Three New Restaurants, One Beethoven Cycle: What Changes Next Door to Pelican Bay by Year-End

The stretch of Seagate Drive that Pelican Bay residents drive without thinking about is quietly being rebuilt into something you will have to think about. Between now and December, three restaurants open at Waterside Shops that did not exist there in the spring, Hermès returns after nearly a decade away, and Artis—Naples begins a season that anchors around all nine Beethoven symphonies. The practical result for anyone who lives inside the Pelican Bay gates is that the reservation calendar, the walking loop, and the Saturday-evening default all shift north.

That is the argument of this piece. The cultural and dining gravity of northern Naples used to run south to Fifth Avenue. By December it will not.

Waterside Is Not Being Refreshed. It Is Being Rebuilt.

The physical footprint tells the story first. The center runs 290,000 square feet with an A++ classification, the highest assigned in the Florida market, and three of its most consequential parcels have all turned over inside a single calendar year.

The former Nordstrom pad, dark since 2020, is the most visible piece. The 74,591-square-foot building is now the construction site for RH Naples, a concept that bears little resemblance to the department store it replaces. Six separate galleries with skylights will connect through landscaped courtyards and glass-roofed walkways, surrounding a central 4,143-square-foot, full-service restaurant and wine bar beneath an elongated glass atrium. The total footprint is 29,382 square feet. The former Barnes & Noble building next door has been reframed as a two-story outparcel that will be shared by Pottery Barn and Williams Sonoma.

For a resident whose weekly rotation runs through Waterside, the change worth planning around is dining. Three sizable restaurants land here between now and year-end, and none of them competes with any of the others.

Eddie V's is the anchor of the fine-dining tier. The brand, known for live jazz and a serious wine program, draws a specific customer who has historically made the drive to Fort Lauderdale or Tampa to find it. Darden confirmed the Naples location as its first in the region, and the Spring 2026 listing on Eddie V's own site now shows 765 Seagate Drive, Naples, FL 34103.

Buck & Rider is the newer name for most Neapolitans. The Naples location will feature the brand's hallmark design elements, including an open kitchen, expansive raw bar, and breezy indoor-outdoor seating that reflects the coastal lifestyle, and CEO Adam Strecker has personal ties to Southwest Florida and described Naples as a natural first choice for the brand's first expansion outside Arizona.

RH Restaurant is the wild card, because it is embedded inside a retail environment rather than sitting as a standalone room. It sits inside a retail environment designed to feel like a private estate, and the 174-seat format beneath the glass atrium, with wine service threaded through the experience, is closer to the European model of a gallery restaurant than anything currently on the Waterside roster.

The contrast with where the property sat a year ago is the useful number. At the start of 2025, Waterside had one major sit-down seafood option and a casual Italian chain that had filed for bankruptcy. By the end of 2026, it will have Eddie V's, Buck & Rider, and the RH restaurant, three concepts with no overlap in price point, format, or menu identity.

What that means for the walk-and-drive math

Waterside sits directly across Seagate Drive from the southern half of Pelican Bay. For a resident who currently schedules three or four fine-dining nights a month, the shift is that all of them can now happen inside a five-minute drive without repeating a room. That is a genuinely new fact about living here. It did not describe the neighborhood in 2024 and it will not have described it if you moved in and stayed inside your gate all summer.

The Retail Side Is Turning Over Just as Fast

The restaurant story overshadows the retail rebuild, but the retail rebuild is more advanced. Dior has opened a standalone boutique at Waterside Shops in Naples after relocating from its former store-within-a-store location inside Saks Fifth Avenue. The move brought it into a 6,000-square-foot suite as of June 11. Hermès has returned to Waterside after a nine-year absence, occupying a freestanding store with a tropical-inspired pavilion.

Behind those two flagships is a longer roster of arrivals and relocations opening between now and fall:

• Anthropologie is moving into a larger storefront expected to open this fall.
• Vuori, the California-based athletic apparel brand, plans to open this fall.
• Peter Millar takes the former White House Black Market space, specializing in premium sportswear and golf apparel.
• Piranesi is opening a fine jewelry store this fall.
• Brunello Cucinelli is under construction inside the mall, with Dior and Brunello Cucinelli boutiques replacing the former Williams Sonoma store, and interior work for Cucinelli beginning this summer after its construction documents were approved July 28.

