For as long as most people can remember, the parking lot at Blackburn Point Plaza filled up around lunchtime and stayed busy through dinner, then went dark. That is just how the corner worked. Now there are cars in that lot at 9 a.m., ordering biscuits and gravy instead of waiting on a dinner reservation. The reason is a single new restaurant, but the shift it points to is bigger than one menu.
Five Nine Grill & Tavern soft-opened its Osprey location on August 10, 2026, with a grand opening the following week on August 17. It moved into the space at 1092 S. Tamiami Trail that used to hold Bay Leaf, an Indian restaurant that closed and left the storefront empty before Five Nine's owners signed the lease. That address sits on the west side of Tamiami Trail, just north of Blackburn Point Road, inside the plaza most Osprey residents already know for a handful of other names.
The Corner That Used To Close By Nine
Before this summer, the businesses clustered around Blackburn Point Road ran on a lunch-and-dinner schedule and nothing earlier. Casey Key Fish House, a few blocks over on Blackburn Point Road itself, has long served a lunch-through-dinner crowd with a tiki bar on the water. Deep Lagoon Seafood and Oyster House and Clever Monkey Craft Grill & Bar round out the same stretch, both known for evening business and weekend dinner traffic. None of them opened before late morning. None of them made brunch a daily habit.
Five Nine breaks that pattern on purpose. The Osprey location runs 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week, with brunch served every morning rather than just on weekends. That is a real departure from the original Bradenton restaurant, which opened in December 2023 near Cortez Road and 59th Street West and never built its identity around a morning menu. The Osprey version was designed differently from the start.
"We always liked the area," co-owner Mike DeGirolamo said of Osprey, Nokomis, and Venice.
He has been in the restaurant business for roughly 35 years, most of it inside corporate restaurant groups before he retired in 2022 and opened the first Five Nine with his wife, Holly, and business partner Quincy Watkins. Two decades of reading traffic patterns is not a small thing to bet on a 9 a.m. opening time.
What Actually Changed On The Menu
The kitchen is still the same 90 percent scratch operation DeGirolamo has run in Bradenton for years, built around burgers, wings, steaks, and handhelds. But the Osprey location adds a full morning lineup the flagship never carried:
- Biscuits and gravy, served daily starting at 9 a.m.
- Shrimp and grits
- A fried green tomato omelet topped with pimento cheese
- The Giant Tavern Pork Tenderloin Sandwich and the Cortez Cordon Bleu Melt, both $14
- A Fresh Grouper Sandwich at $21
- A Buffalo Blue Mac at $16, alongside a full bar pouring Casamigos margaritas and a cocktail called the Shark Bite
The space itself, roughly 3,000 square feet, went through what the ownership group describes as extensive renovation before opening, with new work on the dining room, the bar, and guest seating. It now seats about 120 guests, and the bar program runs local craft beer alongside the cocktail list. None of that is unusual for a new restaurant. What is unusual is the decision to open the doors three hours earlier than every other kitchen on that block.
Why The Morning Matters More Than The Menu
A new restaurant on Tamiami Trail is not news by itself. This stretch of Osprey has absorbed plenty of turnover over the years, Bay Leaf among the businesses that came and went in that exact address. What makes this one worth tracking is the decision to bet on daytime traffic in a corridor that has never had a reliable daily brunch option.
DeGirolamo has pointed to the surrounding area, Osprey, Nokomis, Venice, and South Sarasota together, as the reason his group chose this plaza over sites farther north toward Bradenton. That reasoning only pencils out if there is enough car and foot traffic before noon to support a kitchen running from breakfast through last call, seven days a week. A group with a proven Bradenton location behind them is not guessing at that math. They are reading the plaza's parking lot and betting that this specific corner of Osprey, close to Blackburn Point Park and a short drive from Casey Key, already has enough daytime activity to fill tables that used to sit empty until noon.
The Anchors That Didn't Move
None of the other names on this stretch changed, and that stability matters as much as the new opening does. Casey Key Fish House kept its lunch-to-dinner hours and its waterside tiki bar. Deep Lagoon and Clever Monkey kept their evening crowds. Blackburn Point Plaza did not need to replace anything that was already working. It needed something to fill the hours that were sitting empty on either side of it.
Blackburn Point Park itself, a 15-acre water access park built across three distinct sections just down the road, has run on roughly the same rhythm for years: quiet early mornings, a midday bump from paddlers and anglers, then a slow fade after sunset. A brunch spot with a 9 a.m. opening now sits within a five-minute drive of all three park sections, which means a morning at the water and a morning at the plaza can happen back to back instead of requiring a trip home in between.
One More Thing Worth Marking On Your Calendar
If your version of an Osprey morning runs through Oscar Scherer State Park instead of Blackburn Point, there is a seasonal detail worth flagging now, before it catches you off guard later this year. Part of the Green Trail closes every winter once bald eagles return to nest inside the park, and it stays closed until the eaglets fledge, typically around April. The rest of the loop stays open and can still be hiked as a continuous route, but the full loop shrinks for a few months each year. Oscar Scherer manages more than 15 miles of trails across roughly 1,400 acres and feeds directly into the paved Legacy Trail connecting Venice and Sarasota, so the closure barely dents most people's plans. It just means checking trail status before committing to the long loop once the eagles are back.
What This Actually Tells You About Osprey
None of this is really about one restaurant. It is about a plaza that used to run on half a schedule now running on a full one, backed by a group with two decades of pattern-reading behind them and real renovation money on the line. Add in a park system that already draws a steady morning crowd and a state park managing its own seasonal rhythm a few miles inland, and the picture is a neighborhood whose day just got longer without anyone building anything new from the ground up.
That is the kind of change that shows up in daily routines before it ever shows up in a market report, and it is worth knowing if you already call this stretch of Tamiami Trail home.
SellMyVeniceHome tracks details like this because they shape what it actually feels like to live in Osprey long before any of it shows up in a listing. If you have noticed something changing on your own corner of town, Nick Wikoff would like to hear about it.
