"One of the signature offerings will be Moroccan fish."
That's Olena Chuienko, describing the menu she was building out behind covered windows on State Road 7 this past August. Chuienko told a local business reporter on August 31 that she hoped to open Sababa Hummus House, her kosher pareve restaurant, within ten days to two weeks of that interview. The space used to hold Glyk Gelato, a dessert counter. By the time this posts, the malawa and hummus may already be on plates instead of on a build-out schedule.
That single storefront, on its own, is a small story. What makes it worth telling is what it's part of. Four addresses in Parkland have changed hands or changed shape in the past year and a half, and every one tells a version of the same story: the narrow, single-purpose concept that used to occupy that corner didn't make it, and the operator replacing it is betting on something built to run from morning through last call.
The Corner That Already Failed Once
Before First Catch Seafood & Grill closed its doors, the same address had already been through one failure. When childhood friends Greg El-Hage and Justin Moreno signed their lease in January 2021, the corner of State Road 7 and Loxahatchee Road, in the Waterways Shoppes, had just watched Brooklyn's Best close soon after opening. El-Hage told Parkland Talk at the time that the pair had waited almost two years to find the right spot, and that Parkland's lack of seafood options was part of what drew them there. The two had grown up together in Coconut Creek and cooked side by side for years at Ethos Greek Bistro before betting on their own place.
First Catch ran for years on a fast-casual model: a dozen shaded outdoor tables, a few stools inside, food ordered at a counter and carried to your seat. That worked for a while. It's now the second concept in five years to leave that address, and the tenant preparing to replace it isn't another counter-service shop. Eatz911, a local catering business, is converting the space into a sit-down restaurant, according to Parkland's local news coverage. The specifics of the concept haven't surfaced yet, but the shape of the bet already has. A catering operation doesn't usually open a walk-up window. It opens something meant to hold a table.
Two More Storefronts, Same Pattern
The same swap is playing out at two other addresses, and the details matter because they show this isn't a coincidence confined to one unlucky corner.
| Address | What Left | What's Moving In | Why It's A Bigger Bet |
|---|---|---|---|
| Former Glyk Gelato, Waterways Shoppes (SR-7) | A dessert counter | Sababa Hummus House, a 48-seat kosher pareve restaurant with a Shabbat pre-order menu | Trades a walk-up treat stop for a full kitchen running six days a week, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., with Friday and Saturday built around Shabbat |
| Former Queen's Tea House, Parkside Drive | A tea room | Cozy Drop, an all-day café that added wine and spritz service within six weeks of opening | Built to earn three separate day-parts, coffee in the morning, sandwiches at midday, wine at night, instead of just one |
| Former Deja Blue, N University Drive | A closed restaurant | Dear Olivia Bar & Kitchen, opened August 2025 with a waterfront patio and a Sunday-through-Thursday prix fixe | Runs happy hour, a nightly dinner service, and a Friday late program under one roof, not a single dinner seating |
Cozy Drop is the clearest example of how fast this expanded. When it opened on April 13, 2026, in the old Queen's Tea House space, five local owners, Carlos Talero, Samantha Tobar, Ulisses Souza, Alvaro Tobar, and Roberto Velez, posted hours of 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., a straightforward coffee and pastry counter. Within about six weeks, they announced a wine and spritz program and pushed weekend hours to 9 p.m. A coffee shop doesn't add wine service because the morning crowd asked for it. It does that because afternoon and evening traffic showed up on its own, and the owners decided to build around all three shifts instead of one.
Dear Olivia followed the same logic from a different starting point. The concept comes from P Hospitality Management, run by Eddie and Christina Pozzuoli alongside partner Paul Greenberg, who co-founded the American Social restaurant concept before this one. Their Parkland location didn't open as a lunch spot that happened to stay open for dinner. It opened with a waterfront patio, twinkle-lit cabanas, and a bar menu of trend-forward cocktails and curated wine, then layered in a Monday-through-Friday happy hour, daily specials like ten-dollar cheeseburgers on Mondays, and a Friday-night lounge program called Olivia After Dark, structured from day one to hold a full week's worth of occasions rather than one.
Il Tartufo Already Proved This Works
None of this is actually a new idea in Parkland. Il Tartufo, in the Riverstone Shoppes along State Road 7 and 441, has been running a version of this same theory since long before Sababa or Cozy Drop existed. The restaurant traces its roots to an original location on Las Olas in Fort Lauderdale that opened in 1990. Chef Patron Luciano Balzano runs the Parkland kitchen the way the original ran, wood-fired Neapolitan pizza, pasta made in house, and a nine-ounce prawn imported from waters near Thailand as one of the signature dishes.
Balzano has been direct about what he's selling. "This is an Italian restaurant, that happens to be in Parkland," he said in an interview tied to a 2025 gala night at the restaurant that featured an opera tenor and a $95 prix fixe menu. "Specifically, it's a Neopolitan Italian restaurant that is located in Parkland. If you were to go to an authentic restaurant in Naples, Italy, this is what you would find." He wasn't describing a fallback option for residents who couldn't get a reservation somewhere else. He was describing a destination built inside a suburb, which is a different pitch than most of what filled these same shopping centers before it. The newer operators arriving now, from Chuienko's Sababa to P Hospitality's Dear Olivia, are making a version of the bet Balzano already proved out years ago: that Parkland's household base can support a full-commitment restaurant, not just a convenient one.
The Farmers Market Still Sets The Clock
The Parkland Farmers' Market returns to the Equestrian Center at Temple Park on Sunday, November 1, 2026, running its usual 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. window through the season's close next April. For years, that market represented both the start and the end of a resident's Sunday plans. Once the stalls packed up at 1 p.m., there wasn't much reason to stay in town for the rest of the day.
That's the piece the new lineup of restaurants actually changes. A market morning can now run into a Cozy Drop lunch, then circle back for a Dear Olivia dinner or an Il Tartufo table without anyone leaving the same few miles of road. The market itself didn't get any longer. The day built around it did.
What This Looks Like Right Now
- Sababa Hummus House, 7515 N State Road 7: watch for the doors to open any day now. The kosher pareve menu runs 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., closing at 5 p.m. Fridays and closed Saturdays for Shabbat.
- Cozy Drop, 6682 Parkside Dr: wine and spritz service now runs into weekend evenings until 9 p.m.
- Dear Olivia, 7805 N University Dr: the prix fixe runs Sunday through Thursday.
- Parkland Farmers' Market, 8350 Ranch Road at the Equestrian Center: back November 1, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
- The former First Catch space: no opening date yet from Eatz911, but worth watching, since this is the same corner that has already turned over twice.
None of this is dramatic on its own. Together, it describes a town where the restaurant real estate finally caught up with the size of the community living around it. The Melissa Miller Group keeps a close watch on these same shopping centers and corridors, because what closes and what replaces it tends to say something honest about where a neighborhood is actually heading.
