One Restaurant Group Just Took Over a Corner of First Avenue North

The night before Alder & Oak opened its doors at 131 First Ave. N., the owners threw a friends-and-family preview instead of a quiet soft launch. More than 700 people showed up to eat pizza out of a wood-fired oven and drink craft cocktails on a rooftop that didn't exist a year earlier. By the next afternoon, July 15, the restaurant was open to the public, its dining room and rooftop bar, Zorbas, seating close to 300 people at the corner of First Avenue North and Second Street North.

If you've walked past that corner in the last year, you know why the size of that crowd matters. That building sat behind Jekyll Brewing's name for years, until the Georgia-based brewery chain abruptly closed all five of its locations in May 2025, a shutdown that made national food-industry news. For more than a year, one of the most visible corners on the beachside grid sat dark. What moved in to replace it says more about how this stretch of Jacksonville Beach is changing than the opening itself does.

The corner that sat empty for fourteen months

Jekyll Brewing's exit wasn't a quiet lease non-renewal. It was a full company collapse that closed every location the chain operated, and Jacksonville Beach's storefront was one of the casualties. For over a year, the corner of First and Second sat as a reminder that even a recognizable regional brand can vanish overnight in this business.

What eventually filled the space wasn't a new, unproven concept betting on the address. It was an expansion. Alder & Oak had already opened its first location downtown in January, inside The Hub at 400 Riverside Ave., and had spent the intervening months proving out a wood-fired, Mediterranean-leaning menu before bringing the concept to the beach. That sequencing matters. This wasn't a first-time restaurateur testing an idea on a vacant corner. It was a company with a working playbook moving it straight to the coast.

One name behind three doors on this block

Here's the detail that's easy to miss walking past: Alder & Oak isn't a standalone tenant on this block. It sits directly next to its sister restaurant, Oaxaca Club, and both are owned by Mark Janasik, who also runs Blueberry Artisan Bakery and the Southern Grounds coffee shops through his Restaurant & Hospitality Investment Group. That's four concepts under one ownership umbrella, two of them occupying adjoining storefronts on the same block of First Avenue North.

Eddy Escriba, the operations partner who oversees both Alder & Oak and Oaxaca Club, described the meze-forward format as part of a broader shift in how bigger markets are approaching Mediterranean food.

"It's a trending concept all over the country."

The menu backs that up with specifics: a meze list running from tzatziki to burrata for $8 to $26, fire-baked pizzas from $18 to $23, and seafood plates from $28 to $42, alongside more than 30 wines sourced from Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, and Croatia. Reservations for the dining room and for Zorbas run through OpenTable, though Zorbas also takes walk-ins for anyone who didn't plan ahead.

The two-year timeline behind one corner

Laid out in order, the sequence looks less like a single restaurant opening and more like a slow-motion changeover of an entire block:

1. Spring 2025 – The Bearded Pig barbecue spot on Third Street closes.
2. May 2025 – Jekyll Brewing shuts down all five of its locations, including the First Avenue North taproom.
3. December 2025 – Grouper Shack, backed by a $1 million renovation, opens in the former Bearded Pig space at 1700 Third St.
4. January 2026 – Alder & Oak opens its first location downtown at The Hub.
5. July 2026 – Alder & Oak and its rooftop bar, Zorbas, open in the former Jekyll Brewing space, next door to sister restaurant Oaxaca Club.

Two separate vacancies, created less than a month apart in 2025, both got filled by operators who were already running something else nearby. That's not a coincidence worth shrugging off. It's a pattern.

The same playbook, one beach town over

Grouper Shack is worth a second look, because its ownership group is running the same expansion logic Janasik's group is, just with a different cuisine and a different string of towns. Co-owner Nathan Stuart regularly fishes competitive tournaments himself, and his captain, who holds a commercial license, runs the daily catch off a 43-foot catamaran when he's not competing. The attached Marketplace sells portioned fish and oysters for people who want to cook the same catch at home. That's a distinctly local operation, not a chain trying on a beach-town costume.

But the same group behind Grouper Shack is also building Cleo's in Crescent Beach and Snappers in Vilano Beach. Three restaurants, three different beach communities, one ownership group moving in parallel. Combine that with Janasik's four-concept cluster on First Avenue North, and the picture of Jacksonville Beach's restaurant scene shifts. This year's wave of openings isn't independent small businesses each betting on a good location. It's a small number of well-capitalized, multi-concept groups placing coordinated bets across the coast at the same time, often using a shuttered name as their entry point into a block they already wanted.

If you've noticed that Jacksonville Beach suddenly has a different feel to its dinner options this summer, sushi with rooftop seating at O-Ku's beachside location on First Street North was part of that shift before Zorbas ever opened. The rooftop bar wasn't a first for the block. It was a second act.

The festival took the same year off

The pattern isn't limited to restaurants. Seawalk Pavilion, a few blocks from all of this at 75 1st St. N., is the anchor for most of Jacksonville Beach's outdoor civic life, and its marquee summer event went dark for a year too. Jax Beach Summer Fest returned August 7 through 9, 2026 after a one-year hiatus, with a Teacher & DCPS Appreciation Soiree kicking things off, a free all-ages Beach Mini-Music & Community Fest on the main stage, and a Sunday brunch and service to close it out. The festival also ran a back-to-school supply drive for local students.

A festival taking a year off and a rooftop bar corner sitting vacant for over a year are two different kinds of absence, but they landed in the same summer of return. If you're mapping out what's left on the Seawalk calendar this year, the corridor isn't slowing down:

• August 25 – Jax Beach Classic Car Cruise, Seawalk Pavilion and Latham Plaza, 4 to 7 p.m.
• Beaches Oktoberfest, now in its 10th year, typically fills the pavilion each fall
• Springin' the Blues, the pavilion's three-day music festival, returns each April

What the pattern tells you if you already live three blocks away

None of this is a reason to plan a move. It's a reason to read the empty storefronts on your own walk to the beach differently. When a name you recognized for years disappears from a corner, in this market it now tends to reappear a few months later under someone who already has a foothold two doors down. The vacancy isn't dead space. It's a placeholder for the next group with a cluster strategy.

For a Friday night, that means Alder & Oak's dining room runs 4 to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 4 to 11 p.m. Friday, and 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Saturday, with Zorbas keeping the same hours and taking walk-ins if the OpenTable list is full. For anyone who liked what O-Ku was doing on the roof before this summer, Zorbas is a reason to see how two rooftop concepts on the same three blocks compare.

Watch the corners that have sat quiet the longest. Based on how this year played out, they're not staying that way for long.

If you're weighing what a changing block like this means for property values or timing a move to be closer to it, Michele Tremblay can walk you through what's actually happening on the ground in Jacksonville Beach and the surrounding coast. Request a Private Consultation to talk through it.