Delany's Public House pulled its doors open on July 23, 2026, in the storefront at 8110 Lakewood Main Street that longtime regulars still call the old McGrath's space. It is an Irish pub, and it did not need to introduce itself to anyone who has had a drink on Main Street in the last year, because the people behind it are not new. Kevin O'Hanlon, along with husband and wife Darren Shore and Tory Delany, opened Allswell in Waterside Place in 2025. Now they have opened a second bar elsewhere in the community, with a different concept and the same names on the paperwork.
That is the detail worth sitting with. Restaurant groups do not usually place a second bet on a neighborhood unless the first one already paid off. A press release will tell you a business opened. It will not tell you what the owners already knew going in. Here, the owners already knew, because they had run the numbers once.
A Second Bet From The Same Table
Delany opened Allswell after moving to Lakewood Ranch in 2022. She and her partners had run restaurants in New York City before that, including The Malt House, a tavern with two Manhattan locations, and Mezcali, a Southern California-style Mexican spot in the same city. When Allswell opened, Delany's read on the area was that the newcomer wave had outpaced the local bar scene. She put it simply: there was room for many other restaurants and bars to open here.
A year later, that read looks like it held up well enough to repeat. Delany's Public House is not a hedge against Allswell's success. It is the same team, choosing to reinvest in Lakewood Ranch rather than take what worked and try it in a different Gulf Coast suburb. If you live near Main Street, that is a more useful signal than any single opening announcement. Operators who already know a corridor's foot traffic, its slow nights, and its actual demand are the ones who decide whether to come back. These three came back.
Across The County Line, Nothing Is Opening On The Same Day
Main Street sits on the Manatee County side of Lakewood Ranch. The other place growth is showing up right now is on the Sarasota County side of the same master-planned community, where an entertainment district has been taking shape. This is not a single ribbon-cutting. It is several independent operators building on staggered timelines, which means the district you visit today is not the district you will visit in eighteen months, and neither is final.
Urban Air Adventure Park, with trampolines, slides, and climbing walls, has been open since September 2025. Its owner, Sarasota's Michael Tucci, also runs Urban Air locations in Brandon and Tampa. He recently added mini-carts for kids seven and under, choosing to leave full-size go-karts to a neighboring business rather than compete for the same ride.
That neighboring business is SkyTrack, a go-kart venue from Alokeh and his wife, Jennifer Alokeh, who wanted to build something outside the medical field they'd both worked in. As of March 2026, the track itself was still being shipped from Europe, with a 30-day install window and a roughly 14-month build, putting the projected opening at May 1, 2027. That is not a typo. If you are waiting for the go-karts to be running before you check out the district, you are looking at next year.
Backyard Social, a food-truck-and-bar concept from owners Mat Baum and John Mann, is aiming for a mid-November opening, though as of March 2026 the foundation had not yet been poured. And Life Time, an athletic country club, is targeting a late 2026 debut, with membership pricing to be released closer to that date.
Here is the practical version of all that, as of today:
- Already open: Urban Air Adventure Park (since September 2025), including its new mini-cart addition
- Targeting late 2026: Life Time athletic country club, Backyard Social (mid-November target, foundation work still pending as of March)
- Targeting 2027: SkyTrack go-karts, with a projected May 1, 2027 opening
The people building this seem to know it will not all land at once. Tucci, when asked about competing with SkyTrack for the same audience, said the businesses should partner together instead. Alokeh's framing was more personal: Lakewood Ranch had grown fast enough that a bowling alley or go-kart track had simply never shown up, so he built one.
The Rhythms That Didn't Need An Investor
None of this changes what was already working on Main Street before anyone broke ground on an entertainment district. Music on Main runs the first Friday of every month, a free block party with food vendors, beer trucks, and a different band each time. This year, each show benefits a different local nonprofit. August's edition, which just wrapped, featured Ya Ya & The Diamond Chasers and raised support for HOPE Family Services. September's, coming up the first Friday of the month, brings Jump Start Band and benefits Save Our Seabirds. It is a small structural choice, tying a recurring party to a rotating cause, but it means the event has stayed useful to the community even as the surrounding storefronts change hands.
The Farmers' Market at Lakewood Ranch, held every Sunday at Waterside Place from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., runs on the same logic of familiar faces. Red's Farm, selling pork, poultry, and eggs, started in 2020 on a 10-acre property in Riverview when owner Chase Richie was still in high school. Dynasty Guacamole sells a recipe passed down from owner Assiel Landa's grandmother, run today by Landa and his wife, Veronica Ramon. These are not vendors that rotate through for a season. They are the market's steady core, the reason a Sunday morning at Waterside Place still feels like a routine and not an event.
A Taste of the Ranch, the corridor's restaurant week, ran July 18 through August 1 this year, with prix-fixe menus across Main Street and Waterside Place. It has already wrapped for the season. It returns annually, not as a one-time promotion, which matters if you want to plan around it next summer.
What This Means If You Live Here
Put the two stories next to each other and a pattern comes into focus. On Main Street proper, growth is coming from operators who already have a track record here, reinvesting in a corridor they understand. In the entertainment district, growth is coming from independent operators building in stages, none of them on the same clock, some of them a year or more from opening. Both are signs of a place still filling in, but they move at different speeds, and confusing one for the other means either missing what is already open or waiting on something that will not be ready for months.
If you are deciding whether to make the drive to the entertainment district this fall, Urban Air is running today. If you are picturing go-karts, that is a 2027 plan. If you are wondering whether Main Street's restaurant scene is stable enough to build a routine around, the fact that Allswell's owners just opened a second concept elsewhere in the community is a better answer than anything in a press release. The corridor is still adding pieces. Some of them just arrived. Some of them are still just steel and a foundation waiting to be poured.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own plans in Lakewood Ranch, whether that's timing a move around a neighborhood still filling in or understanding what a corridor like this does to property values nearby, Tonna Gruber and the Let's Move team follow these changes as they happen, not after the fact. Let Us Guide You Home.
