If you drove Coral Ridge Drive last summer, you passed a shuttered Angelo Elia at the Sawgrass Center and probably kept going toward Boca or Delray for anything past a takeout order. Drive it this week and the same address has a new sign over the door, a new owner in the dining room, and a coffee program built around beans roasted two miles from your house. Two miles east, at Sample and University, the Cornerstone development finally has enough signed tenants to function as an actual block instead of a rendering.
That is the story Coral Springs residents deserve this summer. The city's dining is not simply growing. It is consolidating into two specific corridors, and once you see them that way, you can plan a Friday night without leaving a three-mile radius.
Corridor One: Sawgrass Center on Coral Ridge Drive
The anchor here is Ember & Vine, an all-day dining concept from Eddie and Christina Pozzuoli that took over the former Angelo Elia location at the Sawgrass Center on 5920 Coral Ridge Drive. It opens on August 3, 2026, which is the day you are reading this. Opening week matters if you like a soft launch: between August 3 and August 9, guests visiting from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. receive a complimentary house cold brew or drip coffee, with beans roasted locally by 360F Roasters, a Coral Springs-based roastery.
The Pozzuolis are not new operators. Ember & Vine is P Hospitality Management's third Broward County restaurant, following Eddie & Vinny's Coastal Italian and Dear Olivia, and the group also runs Prezzo Boca Raton and Amante's in Deerfield Beach. In practical terms, that means the kitchen has a supply chain and a staffing bench most first-time restaurants do not.
"We saw an opportunity to take an already well-known restaurant location and reimagine it with a fresh concept that reflects where dining trends are headed while still delivering the hospitality and quality that guests expect," the owners told Coral Springs Talk.
Around Ember & Vine, the same shopping center now reads as a full evening rather than a one-restaurant destination. The refreshed space itself carries a full-service dining room, bar area, flexible group seating, and rooms for private events, which is a category Coral Ridge Drive has genuinely lacked for private parties larger than eight people.
Corridor Two: Cornerstone at Sample and University
Cornerstone is the more interesting story because it is not one restaurant, it is a district. After decades of talk and years of construction delays, the $250 million development is finally reshaping the city's most important intersection one building, restaurant, and signed lease at a time. The reason it is finally moving is worth understanding as a resident, because it explains the pace of openings you are about to see:
The CRA approved $300,000 in commercial matching grants to help Farmhouse Kitchen, Mitch's Downtown Bagel Café, and Let's Chill Ice Cream open their doors, part of a broader strategy to use TIF funding to de-risk early-mover retail tenants and accelerate the district's vibrancy. That is a public policy choice with private consequences you can eat at.
Here is who has actually landed:
- Tacocraft Taqueria and Tequila Bar. The first to arrive, opening in August 2024 on the South Block's corner of Main Street and University Drive. If you have driven past and not been in, you are the reason the second wave took so long.
- Mitch's Downtown Bagel Cafe. Now open at 3334 N. University Drive, serving locally made bagels and spreads alongside matzo ball soup, omelettes, French toast, and pastrami sandwiches. This is your Saturday morning.
- Big Whiskey's American Restaurant and Bar. Permits filed at 3347 N. University Drive at the Cornerstone development on the corner of Sample Road and North University Drive. The menu features over 120 whiskeys alongside American food. This will be the after-work seat at the bar.
- Gary Rack's Farmhouse Kitchen. A concept with existing locations in Boca Raton and Delray Beach, built around locally sourced, seasonal menus that honor guests, local purveyors, and the environment. The Boca and Delray outposts are the reason people used to drive south. Now they don't have to.
- Paris Baguette and Let's Chill Homemade Ice Cream, both signed. Let's Chill serves homemade artisanal ice cream and won a national award for its homemade vanilla ice cream, which is not a sentence you get to write about most suburban intersections.
- Coral Springs Museum of Art. Planned within the retail spaces of the development, giving downtown a cultural anchor beyond dining and fitness.
Which Corridor for Which Night
The two corridors are not interchangeable. They solve different problems, and residents who treat them as one blob will pick the wrong one for the occasion.
| The occasion | Coral Ridge Drive | Cornerstone |
|---|---|---|
| Weekday breakfast or coffee | Ember & Vine, 8 a.m. open | Mitch's for a bagel |
| Business lunch | Ember & Vine dining room | Farmhouse Kitchen when it opens |
| Casual dinner with kids | Existing Sawgrass Center rotation | Tacocraft |
| Bar seat, later evening | Ember & Vine bar area | Big Whiskey's |
| Dessert walk after | Drive east | Let's Chill, on foot |
| Group of 12 or more | Ember & Vine private rooms | Not yet |
The honest read: Coral Ridge Drive is the corridor for meals. Cornerstone is the corridor for evenings. If you want to eat and then walk somewhere else, Cornerstone is finally, actually a place you can do that. If you want a single well-executed dinner and to be home in fifteen minutes, Sawgrass Center wins.
Two More Openings Worth Knowing
Not everything is on the two anchor corridors. Flora's Italian Eatery, from the family behind Flora Fine Foods, recently opened across from the Florida Panthers IceDen, offering a unique mix of food stations, market goods, and an upstairs bar and kitchen. Treat it as its own destination rather than a substitute for either corridor.
And on University Drive proper, Jalsa Indian Modern Kitchen has soft-opened at 2238 N. University Drive, taking over the former Honest Indian Vegetarian Restaurant location, with a menu that spans vegetarian favorites like palak paneer and chana masala plus additional options. That address used to be a stop you either knew or didn't. Now it is a stop worth knowing again.
The Weekend Around the Meal
Two events on the near calendar are worth putting on the fridge before the summer runs out.
Coral Springs Collectorfest 2026 Summer Edition runs one day only, July 19, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., with 12,000 square feet of vintage and modern toys, Hot Wheels, retro gaming, comics, artwork, and pop culture goods. Kids under 12 get in free, parking is free, and there are free Hot Wheels for kids under 12. The venue is the Fort Lauderdale Marriott Coral Springs Hotel and Convention Center, which is fifteen minutes from either dining corridor.
Mean Girls, the Musical, plays at Coral Springs Center for the Arts on Friday, July 31, at 2 p.m., as part of the Next Stop Broadway summer program, in which every camper performs in a full-scale production. If you have a middle schooler and you have not been inside the Center for the Arts recently, this is your excuse.
Looking a little further out, plan for winter. The Walk on Wednesdays live music series holds free, weekly performances in the courtyard at 2750 N. University Drive, between BurgerFi and Kilwin's Chocolate & Ice Cream, across from the large fountain. The 2026 run ended in April, and it is the single easiest recurring standing appointment on the Coral Springs calendar once it returns. Combine it with dinner at Ember & Vine on a Wednesday and the entire evening happens inside a two-mile square.
The Point
For years, the reflex answer to "where should we eat" in Coral Springs was a highway. That answer is getting harder to defend. Between Ember & Vine on Coral Ridge Drive and the growing bench at Cornerstone, the city is quietly building the walkable evening block it has been trying to build for a decade. If you have not updated your mental map of Coral Springs in eighteen months, this is the summer to do it.
The residents who benefit most from this shift are the ones who already own here. A neighborhood that finally has an evening block is a neighborhood that holds its value differently than one that empties out after sunset. When you are ready to talk about what that means for your address, the Steven Kaminer Team at Coldwell Banker has been watching this market for decades and can walk you through what your home is worth in the market these openings are shaping. Request a complimentary home valuation or speak with the team today.