Through July and August, the center has introduced a seasonal guest appreciation initiative dubbed "The Squeeze," with complimentary lemonade offered to guests on Fridays and Saturdays. That is the smallest fact in this post and possibly the most useful one, because it is the sort of thing residents notice on foot and visitors do not.

The Cultural Calendar Reshapes Around Beethoven

Two miles up the road, Artis—Naples has announced a season that gives residents a reason to buy a subscription rather than pick shows one at a time. Themed "To Light: The Art of Hope," the season brings together wide-ranging, multidisciplinary programs that explore resilience, renewal and the many ways artists respond to darkness with imagination and possibility. Highlights include Artistic and Music Director Alexander Shelley leading the Naples Philharmonic through all nine of Beethoven's symphonies in conjunction with the season-long commemoration of the composer 200 years after his death, plus major exhibitions in The Baker Museum and performances by Yo-Yo Ma, Audra McDonald, Itzhak Perlman, Sutton Foster and Kelli O'Hara.

The Beethoven cycle is the reason to treat this differently from a normal Artis year. Nine symphonies across a single season with one conductor is a programming choice, not a coincidence, and it changes the case for holding dates rather than gambling on single tickets.

A few of the dates worth writing on the fridge now:

• Hamilton, November 24–25 and 27–29, 2026. The epic saga that follows the rise of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, in Hayes Hall.
• Daniil Trifonov in a piano recital of some of his favorite works, December 2.
• Death Becomes Her, December 29, 2026 through January 3, 2027, the Tony Award-winning musical comedy based on the 1992 film with direction and choreography by Tony winner Christopher Gattelli.
• Yo-Yo Ma at Artis—Naples on January 8.
• Sutton Foster and Kelli O'Hara, 7:30 p.m. January 16 in Hayes Hall, with the Naples Philharmonic and Michael Rafter conducting, in an evening inspired by Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett's famous evening at Carnegie Hall.
• Another Evening with Itzhak Perlman, 7:30 p.m. March 11 in Hayes Hall, a multimedia program blending live performance with pianist Rohan de Silva, personal stories and rare archival moments from his life.

The Baker Museum runs a parallel calendar that is worth the ten-minute walk from the concert hall on the same evening. The Surrealist International: Fifty Years of Dreams explores the long trajectory and the broad reach of surrealism as a state of mind, through a rich texture of paintings, photographs, sculptures and objects drawn from the remarkable collection of Tate, United Kingdom, including works by Eileen Agar, Jean Arp, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Man Ray and Dorothea Tanning. It runs October 2026 through February 2027. In the same building, Baron Wolman: Capturing the Sound of an Era celebrates the legacy of the trailblazing first chief photographer of Rolling Stone magazine, whose lens immortalized the era's most influential blues, jazz and rock legends: Miles Davis, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones.

For residents already on a subscription, none of this is new information. For residents who let their subscription lapse during the quieter seasons of the past two years, this is the year to re-up. Nine Beethoven symphonies, Yo-Yo Ma, Perlman, and two Broadway tours inside a five-month window is not a normal Artis roster.

The Through Line

Waterside and Artis—Naples share a corner of the city and, this year, they share a story. Both are doing an unusual amount of programming inside a compressed window, and both are doing it in a way that will materially change what a Pelican Bay resident does on a Saturday. The RH restaurant, Eddie V's, Buck & Rider and the Beethoven cycle are not a roundup of unrelated news. They are the same neighborhood repositioning itself as a destination rather than a bedroom for downtown.

The residents who will notice first are the ones who already walk to Waterside for coffee and already treat Artis as their local venue. If that is you, the practical move before Labor Day is a small one. Look at the fall subscription options, pick a night to test one of the three new restaurants the week it opens, and let the season do the rest.

When your plans for the address itself change, Kim Price and The Kim Price Group at Premier Sotheby's International Realty track Pelican Bay at the tower and floor level and are glad to walk you through what the fall's changes mean for the specific building you live in or are considering. Work With Kim — Request a Private Consultation.