Drive south on US-441 through Belleview right now and you will pass a brand-new Starbucks with a covered patio, a Chipotle that did not exist a year ago, and at least one storefront wrapped in construction paper that used to be somewhere everybody knew. Keep going a few blocks over to Abshier Boulevard and the story changes again: a family-style Italian dining room just opened where a bar used to be, a longtime neighborhood ice cream shop reappeared under new ownership, and a building that spent two years empty is being fitted out for something that has nothing to do with food at all.
It is tempting to read all of this as one trend, the kind where a small town starts losing its personality one national chain at a time. That is not quite what is happening here. Four separate things have happened to Belleview's restaurant buildings in the past two years, and they point in four different directions.
The New Construction Nobody Can Miss
The most visible change sits on a 6.96-acre parcel along South US Highway 441 that most longtime residents still remember as Belleview Hills. The mobile home community there was sold in February 2023 for $850,000, then sold again in July 2024 for $2.3 million to a company called One Oak Belleview, which told existing residents they had to vacate the property. The Belleview City Commission approved plans for the site in May 2025, and by October the first Chipotle and the first Starbucks Belleview has ever had were nearing completion and hiring staff.
Chipotle opened that November, right next to Starbucks, at addresses on South US Highway 441. Reviewers who found the new Starbucks location have singled out one detail that would not show up on a corporate press release: a covered outdoor patio, unusual enough for the chain that visitors have called it a standout even by Florida standards.
A few miles over on Abshier Boulevard, a different national name arrived. 7 Brew, the drive-thru coffee chain that has grown fast across the Southeast, opened its Belleview location on Abshier Boulevard with a grand opening celebration on January 19, 2026. So the chain expansion in Belleview is not confined to one shiny new plaza. It is showing up on two different roads, in two different formats, within a few months of each other.
The Building That Didn't Become Another Restaurant
Here is where the story gets more interesting than "the chains are taking over." Just down Abshier Boulevard from that new 7 Brew sits a building with a longer history: the former Belleview Pizza and Italian Restaurant, one of the city's longest-operating dining spots, which closed its doors in June 2024. The space sat vacant for the better part of two years before anyone found a new use for it.
That new use is not a restaurant. Trulieve, the medical cannabis company, has been converting the site into a dispensary, joining its existing locations in nearby Summerfield, Lady Lake, and Ocala. City records showed the company pulling several permits over an eight-week stretch earlier this year, starting with a demolition permit and moving into a full interior remodel.
What makes this worth paying attention to is what happened around the same building at the same time. Todd and Shelly's Cafe and Pub, another local favorite, also left its Belleview location during that stretch and relocated to Ocala. Ms. Steve's Ice Cream closed in early 2025. That last one did get a food-service second act, just not the original one: Manny's Ice Cream Shop moved into the space afterward.
So in roughly the same eighteen-month window, Belleview lost three independent, non-chain food businesses, and the buildings they left behind had three different outcomes. One became a dispensary. One became a different ice cream shop. One left town for Ocala and has not been replaced by anything yet. There is no single pattern here worth generalizing from. That is the point.
The Building That Became Something Better
Then there is the fourth story, and it is the one with the most texture. At 11008 SE 66th Terrace, in a building some residents still call by its older name, Cal's Place, and more recently knew as Tropical Vibes Restaurant and Bar, a new tenant has moved in with real restaurant experience behind it.
Monti Primo Ristorante is the work of Chef Mondi Markeci, along with his parents Mike and Suzana Markeci, who spent eleven years running Naples Italian Restaurant in Leesburg before selling it in 2022 and going looking for their next location. They found it in Belleview. The restaurant seats roughly 150 people inside, with a 50-person event room, a full bar, and outdoor seating, and it operates on a family-style format with an open kitchen so guests can watch the food come together.
The name carries a small joke: Monti plays on Mondi's own name and translates to mountain, while Primo means prime, together landing on "prime mountain," a nod to the family's standard for the food. It is the kind of detail that only surfaces when a restaurant is run by the people whose name is actually on it, and it is a useful reminder that not every vacant Belleview storefront is destined for a drive-thru lane. Some of them are still landing with people who have spent over a decade learning how to run a dining room three exits down the highway.
What Never Changed
None of this churn has touched the businesses that have been quietly running Belleview's actual daily food routine for years, and that is worth saying plainly, because it is easy to lose sight of the stable stuff when the construction signs are the loudest thing on the block.
- BD Beans Cafe and Coffee Co. on Abshier Boulevard still opens at 8 a.m. for breakfast and closes by 2, and has built the kind of following, reflected in a 4.7-star rating across hundreds of reviews, that comes from doing the same thing well for a long time.
- Flying Boat Tap Room keeps pouring 28 Florida craft beers alongside wood-fired pizza, with Chef Tucker Bengoa's menu still drawing people in for pork belly tacos and lobster grilled cheese.
- Riccardo's and Pasta Faire remain the two names locals reach for when they want Italian without driving to Belleview's newest arrival.
- Paradise Bakery is still the answer for Cuban food along the corridor.
- RJ's Diner, run by sisters who made their way from West Virginia, is still open for breakfast six days a week.
- Farmhouse Restaurant is still Farmhouse Restaurant.
These places were not part of the chain expansion story and they were not part of the vacancy story either. They just kept operating while everything around them changed twice over.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
If you have watched the construction on 441 and assumed Belleview is turning into a strip of the same five chains you see everywhere else, the Starbucks and Chipotle and 7 Brew are real, but they represent one storyline out of four running at the same time. If you have watched a familiar building sit empty for a year and assumed whatever replaces it will be another restaurant, the old Belleview Pizza and Italian Restaurant site says otherwise. And if you have assumed every closure means a piece of the neighborhood is gone for good, Monti Primo is proof that sometimes the next tenant is someone who has been perfecting the same recipes since 2011 and simply needed the right room to bring them to.
The two miles of 441 and Abshier Boulevard that make up Belleview's dining scene are not moving in one direction. They are running four different experiments at once, and the only way to actually track them is to notice which building you are looking at.
That kind of granular, on-the-ground read of what is happening block by block is the same lens we bring to the housing side of Belleview and the rest of Marion County. If you are curious how any of this corridor activity, old buildings changing hands, new retail landing nearby, tends to ripple into the residential streets around it, The Table Team knows this stretch of road well enough to walk you through it. Schedule a consultation whenever you are ready to talk about what is actually happening in your part of town.
