The Hub at Bexley Just Traded a Brewery for a Second Restaurant

Tonight, if you walk down Vibrant Way toward the Bexley Clubhouse, you will find folding tables, string lights, and a Friday Night Market that has become part of the neighborhood's summer rhythm. A few minutes away by golf cart or bike, Stillwaters Tavern is working through its lineup of twenty taps at The Hub at Bexley. Two years ago the Hub had one sit-down restaurant. Today it has two, and one thing that used to fill the space between them is gone.

That timing is the actual story. Everyone who covers The Hub at Bexley this year is writing about Stillwaters Tavern's arrival like it is simple addition: one more restaurant, one more reason to eat local. What the coverage misses is what left at almost the same time. Thirsty Buffalo Brewing Company, the taproom that used to anchor weeknights at the Hub with trivia and eleven house-brewed taps, is gone from that address. The brand's own site now describes a single location, in Odessa, with no mention of Bexley at all. So the honest read on this year isn't that the Hub got bigger. It specialized. What it lost in beer and trivia, it gained in scratch-kitchen dinner tables, and that trade changes which nights actually work here without leaving the neighborhood.

Two years of one restaurant, then a second one showed up

BellaBrava opened at the Hub in 2024 as the center's first sit-down concept, an Italian trattoria from 2B Hospitality, the Tampa Bay restaurant group founded by Thomas Sanborn, Brandyce Craig, and Robert Sanderson. For roughly two years, it was the only full table-service option in a retail center otherwise built around counter food: Taco Bus out of its yellow school bus, Grain and Berry, Banh Mi & BOBA, EggBred for breakfast sandwiches.

That changed in June 2026, when 2B Hospitality opened Stillwaters Tavern at 16729 Focus Loop, a few doors from BellaBrava. It is the concept's second location after nearly a decade on Beach Drive in downtown St. Petersburg, and it brought the same idea north: scratch-made versions of dishes people already know, fried green tomatoes, burgers, steaks, local fish, built out at the Bexley location into a menu that includes Tavern Pot Roast, Bayou Style Shrimp and Crawfish, jerk chicken, shrimp and grits, and hushpuppies. Sanborn personally selects the Maker's Mark barrels that become Hogfish, a whiskey made specifically for the Stillwaters brand and poured at both locations. The Bexley kitchen serves lunch, dinner, and weekend brunch, open from late morning into the evening seven days a week and as late as 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday nights.

One description from a Tampa Bay Beacons feature on the opening gets at what the Hub actually needed:

down-to-earth Key West with enough upscale polish that you don't feel like you're just eating deep-fried conch fritters

BellaBrava covers Italian. Stillwaters covers everything else people mean when they say American comfort food with a Gulf Coast accent. Together, for the first time, the center can host two different full dinners on the same night without repeating a cuisine.

What the Hub actually is now

The developer's own leasing roster for the Hub, a lifestyle center of more than 50,000 square feet that opened in 2022, today lists Banh Mi & BOBA, BellaBrava, Bengaluru Cafe, EggBred, Grain and Berry, Spanky's Place, Taco Bus, Urban Crunch, Mr Bear Cotton Cheesecake, Stillwaters Tavern, BDC Candle Bar, Bexley Nails & Spa, Checkmate Escape Rooms, Headlines barbers, Tampa Smile Co., Trek Land O' Lakes, Woof Gang Bakery & Grooming, and Elite Martial Arts.

Read that list as a night out rather than a directory and it maps cleanly onto an evening: dinner at Stillwaters or BellaBrava, a game at Checkmate Escape Rooms or a walk-in visit to Trek Land O' Lakes if you are thinking about the trail instead, and Mr Bear Cotton Cheesecake to close it out. That last piece is easy to skip past, but it means dinner and dessert can happen at the same address without a separate stop.

The gap nobody is writing about

Here is what does not show up in any of the coverage celebrating Stillwaters. Thirsty Buffalo Brewing Company operated at 16794 Focus Lp, inside the same Hub, with eleven house-brewed taps, a rotating seasonal lineup that included a pumpkin ale literally named for the neighborhood, and a trivia night that gave the center a weeknight identity that had nothing to do with dinner reservations. As of a business listing update this spring, that location is marked closed. The brewery's current website now describes only a single taproom, in Odessa, with no reference to a Bexley or Land O' Lakes address.

That is not a small substitution. A restaurant and a brewery serve different nights. Stillwaters and BellaBrava are reservation-driven, dinner-focused, the kind of place you plan around. Thirsty Buffalo was a drop-in taproom, the place you ended up on a random Tuesday because trivia started at seven. Losing that means the Hub no longer has a low-commitment weeknight option. It has two good reasons to book ahead for Friday, and fewer reasons to wander over on a Wednesday for a beer and a quiz.

If a casual, no-reservation night out is what you are after now, that has shifted west to Odessa rather than disappearing entirely. It is a longer trip than walking over from a Bexley cul-de-sac, and that difference is the whole point.

The dessert spot that isn't actually at the Hub

A second sweet-tooth option opened this spring at 6745 Land O' Lakes Blvd, several miles from the Hub itself and worth knowing about specifically because it is easy to assume it's the same development. Cotee River Creamery and Desserts opened its third brick-and-mortar location here after building a following with a food truck permanently stationed at the That Place Down the Street food truck park nearby. The shop rotates through roughly sixty house-made ice cream flavors, leans into boozy-infused options alongside classic milkshakes and pastries, and added coffee and lattes to the menu specifically for this location, something its other two shops do not offer.

So residents now have two distinct dessert stops worth knowing apart from each other: Mr Bear Cotton Cheesecake inside the Hub itself, and Cotee River Creamery as its own destination a short drive up Land O' Lakes Boulevard. Neither one requires a trip toward Wesley Chapel or downtown Tampa, which is the actual point, even if the two shops have nothing to do with each other operationally.

The market schedule that gives the week its shape

None of this happens in a vacuum. The Bexley Clubhouse at 16950 Vibrant Way has hosted Bexley Market on the Lawn on Saturday mornings this summer, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., a shop-local market with vendors and food that gives the neighborhood a standing weekend plan rather than an event you have to remember to check for. Friday Night Market runs at the same address on select Friday evenings, the same vendor mix under string lights instead of daylight. On Saturdays, a bootcamp class fills the Hub's own courtyard before the market crowd next door even arrives.

Layer the trail system on top and the picture gets more complete. Bexley's roughly 13 miles of internal paved trail connect directly to the Suncoast Trail, which runs more than 40 miles south into Hillsborough County and north toward Spring Hill. Trek Land O' Lakes, the bike shop that leases space inside the Hub, sits at the exact point where a resident might rent or tune up a bike before heading out on that connection rather than driving to a trailhead somewhere else.

What this actually adds up to

The honest version of this year is not that Land O' Lakes got a new restaurant, though it did. It's that the Hub at Bexley stopped being a place with one good dinner option and a casual beer stop, and became a place with two serious dinner options and no casual beer stop. That is a real trade for anyone who used to treat a Tuesday trivia night at Thirsty Buffalo as part of the weekly routine. It is a good trade for anyone who wants two different restaurants worth booking on the same Friday without leaving the neighborhood.

Either way, it is worth knowing before you plan around it, because the version of the Hub in most online write-ups this year is the one that only got bigger. The one you will actually walk into tonight is a little more specific than that.

If you are weighing what a neighborhood like this actually offers day to day, not just what a listing says about it, that is exactly the kind of on-the-ground read The Platinum Pelican Home Team builds into every conversation about Land O' Lakes. Let's Connect if you want the fuller picture, whenever you're ready for it.