"It was inspired by the full moon that rises over our backyard every month. These are moments that bring us all together, when we can slow down and just appreciate where we live."
That's Jen Iavarone, talking about why she and her husband Derek named their new restaurant after their daughter's middle name. It sounds like the kind of quote that belongs to any beach town opening, warm, a little sentimental, easy to skim past. But the building she's describing has sat boarded on Eighth Avenue for two years, and what replaces it says something specific about how this neighborhood works.
Two Years of Plywood on Eighth Avenue
If you've walked from the Gulf side of Pass-a-Grille toward the Don CeSar in the past two years, you've passed the same dark storefront at 109 8th Avenue, ground floor of the Berkeley Beach Club. It used to be The Dewey. Then Hurricanes Helene and Milton hit in the fall of 2024, the space took damage, and it never reopened. Two years is a long time for a single address to sit empty in a two-block downtown where almost everything else runs on a waiting list.
This September, that changes. Derek and Jen Iavarone, the family behind Malio's Prime Steakhouse in downtown Tampa, are opening Moon by Malio's in that same footprint. Roughly 4,000 square feet across a dining room, a patio, and a rooftop, seating about 200 guests. The menu leans into wild-caught seafood rather than the steakhouse's prime cuts, which the Iavarones describe as the "playful little sister" of their other two restaurants.
The timing matters more than the menu. Malio's already has a presence up the beach on Gulf Boulevard with Malio's Beach House, which the family opened not long after the storms as something close to a public statement. Jen told a Tampa restaurant outlet at the time that they couldn't wait to open in St. Pete, where everything was reopening and coming back stronger. Moon is the third build in that same family, and it happens to be landing in the one storefront on Eighth Avenue that hadn't come back yet.
The Neighborhood Already Ran This Play Once
If this were the first time a Pass-a-Grille address changed hands and came back as something else, it might just be a nice story about resilience. It isn't the first time. Four years ago, a small waterfront building at 2007 Pass-a-Grille Way went through the same motion, minus the hurricane.
Sea Critters Cafe had been a fixture at that address for years, known for boat access, a full dock, and a menu that leaned into the kind of casual seafood a place like this survives on. In 2022, new owners Charles and Helen Collom bought the property and renamed it Red, White & Booze. They kept the building, kept the dock, kept most of the staff, and kept the bar-and-grill bones of the place. What changed was the name, the paint, some new outdoor seating, and a live music schedule on Fridays and Sundays.
Locals who remember Sea Critters still argue about whether the fish and chips are the same. That argument is itself the point. Nobody in this argument is talking about a restaurant that closed. They're talking about a restaurant that changed its name and kept doing business at the same address, with mostly the same people, because that's apparently how this stretch of beach handles turnover. Moon by Malio's is the same mechanism running on a different cause. Red, White & Booze happened because an ownership group wanted something new. Moon happened because a storm forced the issue. Either way, the building didn't sit empty for a decade. Somebody came in, kept the location's bones, and put a new name over the door.
What Moves Into the Dewey's Old Address
The Iavarones aren't newcomers gambling on a beach concept. Malio's Prime Steakhouse has operated in Tampa since 1969, moving to its current spot on North Ashley Drive in 2007. That's a family that has run one restaurant in the same city for more than five decades before ever touching a second location. When they expanded to St. Pete Beach with Malio's Beach House, and now again with Moon, the pattern isn't a chain rolling out a franchise. It's one operating family building three distinct rooms, each with its own identity, inside a fifteen minute radius.
Moon's identity, according to Jen, is personal rather than corporate. The name comes from their daughter's middle name and from watching the moon rise over their own backyard, not from a marketing exercise about "elevated coastal dining." Whether that translates into a menu locals adopt the way they adopted Red, White & Booze's Friday night crowd remains to be seen. What's already true is that the address is no longer dark. For residents who've walked past that particular stretch of Eighth Avenue for two years without a storefront to look at, that alone changes the evening walk.
The Corner That Never Needed Renaming
Not everything in Pass-a-Grille runs on this turnover. Some of the neighborhood's anchors have simply stayed put, which is its own kind of information for anyone trying to read the local food scene correctly. Maritana Grille, tucked inside the Don CeSar, has held a AAA Four-Diamond rating and a spot among the country's top seafood restaurants for close to fifteen years, without changing its name or its address. The Wharf and the Brass Monkey have been serving the same grouper sandwich crowd for years without a rebrand. And every Saturday and Sunday, year round, the Suntan Art Center runs its Art Mart on the beach patio next to Paradise Grille, the same folding tables and handmade work that's been part of the morning routine here for decades.
That mix, some addresses that get renamed every few years and some that never change hands at all, is closer to how Pass-a-Grille actually operates than either extreme on its own. It isn't a neighborhood in constant flux, and it isn't frozen either. It's a place where a two-year gap on Eighth Avenue gets treated as an open question rather than a permanent loss, because the track record here says somebody eventually walks in and reopens the door.
For residents, that means this fall's answer to "where's new" isn't really about newness at all. It's about a building getting its second act, the same way the corner building at Pass-a-Grille Way got its second act back in 2022. Worth a walk down Eighth Avenue once Moon opens, if only to see whether the rooftop catches the same moon Jen was talking about.
If you're the kind of person who tracks these small shifts because you already call Pass-a-Grille home, the Natalie Scott Team spends the same amount of attention on this stretch of coastline that you do, for the same reason. When the conversation eventually turns to buying, selling, or just understanding what a place like this is worth, that's the kind of local read worth having in your corner. You can find more on daily life across St. Pete Beach and the surrounding beach communities any time you're curious what else has changed.
