The stretch of State Road 13 between the Julington Creek Bridge and Race Track Road runs about a mile and a half. You can drive it in under four minutes with the windows down, live oaks closing overhead near the water, then opening up again by the time you reach the Publix light. Most residents treat it as a commute. This summer, it quietly turned into the reason to stay home on a weeknight.
Three unrelated decisions made by three different sets of people are behind the shift. A restaurant group filled the old Broudy's Liquors box with something you can eat at twice a week. The Julington Creek Plantation CDD board changed a long-standing rule about who gets into the Tide Club. And a Palm Valley chef with a following bought ten acres across from Trout Creek Marina. None of these is a headline on its own. Read together, they redraw what an ordinary Tuesday looks like for anyone who already lives here.
The Tide Club rule most residents haven't caught up to yet
If you host out-of-town family in July, the calendar just got easier. On June 23, 2026, the Julington Creek Plantation Community Development District Board of Supervisors approved allowing guests at the Tide Club beginning Monday, June 29th. For years the amenity center was a residents-and-cardholders-only affair, which meant summer visitors either sat this one out or you burned a favor asking a neighbor to escort them. That constraint is gone.
The practical effect is small on paper and large in real life. A grandparent flying in for a week can spend an afternoon at the pool instead of a chain hotel down 9B. A cousin's kid can take a swim lesson while you finish work upstairs. It is the kind of change residents tend to learn about six weeks after it takes effect, usually from someone else at a food truck night, which brings us to the second shift.
What replaced Broudy's at 138 SR-13
St. Johns County approved plans on September 16 for Pecan Craft Kitchen to build out in Julington Creek at a cost of $750,000, renovating and operating out of the former Broudy's Liquor Store at 138 Florida 13 N, after Broudy's moved to 25 Village Oaks Drive in August 2023. The doors opened for real on December 20, 2025.
The concept is not another wings-and-fried-catfish room. Pecan Craft Kitchen features menu items cooked over a pecan-fired grill, with a menu that includes grilled tamarind flatbread, cornbread with hot honey, pecan-fired salmon and banana pudding, and the restaurant seats 120 customers and includes a covered patio. Fifty parking spaces sit out front, which matters if you have ever tried to grab a table at Julington Creek Fish Camp on a Friday.
The operators are not first-timers. Darryl Nagao and Brad Chasteen, through Welcome to Moe's Inc., are developing Pecan Craft Kitchen, and they have more than 50 Moe's Southwest Grill locations in Florida, Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. That matters because "farm-to-fire" as a category has a mortality rate. This one was built by people who know how to run 300 covers on a Saturday without falling apart.
The alcohol permit tells you something too. The St. Johns County Planning and Zoning Agency voted 6-0 on April 17 to approve a special-use permit for the on-site sale of alcoholic beverages in conjunction with the fast-casual restaurant's state-issued liquor license. A unanimous vote in this county on a liquor add for a fast-casual location is not automatic. The room agreed the site could carry it.
"The idea has been in the works for a long time and the concept is simple: Use local ingredients and fire to enhance flavor. We want to create dishes you can eat on a daily basis that aren't going to hurt you." — Brad Chasteen, co-owner
If Chasteen means it, the ceiling for a place like this is a Tuesday-and-Thursday habit rather than a birthday spot.
The Wednesday-Friday rhythm at 350 Plantation Club Pkwy
The CDD Rec Center has been running food trucks for a while, and the pattern is worth knowing if you moved in recently. All Wednesday and Friday food trucks are from 5:00pm to 8:00pm and are located at the Rec Center at 350 Plantation Club Pkwy, with Wednesdays as Grab and Go and Fridays featuring live entertainment poolside.
Two things about that schedule are non-obvious:
- Wednesday is transactional. Grab and go means you pick up dinner and take it back to your kitchen or your porch. It solves the 6:15 p.m. problem on a school night without turning into an event.
- Friday is social. Live music poolside means the amenity is doing double duty as a neighborhood gathering point, not a hall rental.
Put next to the June 29 guest policy, Friday nights at the Tide Club stop being a residents-only closed loop. You can bring the visiting sister-in-law. That is a real change in the texture of the week.
