The People Opening FishHawk's Newest Businesses Already Live Here
August 27, 2026
August 27, 2026
Drive FishHawk Boulevard toward FishHawk Crossing on a Friday evening now and the block looks different than it did two years ago. There's a car wash with 1950s surf graphics on one side and a supper club with backlit reservation lockers not far down the road. A little further out on FishHawk Crossing Boulevard, a family restaurant with a name most people still stumble over when they say it out loud has moved in too. None of this showed up as a single headline. It showed up business by business, permit by permit, over roughly the last two years.
Here's the part that actually matters if you live here: almost none of it is a stranger to the neighborhood.
It would be easy to read the recent openings along FishHawk Boulevard as generic suburban growth, the kind of retail churn that happens anywhere rooftops keep multiplying. Look at who's actually signing the leases and a different story shows up. The people opening the newest, highest-visibility spots in FishHawk already had a stake in the community before they picked up a second set of keys.
Take the Boulevard Supper Club, which opened at 15260 FishHawk Boulevard last fall. It would be reasonable to assume a concept like this, an upscale room with wine lockers and a members' club, arrived from outside looking for a growing zip code to test. Instead, it's the third venture from Joel Granata, Jennifer Adamo, and Elier Velasquez, the same team behind The Scrambled Egg and Posh Trading Company, two spots FishHawk residents already knew by name. Granata described the goal as letting people "feel at home without breaking the bank." That's not a pitch aimed at drive-through traffic from Riverview. That's a pitch aimed at neighbors who already trusted the brand behind brunch.
The same instinct shows up over in Park Square, where Cherry's Bar and Grill has been pouring beer and running its wing special since June 2014. Owner Scott Schlarbaum started the franchise with his brother in 1995 and picked FishHawk as the home base years later. Twelve years on, Cherry's is still the place where, as one recent writeup put it, you can hear "bellowing laughs" and 80s hits on a typical Friday night. That's not a business hanging on. That's a business that outlasted an entire boom-bust cycle in the same storefront.
To understand why the current wave feels different, it helps to remember what Park Square looked like before. Back in 2017, Osprey Observer covered Park Square's return to life after a stretch where most of its original tenants had shuttered. Amici's Pizza & Pasta moved into the space, the YMCA Express gave way to Anytime Fitness, and Cool Beans opened where the old Park Square Pizza had been. Amici's owner Peggy Santivasci called it a return to the earlier days when residents didn't need to leave the neighborhood for a good meal.
That comeback held. Amici's is still there. Cherry's is still there. Anytime Fitness, Sidekicks Family Martial Arts, and Code Wiz filled out the roster and stayed put. Nine years later, Park Square is fully leased, and the businesses that survived the lean years are the ones still running it.
What's happening now further down FishHawk Boulevard looks like the same instinct applied to a second location. Boulevard Supper Club isn't a first-time restaurant bet. It's operators who already know the community expanding into a bigger evening room. The Root Studio 7, a yoga and Pilates studio that opened in Park Square in August 2025, followed a similar path. Owner Natalie Kozlowski had worked in that same plaza years earlier, then came back after her son enrolled at FishHawk Creek Elementary and she decided, as she put it, that FishHawk would become home. She spent a year working through permitting before opening the doors.
Not every new name on the boulevard grew up here. Woodie's Wash Shack, the 1950s surf-themed car wash chain, opened its Fishhawk location at 15256 FishHawk Boulevard in the summer of 2024, its 16th site across Tampa Bay. But the way the company talked about the decision is worth noticing. Business development manager Melissa Roberts said the new spot was picked to "fill in some of the holes" between the chain's existing Gibsonton, Dale Mabry, and Sun City locations. That's not a speculative land grab. That's a regional operator with years of Tampa Bay wash data choosing FishHawk specifically because the map had a gap there.
Its street number, 15256, sits just a handful of addresses from Boulevard Supper Club's 15260, close enough that the two read like neighbors on the same stretch of boulevard. A short drive away on FishHawk Crossing Boulevard, The Hawk fills out the same general corridor with comfort food and an easygoing, family-first menu. None of these three existed anywhere near here three years ago. Together they've turned this end of FishHawk into a real second option for an evening out, not just a pass-through on the way to somewhere else.
The reason this cluster matters beyond convenience is what's happening just to the west. Mattamy Homes, the largest privately owned homebuilder in North America, closed on a 102-acre site in Lithia in December 2025 for a new community called Skyhawk. The company's announcement describes roughly 172 single-family homes on 50 and 60-foot lots, ranging from about 1,900 to 3,700 square feet, with a central park, paved trail, dog park, tot lot, and picnic cabana. Development was slated to begin in March 2026. Skyhawk sits outside FishHawk Ranch proper, but it's close enough that its future residents will end up driving the same boulevard, eating at the same restaurants, and probably washing their cars at the same shack with the surf mural.
That's the quieter reason the current cluster of openings reads as more than a coincidence. A supper club with membership perks, a car wash chosen for a specific coverage gap, a wellness studio opened by someone who already had roots in the plaza. Together they read less like scattered growth and more like a neighborhood whose newest businesses were built by people betting on FishHawk specifically, not on suburban Florida in general.
If you already live here, none of this changes what you do on a Tuesday. But it does mean the answer to "where should we go" has quietly expanded. For years, Park Square was the only real answer: the fountain, the amphitheater, Amici's, Cherry's. Now there's a second stretch of the boulevard doing its own thing, run in large part by people who were already fixtures in the community before they opened a second storefront.
That's worth knowing the next time a friend from Riverview or Bloomingdale asks what's actually new in FishHawk. The honest answer isn't a list of chain openings. It's that the people who already built trust here are the ones building the next chapter, one lease at a time.
If watching your neighborhood's daily map shift like this has you wondering what it means for your own address, Carter Company Realtors knows this stretch of Hillsborough County block by block. Reach out any time for a free home valuation and a conversation grounded in what's actually happening on the ground, not just what the portals say.
Whether you are looking to buy or sell a home, Carter Company Realtors has all the knowledge and tools to get the job done right, Work with us today!