022.
- Saturday dinner. HB's if you want the tradition, The Merchant Room if you want to see what Gavin Kaysen is actually doing here.
- Sunday. Drive north to Waterside once for a walk-through of the outparcel and glass atrium sites so the fall openings register in three dimensions when you read about them, then loop back down Tamiami Trail North for lunch at Heyday.
The point of the itinerary is not the meals. It is that by mid-September you should have a first-hand reference point for every room that will define reservations in your zip code from November through April.
What this actually says about the neighborhood
The story a Port Royal resident is hearing this summer, if the sources are the tourism sites and the national press, is that Naples got a new Four Seasons. The story the calendar tells, if you read it locally, is that the two anchors of this stretch of beach are reopening ten months apart, that the shopping district three miles north is being repositioned in the same window, and that August is the last month in which any of it is quiet.
There is no version of this fall that looks like last fall. If you spend August visiting the reopenings rather than avoiding the construction, October will feel like a homecoming instead of a scramble.
For a longer read on the neighborhood itself, see our Port Royal overview and the broader Naples guide. If you would like to talk through what any of these openings mean for your address in particular, reach out to The Beretta Group to schedule your consultation.
