The Difference Between a Press Release and a Permit, Explained by One Empty Lot on Roscoe Boulevard

"We're excited to bring this storied property to life as a world-class dining and hospitality landmark for Ponte Vedra," Justin Anthony said in a December news release announcing his next restaurant.

If you drive North Roscoe Boulevard along the Intracoastal, "storied" is a generous word for what that property actually looked like on the day he said it. A demolished slab. A chain-link fence. Weeds working their way through cracked concrete where Lulu's Waterfront Grille used to serve dinner before it closed in 2021. For most of the past few years, that lot has been the kind of thing residents mention to each other in passing: someone's finally going to build something there, right?

The answer, as of this year, is yes. But the part worth paying attention to isn't the press release. It's what happened a month after it.

What Actually Sat There Since 2021

Lulu's Waterfront Grille shut its doors in 2021, and the building came down not long after. For a while, the 1.34-acre waterfront parcel just sat there, doing nothing, the way vacant commercial land in a market this expensive often does when nobody can agree on a use that pencils out.

That changed in 2024, when Alex Cranberg bought the site for $4.1 million through an entity called Shark Tooth Dining LLC. Cranberg lives nearby in Palm Valley. He's better known locally and nationally for his oil business and his school-choice advocacy than for restaurants, which made the purchase itself a mild curiosity around the neighborhood. A local buying waterfront land a mile from his own house is one thing. Turning it into something is another. For over a year, nothing visible happened.

The Permit Is the Part That Matters

In late December 2025, Cranberg's group announced a partner: Atlanta-based True Story Brands, the hospitality company built by South African-born restaurateur Justin Anthony. The plan was Yebo Beach Haus, an established Atlanta restaurant known for sushi, seafood and prime steaks with flavors drawn from Cape Town and South Africa's wine country, paired with something new called the Lions Head Private Members Club on the floor above it.

Announcements like that happen constantly in coastal Florida. Most of them are aspirational. What separates this one is what came next: on January 20, 2026, St. Johns County issued an actual building permit for the project, valued at $3.14 million, covering a 10,279-square-foot building with 66 parking spaces. Cronk Duch Architecture and Wolf Design Group are the firms of record. That's not a rendering and a quote in a press release. That's a permit number tied to a dollar figure that a contractor has to answer for.

A month between announcement and permit is fast, especially for a waterfront build in a county that reviews plans carefully. It's the clearest signal yet that this project is moving on a real construction timeline rather than sitting in the same limbo that held the lot empty for the better part of five years.

Two Businesses, One Address

The structure of what's coming is worth understanding, because it's not simply "a new restaurant." The ground floor will be Yebo Beach Haus, open to the public, expected to seat roughly 207 guests between indoor and outdoor space. Anthony's other concepts back in Atlanta, 10 Degrees South and Biltong Bar, share the same instinct: elevated menus built around a specific point of view rather than a generic coastal-American formula.

The second floor is where it gets more interesting. Lions Head Private Members Club is described as a discreet, curated dining experience, separate from the restaurant below it. Membership details haven't been released yet. But the basic idea, a public restaurant on one floor and a dues-paying private club on the other, is a financial structure as much as a design choice. A restaurant lives or dies on covers walking through the door every night. A membership club collects dues whether or not anyone shows up for dinner that particular Tuesday. Stacking the two on the same address gives the whole project a revenue floor that a standalone restaurant doesn't have.

That distinction matters more here than it might somewhere else, because of what's happened to some of the other restaurants nearby in just the past year.

Why That Hedge Matters on This Stretch Right Now

In April 2026, Trasca & Co Eatery closed after 11 years in Sawgrass Village, taking the attached Ponte Vedra Tap Room with it. Owner Sara Frasca had built a genuine following around a family panino recipe and had collected local honors over more than a decade. She wasn't pushed out by weak sales. She closed on her own terms, choosing to focus on her consulting business and her family instead of running two operations at once. It's a reminder that even a beloved, established name with over a decade of goodwill can still end its run for reasons that have nothing to do with whether the food scene here can support it.

Dank Burrito had a rougher version of the same lesson. It opened in May 2025 at the Shoppes of Valley Ridge and was gone within six months, its signage scratched off and its equipment stacked in the windows. Neighboring merchants pointed partly to confusing road access into that particular shopping center, a problem that hurt foot traffic for more than just the burrito shop.

Neither of those closures is a verdict on Ponte Vedra's appetite for good food. But they are a reminder that a restaurant here, even a well-run one, competes against real estate costs, staffing and simple bad luck, with no guarantee that a loyal following is enough to carry it through a rough stretch. A project betting $3.14 million on new construction, with a private membership tier built in from day one, is making a different bet than a standalone kitchen hoping for steady covers. That's the actual reason this lot might finally become something permanent instead of another name that comes and goes.

What to Actually Watch For

A few things will tell you whether this one is tracking on schedule:

• Visible construction activity at 301 North Roscoe Boulevard, since the permit allows work to begin now that it's been issued
• Any announcement of Lions Head membership pricing or terms, which hasn't been released yet
• A firm opening date from Yebo Beach Haus, since neither the December release nor the January permit filing included one

None of that requires anything more than driving past the site or checking in occasionally. It's the same way most of us track any long-promised project in this neighborhood: not by believing the first press release, but by watching for the fence to come down and the trucks to show up.

For now, the lot on Roscoe Boulevard has gone from "someday" to "under permit," which in this market is a meaningfully bigger deal than it sounds.

We spend a lot of time tracking exactly this kind of detail across Ponte Vedra, the Beaches and St. Augustine, not because every reader is buying or selling, but because knowing what's actually happening on your own street is part of living here well. If you're curious what a specific change like this one could mean for property values nearby, or you're just thinking ahead, the team at Mandy Morrow Group is always happy to talk through it. Request a Complimentary Home Valuation whenever you're ready to see where your own home stands.