Alpine Groves, used differently
Every list of things to do in Fruit Cove mentions Alpine Groves Park. Almost none of them tell you how to actually use it, so residents default to a single Sunday morning walk and check it off. The park rewards more specific visits.
| If you have | Go here | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 45 minutes at sunset | The covered fishing pier | The park is on Julington Creek and has a pier that is covered at the end, along with a small kayak launch, trails, picnic tables and several historic buildings. The cover matters in July when a 6:30 p.m. storm rolls through in ten minutes. |
| A restless kid on a Saturday morning | The Ruth Harris Bennett Butterfly Garden | The Friends of Alpine Groves Park are responsible for the maintenance of the Ruth Harris Bennet Butterfly Garden, and their mission focuses on maintaining the park's rich heritage and providing educational opportunities for the community. |
| An out-of-town guest who wants context | The restored farmhouse and Friends tour | The Friends group offers monthly tours of the park, providing insights into the area's history, including its origins as an orange plantation in the early 1900s. |
The county has been treating this park as more than a passive greenspace. In January of 2025, St. Johns County received the Northeast Florida Regional Council's Resiliency Award for the completion of the Parks and Recreation Departments Alpine Shores Grove Park Shoreline Restoration Project. The stabilized bluff is why the pier is still usable after storm season.
The next domino, ten acres away
If you want to know where SR-13 is going, the answer is a few miles up the road, across from Trout Creek Marina. The project will rise on a 9.87-acre vacant parcel at 6595 State Road 13 North, directly across from Trout Creek Memorial and Marina on a tributary of the St. Johns River. The group behind it is not speculative. Their umbrella group, Southern Table Hospitality, has overseen some of the region's most popular dining spots, including the four Fish Camp restaurants in Julington Creek, North Beach, Palm Valley and St. Augustine.
The scale is unusual for this stretch of the river. Contractor Coastal Atlantic Inc. will construct a 6,689-square-foot restaurant accompanied by a 2,167-square-foot outdoor dining area, and inside, the restaurant is designed to seat about 438 guests. For comparison, Pecan Craft Kitchen seats 120. A 438-seat room on the water changes the gravity of the whole corridor. Residents in the Plantation will feel it first on Saturday nights, when the pull of dinner north of the bridge starts competing with the pull south toward Race Track Road.
Julington Creek Fish Camp, still on San Jose Boulevard, holds down the other end of the same portfolio. If you have never gone by boat, that is the missing detail. Dockside arrivals are part of the point.
A summer week, sketched
For someone who has lived in the Plantation long enough to have stopped noticing the changes, here is what a week actually looks like now:
- Monday. Quick dinner from Pecan Craft Kitchen, patio if you can get it, home before 7.
- Tuesday. Walk or bike to the Tide Club before the light goes, then order in.
- Wednesday. Food truck grab-and-go at 350 Plantation Club Pkwy between 5 and 8, eat at home.
- Thursday. The Loop at 450 SR-13 if there are kids at the table, Julington Creek Fish Camp on San Jose if there aren't.
- Friday. Poolside food trucks and live music at the Rec Center. Bring the visiting relatives. It's allowed now.
- Saturday morning. Coffee, then Alpine Groves. Kayak launch if the tide cooperates, butterfly garden if there is a nine-year-old in the mix.
- Sunday. Farmhouse and Friends tour if it lands on the calendar. Otherwise, the covered pier and a book.
None of that is aspirational. All of it is within a fifteen-minute radius of the traffic light at Race Track Road and SR-13.
The quieter shift underneath all of this
The through-line is that Julington Creek is aging into itself. Broudy's outgrew its old box and moved to a larger one at Village Oaks. A restaurant group with fifty locations under its belt chose the vacated space instead of a strip mall further south. The CDD is treating the Tide Club like a real amenity rather than a compliance checkbox. Southern Table is buying dirt on the river. These are the moves operators make when they think the neighborhood has another decade of run left in it, not when they think the neighborhood peaked in 2018.
If you have been here since the early builds, that is either reassuring or slightly alarming, depending on your temperament. If you moved in during the last two years, it is why your realtor mentioned the corridor and then trailed off. There was not a clean way to describe what was happening. Now there is.
If you're thinking about how any of this shapes your next move in the neighborhood, whether that's a listing decision, a build across town, or a family member looking at Julington Creek from out of state, Laura Worrell is glad to talk through it in plain terms. Request a consultation whenever the timing is right.
