If you have walked the south side of Fifth Avenue South any Saturday this summer, you already know something is off. The block between Del Mar and Osteria Tulia is quieter than it should be. La Pescheria's windows are papered. Two doors of retail beside it look done rather than closed. Around the corner on 12th Avenue South, the old Bevy space has been dark for months.
None of this is drift. One restaurateur, Stefano Frittella, is quietly rebuilding the fine-dining spine of this corridor around his own Monte Carlo playbook, and while that happens, a separate wave of small counter-service operators has done something Fifth Avenue South has never really done: given residents a lunch rotation that does not require a reservation.
The Monaco pipeline is not a rumor anymore
On October 22, 2025, the Naples Design Review Board voted unanimously to approve Avenue 31 at 472 Fifth Ave. S., planned to be built between the Del Mar and Osteria Tulia restaurants on the south side of the upscale avenue. The current one-story building, home since December 2018 to La Pescheria and two retail units, is being replaced with a three-story mixed-use structure designed by MHK Architecture. Ground floor: restaurant. Upper floors: condominiums.
The name is not decorative. Frittella already runs a restaurant called Avenue 31 in Monaco, at 31 Avenue Princess Grace near the Grand Prix circuit, and he has been direct about the intent. "I'm going to open a super high-end restaurant like I have in Monaco — Avenue 31," he told Gulfshore Business. The Naples room is planned at 70 seats in an indoor dining area, 10 seats at a full bar and 66 seats in a more than 1,600-square-foot covered open area, which puts it materially larger than most of the corridor's fine-dining rooms once the covered patio counts.
Two blocks off Fifth, the second Monaco reference is already in motion. La Salière is set to open in the former space of The Bevy on 12th Avenue South. That gives Frittella three Naples restaurants with Monte Carlo sisters, layered on top of the four he already runs on Fifth: Bice, Caffe Milano, La Trattoria and Vergina. If you have wondered why the same operator's name keeps surfacing on the corridor, the answer is that it is not a coincidence and it is not slowing down.
What 472 Fifth Ave S actually becomes
The redevelopment is worth spelling out for anyone who has watched Fifth for a decade and assumes the streetscape is fixed. The parcel currently reads as three narrow storefronts in a single low building. The replacement is three stories: a restaurant footprint that swallows the whole ground floor, then two residential floors above. The retail that was there does not come back. La Pescheria does not relocate on-street as far as any current filing shows.
The design team is not treating this as a chain rollout. Working with MHK, the operator has described the interior direction as a play off the Monte Carlo location. Casa Avenue 31 in Naples is a play off of Frittella's restaurant in Monaco, between France and the Mediterranean Sea. "We're trying to bring that level of sophistication to this space here in Naples."
"The addition of more accessible and affordable options alongside its high-end offerings strengthens the district's appeal, whether you're celebrating a milestone dinner, grabbing coffee with friends or making a quick lunch stop." — Meg Stepanian, executive director of the Fifth Avenue South Business Improvement District
Read that quote against what Frittella is building and the strategy for the corridor becomes visible. The BID is not defending a monoculture of white-tablecloth rooms. It is signaling that the district wants layering: Monaco-scale evening anchors on one end, counter service on the other, and enough independent operators in between that a summer weeknight has more than three viable options.
The counter-service wave that closed the daytime gap
Fifth Avenue South has historically been a dinner street. Lunch on the corridor meant a bar seat at one of the Italian rooms or a walk over to Third Street South. That changed inside a five-month window.
- Barrio Taqueria opened downtown in early 2026 with a short menu of tacos and empanadas, a quesadilla, side dishes and the Barrio Caesar salad topped with Cotija cheese and charred corn, plus taco options including chicken, shrimp, steak and birria with slow-cooked beef, melted Chihuahua cheese, red onion, cilantro, lime and a house green sauce, and three empanada versions including a spinach, guava and goat cheese. Hours run 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily, with future times possibly expanded.
