Order a latte at DI Coffee Bar on a weekday morning and you're standing on East Davis Boulevard, the same four-block stretch of sidewalk cafes and boutiques that has anchored the island since the 1920s. No traffic lights, no chain storefronts, just a walkable run of businesses between Barbados and Biscayne Avenues that most of the neighborhood passes on foot or by golf cart before 9 a.m.
Order that same latte this year, and there's a real chance you did it thirty feet from an elevator bank in one of Tampa's newest office towers, nowhere near the water.
That's the part of the story worth knowing if you live here: the coffee shop that started as a side project for two Davis Islands homebuilders is quietly becoming a citywide name, and it's happening at the same time three other storefronts on that identical stretch of sidewalk are changing hands. The island isn't just absorbing new restaurants this year. For the first time in a while, it's exporting one.
A side project that outgrew the island
DI Coffee Bar opened in 2014 on East Davis Boulevard, started by Ramon and Marilyn Perez, who built homes for a living and ran the cafe as something closer to a hobby than a business plan. It stayed that way for years: a neighborhood counter serving specialty lattes and imported beers to people who lived within walking distance.
That changed last year. In April 2025, DI Coffee Bar expanded off the island for the first time, opening a second location in Seminole Heights inside the former space of Cake Cuties Bakery, the same bakery that used to supply DI Coffee Bar's pastry case. Then, in a report from Creative Loafing Tampa Bay published in late January 2026, Perez confirmed a third location was on the way, this one inside the lobby of TECO's new headquarters at 3600 Midtown Dr. TECO occupies the majority of that building, an 18-story, 440,000-square-foot office tower called Midtown East, and the plan called for DI Coffee Bar's counter to open there by mid-February 2026, roughly six months before this story went up.
Perez didn't sound like someone who planned this from the start.
"If you would've told me DI Coffee Bar was going to be what it's become, I never would've believed you."
A shop that once served people who could walk there on a Tuesday morning now serves office workers in a downtown tower who have never set foot on the island. That's not a small jump for a business with no franchise ambitions and no outside backing behind it.
Meanwhile, the same block keeps turning over
While DI Coffee Bar was expanding outward, the storefronts near where it started kept changing. Three addresses within a few doors of each other tell the story of a strip that's still very much in motion.
At 236 E Davis Blvd, Oggi Italian opened a spinoff called Buchette Spritz Bar, debuting to the public on Mother's Day. The concept borrows from Florence's centuries-old buchette del vino, the small wine windows built into building facades during plague-era Italy so wine could be passed through without face-to-face contact. Buchette's version keeps that novelty but adds a modern happy hour: $6 spritzes from 4:30 to 6 p.m., a short charcuterie menu, and hours that run daily except Tuesdays. It has become enough of a fixture that regulars now plan post-dinner nightcaps around the window specifically, not just around Oggi's dining room next door.
A few doors down at 241 E Davis Blvd, Spartaco's Kitchen tells a different kind of story. Spartaco Giolito, originally from Rimini in Italy's Emilia-Romagna region, first came to Tampa in 1985 to help run Donatello, a restaurant owned by his cousin. Years later he had built his own restaurant, only to be forced to sell it in 2018 under circumstances outside his control. Spartaco's Kitchen is his return, run with his sister Ombretta out of a room that seats only 35 people, serving his mother's pasta recipes under a wall dedicated to her memory. It's regional Italian food, built around Adriatic seafood and the wild boar and truffle traditions of the hills west of Rimini, not the red-sauce menu most people expect from an Italian spot in Florida.
And at 205 E Davis Blvd, permit paperwork filed with the city shows a fourth concept preparing to join the block: Little Palm Cafe, backed by Tampa restaurateur Christopher Rivas, who also created Little Tina and Urban Cantina. As of the filing, no opening date or menu details had been made public, which means the space is still very much a placeholder for whatever Rivas decides to build there.
Three storefronts, three different chapters, all within easy walking distance of the counter where DI Coffee Bar got its start twelve years ago.
What that pattern actually says about the island
Most neighborhoods experience restaurant turnover in one direction. A concept opens elsewhere in the city, proves itself, and eventually a version of it lands in your neighborhood as a sign that you've arrived on someone else's map. Davis Islands has had plenty of that too, evidenced by how quickly Buchette's wine window and Spartaco's regional menu have found an audience.
What's different this year is that the flow is running both ways. East Davis Boulevard's small footprint, its total absence of traffic lights, and its walk-everywhere layout make it a low-overhead place to test a concept against a genuinely captive, loyal audience before deciding whether it can survive somewhere bigger. DI Coffee Bar spent a decade proving itself against that exact audience before anyone thought to put it inside a downtown tower lobby. The same conditions that make the block pleasant to walk on a Sunday morning, the small scale, the foot traffic, the lack of a highway cutting through it, are the same conditions that let a business figure out whether it's worth scaling in the first place.
That's worth knowing if you live here and have wondered why your neighborhood coffee shop suddenly has a name recognition it didn't have five years ago. Six months past that Midtown target date, the real test is whether the tower counter is holding on the way the Seminole Heights location did, proof that a Davis Islands concept can survive somewhere with zero walkable regulars. East Davis Boulevard itself is still waiting on its own answer: whether Little Palm Cafe's paperwork turns into an actual storefront at 205 E Davis Blvd, adding a third turnover to the same four blocks in about two years while the neighborhood's own coffee shop keeps expanding outward.
Either way, the next time you're standing at that counter on East Davis Boulevard waiting for your order, it's worth remembering you might be looking at the early version of something that ends up somewhere you don't expect.
If you're weighing a move to Davis Islands or already call it home and want a broker who tracks these details as closely as the comps, reach out to Phillip Ochoa to schedule a consultation.
