Walk the New River side of downtown on any weekday morning and you'll see the gap for yourself. The lawn is full. The dog run has regulars. The restored fountain runs on schedule. And the one thing that was supposed to anchor the whole redesign, a full-service waterfront restaurant from the family behind Miami's Rusty Pelican, is still a construction fence and a fall 2026 promise.
Huizenga Park reopened to the public on January 24 and 25, 2026, after a two-year, $15 million redesign led by the architecture firm Perkins&Will and built by MBR Construction. That's roughly seven and a half months ago as of this writing. Sweetwaters, the anchor restaurant meant to give the park its dinner crowd, broke ground in November and is still targeting a fall opening, which means the park has now been fully public and fully food-service-empty for longer than it took to build the rest of it. If you live within walking distance of Las Olas Boulevard, that timing gap is the thing worth understanding, because it explains why the neighborhood feels like it's in two different seasons at once.
What's Actually Finished
The 3.6-acre park at 32 East Las Olas Boulevard is not a construction site anymore. The open civic lawn is done and named for philanthropists Michele and Chuck West Jr., who gave $1.5 million toward the project. Downtown's first dedicated dog run is open. So is the children's play moundscape. The Spirit of Fort Lauderdale Fountain, the park's original centerpiece, has been restored and runs again. Two new public art installations, one by Manolo Valdés and one by Cey Adams, are in place. Crews planted more than 13,500 new plants across 58 species and added 88 shade trees, so the park reads far greener than it did during the two years of construction fencing.
Food-wise, the only thing operating inside the park right now is a stand from Mr. Smash Burgers, part of a rotating concession program the Downtown Development Authority set up to give the space some activation while the main restaurant gets built. It's a placeholder, and a reasonable one, but it is not the sit-down waterfront dinner spot the renderings promised.
The Restaurant That Isn't Here Yet
Sweetwaters is being built by Specialty Restaurants Corporation, the company the Tallichet family has run since opening the original Rusty Pelican on Key Biscayne in 1972. The Rusty Pelican has been the company's only South Florida address for more than five decades, so Sweetwaters marks the first time the family has expanded into the region since then. The site sits right at the corner of Las Olas Boulevard and Andrews Avenue along the New River, inside the park itself. When it opens, the numbers are substantial for a single restaurant: 6,140 square feet of indoor dining with seating for up to 291 guests, plus another 3,500 square feet of riverfront terraces and patios. JVB Architect designed the building, and ICRAVE handled interiors, working in natural materials and warm tones meant to match the park's redesign rather than compete with it.
The plan is to open with dinner service first, then add lunch, and eventually a café-style morning counter for coffee and grab-and-go. None of that has a firm date beyond "fall 2026," which for a project of this scale could land anywhere from October through December.
The gap between a reopened park and an unopened restaurant isn't a delay story. It's a structural one. Public park redesigns and private restaurant buildouts run on different clocks even when they share an address. The park's timeline was driven by landscaping maturity, donor recognition installations, and a fountain restoration, work that had to reach a defined finish line before a ribbon-cutting made sense. The restaurant's timeline is driven by kitchen buildout, health inspections, and staffing, which don't care whether the lawn next door already has its opening ceremony behind it. Residents who assumed the two would arrive together were working from the renderings, not from how these projects actually get built.
Where Downtown Is Actually Eating Right Now
While the park waits on its restaurant, the boulevard around it hasn't slowed down. Here's the split between what you can walk into tonight and what's still under construction:
| Open Now | Opening This Fall |
|---|---|
| Ocean Prime, Las Olas Marina (171 Las Olas Circle) | Sweetwaters, inside Huizenga Park (58 E Las Olas Blvd) |
| Earls Las Olas (1002 E Las Olas Blvd, open since March 2025) | Caviar Club (833 E Las Olas Blvd) |
| TIMBR, now in its second season with a new 2026 menu | La Felicità (1021 E Las Olas Blvd) |
| Little Hen (1201 E Las Olas Blvd, former Planta Queen space) |
Ocean Prime opened this year as the first East Coast location for the brand, taking a two-story, 15,000-square-foot space at the new Las Olas Marina with a private dining room for up to 32 guests and terrace seating on both levels overlooking the Intracoastal. It's the kind of opening that would have been the story of the year in a quieter cycle. Right now it's one of several.
Caviar Club, from restaurateur Marc Falsetto, is bringing a 1980s-inspired steakhouse and lounge to 833 East Las Olas, designed by Garrett Singer Studio, the New York firm behind Flyfish Club and Major Food Group's Torrisi. La Felicità is taking the former B Square Burger space at 1021 East Las Olas for an Italian concept. And Little Hen, an English-inspired brunch concept, is set to take over the former Planta Queen space at 1201 East Las Olas Boulevard. All three are targeting openings before the end of the year, which means the boulevard itself, not the park, is where most of the near-term change is actually landing.
The Award That Arrived Too Early to Count Any of This
Fort Lauderdale's Riverwalk, the 2.5-mile linear park that runs along the New River and connects to Huizenga Park, placed eighth in the 2026 USA Today 10Best Readers' Choice Awards for Best Riverwalk. That's a slide from seventh place in 2025, even though this was the year the city poured $15 million into the adjacent park and lined up a marquee restaurant tenant.
The explanation is in the calendar, not the quality. Voting for the 2026 award closed on April 6, barely ten weeks after the park's ribbon-cutting and months before Sweetwaters was anywhere near its fall opening. The ranking reflects a snapshot from early spring, not the version of downtown that exists today in September. If you're judging the neighborhood by a national reader poll, you're judging a slightly earlier draft of it.
The Next Six Weeks, If You Live Here
None of this requires a restaurant reservation to enjoy right now. The recurring stuff that's active this month:
- Free lunchtime concerts run Wednesdays and Fridays, September 2 through October 9, from noon to 1:30 p.m. at Tunnel Top Plaza, a short walk from the Isles side of the boulevard.
- The MKT market sets up at Las Olas Oceanside Park every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with local produce and handmade goods.
- Riverwalk's fall calendar picks up October 17 with an afternoon festival, followed by a second annual Downtown Day of the Dead on November 7 and the sixth annual International Food Festival on November 14.
That's the actual rhythm of the neighborhood this fall: a park that's finished except for its centerpiece restaurant, a boulevard that's quietly becoming the busier of the two food scenes, and a calendar of free public events that don't wait on any of it.
What This Means If You're Watching the Neighborhood
The lesson here isn't that Huizenga Park underdelivered. It's that a civic redevelopment and a private restaurant opening are two separate projects that happened to share a groundbreaking photo. If you're planning around Sweetwaters, fall 2026 is still the right window, but don't expect a specific date before the construction fence comes down. If you want the current dining energy of this stretch of downtown, the boulevard itself, not the park, is where it's concentrated right now, and that's likely to stay true for at least another season.
If you're weighing what a home in this stretch of downtown Fort Lauderdale is actually worth given how fast the block is changing, that's a longer conversation, and it's the kind Heather Lefka has with clients regularly. Schedule a private consultation to talk through it.