- All Too Well Gourmet Sandwiches launched Feb. 12 on the corner of Fifth Avenue South and Eighth Street South in downtown Naples. It is a Chicago import. It was born in 2022 in Lincoln Park, and a second location opened a few miles away in The Chicago Loop; chef Mitchell Jamra hails from a family of butchers, so sandwiches start with curated meats.
- Tiny Kitchen opened just off the corridor on Park Street, in the low-500s block. Alejandro Veiga along with his wife, Samantha Skarl, and his mother, Chef Marta Veiga, are serving Argentinian street food from a 680-square-foot space near Fifth Avenue South.
- Ce Soir at Bayfront rounds out the new downtown lineup this year, three blocks north of Fifth on the water.
The pattern is the interesting part. These are owned by seasoned hospitality professionals, presenting a more approachable dining experience as an alternative to the locality's upscale full-service establishments. None of them are chains chasing a season. Three are single-market debuts. All four opened at the exact moment the corridor's fine-dining side was thinning out for redevelopment. The BID has been open about the strategy behind that.
Where this leaves a resident's rotation
If you have been on Fifth for years, the corridor you knew organized itself around a handful of anchor operators: Cameron Mitchell for the American upscale slot with Del Mar and Ocean Prime, the Wahlstedt and King team behind Le Colonial for the Vietnamese-French slot, and Frittella for the Italian classics. That map has grown a fourth axis this year: Monaco-scale fine dining under a single operator, planned as two rooms roughly two blocks apart.
A short read on how the corridor's rooms line up right now:
| Address | Concept | Status | Operator |
|---|---|---|---|
| 472 Fifth Ave S | Avenue 31 (Casa Avenue 31) | Approved Oct 2025, redevelopment underway | Stefano Frittella |
| 494 Fifth Ave S | Del Mar Naples, Mediterranean coastal, from Cameron Mitchell | Open | Cameron Mitchell Restaurants |
| 457 Fifth Ave S | Le Colonial, French-Vietnamese known for its celebration of Saigon in the 1920s | Open | Wahlstedt / King |
| 12th Ave S (former Bevy) | La Salière | Set to open | Stefano Frittella |
| Fifth Ave S at 8th St S | All Too Well Gourmet Sandwiches | Open (Feb 2026) | Mitchell Jamra |
| Fifth Ave S | Barrio Taqueria | Open (early 2026) | Independent |
| 524 Park St | Tiny Kitchen | Open (late May / early June 2026) | Veiga / Skarl family |
The corridor is no longer a linear list of dinner rooms. It reads more like two overlapping districts sharing an address book.
Reading the pattern
Three things are worth holding onto if you live within walking distance of any of this.
First, the south side of Fifth Avenue South between Third and Eighth Streets is going to lose retail depth and gain vertical mixed-use. Avenue 31 is the visible example. It is unlikely to be the only one on that side of the street given the parcel economics that a three-story building with two residential floors implies.
Second, one operator now anchors an outsized share of the corridor's Italian and Mediterranean seats. If you have wondered why the corridor's fine-dining reads more Italian than French or American, the roster explains it. That concentration is a strength for consistency and a risk for variety, which is exactly the balance the BID has been talking around in its public statements.
Third, the counter-service arrivals have quietly solved a problem residents complained about for years. A lunch walk that used to end at one of two options now has four, and the operators standing behind them are not people running a fifth or sixth location. They are in the room.
The other detail worth internalizing before high season: these are small rooms with owner-operators in the kitchen, which is why they are worth visiting in July rather than March, because the service is calibrating to the residents in the room right now. That calibration window closes when the reservation phones start ringing in November.
If you own on or near Fifth and are trying to read what this reshuffle means for your block, or you are watching the 12th Avenue South corridor for the next Bevy-style parcel, that is the conversation Live in SWFL has every week. Start Your Success Story.
