Drive south on MacDill Avenue past Barcelona Street and the building at 2616 still has the same bones: low-slung, glass-fronted, a parking lot that fills up around brunch. What used to be on the sign is gone. Datz, the comfort-food spot that opened here in 2009 and spent fourteen years turning out mac and cheese "buns" and a menu that changed often enough to keep regulars guessing, served its last plate on August 27, 2023. The building sold not long before that, reportedly for $6.1 million, and the new owners had their own plans for the space.
If you've lived in Bayshore Beautiful for a while, you probably already knew that. What you might not know is what replaced it, or that the same pattern just repeated itself at the other end of the neighborhood, where two restaurants with a national hospitality group behind them opened inside a single renovated address on Bay to Bay Boulevard. Put those two facts next to each other and the neighborhood's food scene looks different than the version still floating around online, including on the Bayshore Beautiful neighborhood association's own site, which still lists Datz as a current MacDill Avenue eatery.
What's Actually at 2616 South MacDill Now
The Datz building is now 1983 Restaurant, Bar & Arcade, an American concept with an indoor arcade, golf simulators, and an outdoor patio with lawn games. It comes from Three Oaks Hospitality, the same Tampa group behind Bar Aw at Armature Works and Ro in Hyde Park. Permit paperwork for the project surfaced under the name "1983" in early 2025, and by that fall the restaurant was open and running full breakfast-through-late-night service, seven days a week except Mondays.
The shift matters less as a menu change and more as an ownership change. Datz was a locally founded, locally owned restaurant from its first day to its last. What sits in that building now is a single location inside a multi-property hospitality group's portfolio, the kind of operator that treats a restaurant less like a neighborhood fixture and more like one node in a citywide brand.
That doesn't mean MacDill Avenue lost its independent character entirely. Cru Cellars, the wine bar a few doors down, has kept its own identity through the transition, and it's worth knowing that not every business on the strip is following the same script. But the anchor address, the one every longtime resident has directions memorized to, is now run by people who also run restaurants at Armature Works and in Hyde Park Village. That's a different kind of business than the one that used to be there.
The Other End of the Neighborhood Got the Same Treatment
Walk or drive to where Bayshore Beautiful meets Bay to Bay Boulevard and you'll find the same pattern playing out on a different block. Bayshore Gardens, the retail building at 2907 and 2909 W. Bay to Bay Blvd, was acquired by Asana Partners in December 2021 and has been reworked since. In May 2025, Maru opened on its rooftop, a Peruvian-Japanese restaurant with 60 indoor seats and 30 outdoor seats and views straight down Bayshore Boulevard. This spring, its ground floor got a second concept from the same ownership: O-Ku, a sushi and robata restaurant led by chef Billy Brannen, with an outdoor patio and a private dining room.
Both restaurants come from Indigo Road Hospitality Group, a Charleston-based company that also operates restaurants in Nashville, Charlotte, D.C., and Jacksonville Beach. The people behind the concepts, Steve Palmer and Kimball Brienza, are James Beard Award semifinalists, which tells you something about the level of polish going into these spaces. It also tells you that, like the MacDill building, this address is no longer a single owner-operator running one restaurant. It's a regional group's outpost, chosen because Bayshore Boulevard is exactly the kind of address that makes a hospitality brand's map look good.
Here's the comparison laid out plainly:
| Address | Then | Now | Operator |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2616 S. MacDill Ave. | Datz (2009–2023) | 1983 Restaurant, Bar & Arcade | Three Oaks Hospitality |
| 2907–2909 W. Bay to Bay Blvd. | Vacant/underused retail | Maru (2025) and O-Ku (2026) | Indigo Road Hospitality Group |
Two different hospitality groups, two different cuisines, and two different reasons to walk over. But the underlying story is the same: the anchor food spots on both ends of Bayshore Beautiful's dining spine changed hands from independent owners to multi-property operators inside roughly a three-year window.
The Trail Between Them Hasn't Changed at All
What has stayed exactly the same is the walk connecting these two points. The Bayshore Linear Park Trail, also called the Bayshore Greenway, runs 4.5 miles along the water from Gandy Boulevard at its southern end to Columbus Statue Park at its northern end, and a stretch of it cuts directly through Bayshore Beautiful. It's the same continuous sidewalk it's been for decades, the same fitness stations and water fountains, the same view of the bay that hasn't needed a hospitality group's design team to look good.
That's worth sitting with for a second. The restaurants on either end of the neighborhood have turned over in ownership twice in three years. The path between them hasn't turned over at all. If you're trying to describe what actually defines daily life in Bayshore Beautiful right now, it isn't which company owns the kitchen at either end. It's the fact that residents still walk, run, and bike the same stretch of waterfront regardless of who's plating the food when they get there.
What's on the Fall Calendar Along the Route
The boulevard's biggest annual event is still the Publix Gasparilla Distance Classic every February, which pulled more than 20,000 runners through the area in 2026. That one's already behind us for the year, but the fall calendar has its own fixture worth knowing about. On November 7, 2026, the Tampa Bay Lightning Foundation and AdventHealth are hosting the Bolt Run, a 5-mile, 5K, and 1-mile family event that runs straight down Bayshore Boulevard behind Thunderbug, with a post-race celebration at the finish. If you live in Bayshore Beautiful, that's a Saturday morning your usual walk on the Greenway is going to be considerably more crowded, and considerably louder, than normal.
It's a small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that actually shapes a week here. Restaurants change hands. New logos go up. The boulevard keeps its own schedule regardless.
The Actual Takeaway
The easy version of this story is a restaurant roundup: new spot here, new spot there, go try the sushi. The more useful version is this: Bayshore Beautiful's dining anchors on MacDill Avenue and at the Bay to Bay edge are now both run by hospitality groups with properties elsewhere in the city, not by single owners rooted only in this neighborhood. That's a real shift in who's setting the tone for what this stretch of South Tampa feels like on a Friday night, even if the buildings themselves look familiar and the sidewalk out front hasn't moved an inch.
If you're the kind of resident who still tells visitors to look for the Datz sign on MacDill, it's worth updating the directions. And if you're weighing what any of this means for your own next move in Bayshore Beautiful, whether that's a sale, a purchase, or just a clearer read on what the neighborhood is worth right now, KVA Group knows this stretch of South Tampa block by block. Request a confidential consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
