Hub at Bexley and 3 Distinct Weekend Scenes in Land O' Lakes

On a Friday evening in June, the patio at Stillwaters Tavern in the Hub at Bexley filled up the way patios only fill up when word has already gotten around. The restaurant's other location, the one on Beach Drive in downtown St. Petersburg, has been part of that stretch since 2014, the kind of place people plan a whole evening around: park downtown, walk the pier, grab a table, stay for the schnitzel and the twenty taps. Now there's a second one fifteen minutes from most Bexley driveways, and the regulars showing up on Focus Loop this summer were doing something they hadn't needed to do before: getting the Beach Drive experience without leaving Land O' Lakes.

That's a small fact with a bigger implication. It also happens to be one piece of a larger pattern that's easy to miss if you only pay attention to the plaza closest to your own front door. Land O' Lakes, and Bexley specifically, doesn't have one social hub this fall. It has three, and they run on different clocks, in different settings, for different reasons.

The Hub Picked Up a St. Pete Regular

Stillwaters Tavern opened at 16729 Focus Loop in June as the second restaurant that Tampa Bay hospitality group 2BHospitality has placed inside the Hub at Bexley, joining BellaBrava, which the same group already operates at the site. The founders, Thomas Sanborn, Brandyce Craig and Robert Sanderson, built their reputation on Beach Drive, one of the most competitive dining corridors in the region. Choosing to put a second concept in a suburban lifestyle center rather than another established urban strip says something about how the Hub has matured as a destination in its own right, not just an amenity attached to a subdivision.

The menu leans into that scratch-kitchen identity: house-made sausages, chicken schnitzel, rotating seasonal dishes, twenty beers on tap alongside wine and a full bar. It serves lunch, dinner and weekend brunch, with a daily happy hour that runs until 7 p.m. and a patio where regulars report bringing their dogs and settling in for Sunday mornings that stretch into early afternoon.

Stillwaters didn't arrive into empty space. The Hub at Bexley is a roughly 50,000-square-foot lifestyle center, and its tenant roster reads less like a strip mall and more like a small town's worth of errands and evenings: BellaBrava and EggBred for breakfast and Italian, Banh Mi & BOBA, Bengaluru Cafe, Grain and Berry, Spanky's Place, Taco Bus, Urban Crunch and Mr Bear Cotton Cheesecake for the rest of the day's meals, plus Woof Gang Bakery & Grooming, Trek Land O' Lakes, Checkmate Escape Rooms, Headlines barbers, Tampa Smile Co., BDC Candle Bar, Bexley Nails & Spa and Elite Martial Arts filling out the non-food half. The center's own site lists weekday hours of 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., though individual businesses keep their own schedules on top of that.

The wait at EggBred, the breakfast spot two doors down from Stillwaters, still runs past fifteen minutes some mornings even for people who order ahead. That's not a complaint so much as a data point: the demand at this plaza isn't limited to whichever restaurant opened most recently. Saturday mornings also bring a recurring bootcamp class, Pump It with Tash, staged right on the Hub's grounds, which is its own small proof that the center has become a place people return to for reasons that have nothing to do with dinner reservations.

The Lake Beat the Plaza to It by a Decade

None of this is the oldest gathering spot in the area, though. That distinction belongs to In the Loop Brewing, a small craft brewery at 3338 Land O' Lakes Boulevard that opened back in 2016, years before the Hub existed. Founders Mark Pizzurro, Peter Abreut and Joe Traina converted a two-story house built in 1903 into a tasting room and beer garden along the shore of Lake Padgett, and the setting still carries that older Florida character: cypress trees, a wraparound deck, fire pits for cooler evenings, a dock view that has nothing manufactured about it.

The brewery runs its own recurring event, the Lakeside Market, on roughly a monthly cadence. This year's editions landed on July 25 and August 22, and the next one is set for September 19, each running from 6 to 10 p.m. Local vendors set up along the lawn, food trucks handle dinner since the brewery itself doesn't run a kitchen, and the crowd skews toward people who already know the place rather than newcomers discovering it for the first time. Regulars also still talk about the brewery's Looptoberfest, an annual fall tradition that predates the Hub by years and has built its own following independent of anything happening on Focus Loop.

The contrast with the Hub is worth sitting with. One is a curated commercial center built to a master plan, with a consistent tenant mix and predictable hours. The other grew out of three friends brewing beer in a garage and slowly opening a hundred-and-twenty-year-old house to the neighborhood. Both now anchor a Saturday night in Land O' Lakes, but they're pulling from overlapping and sometimes entirely different crowds.

The Clubhouse Runs a Third Calendar, and It's Not for Sale

There's a third node, and it's the one most likely to be invisible to anyone who isn't already inside Bexley's own gates. The Bexley Clubhouse, at 16950 Vibrant Way, hosts its own recurring market series, Bexley Market on the Lawn, with seasonal editions built around the calendar: a Sweetheart-themed edition on February 28 and a Summer Celebration edition on June 27, both running 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. with local artisan vendors, food vendors and lawn space for kids. A separate evening event, the Friday Night Market at Bexley Community, ran August 14 at the same address, shifting the same basic idea, local vendors and food, into a nighttime format.

This calendar operates differently from the other two. It's tied to the residential community itself rather than to a commercial address anyone can wander into off the highway, and its rhythm follows the seasons and the HOA's own programming rather than a brewery's or a restaurant group's schedule.

Here's a quick side-by-side of what's actually running where:

Why the Split Matters If You Live Here

It's entirely possible to live in Bexley for a couple of years and have only ever set foot in one of these three places. Someone who works from the Hub's coffee shops and eats dinner at Stillwaters most weeks may never have wandered down to Lake Padgett for a Saturday pint. Someone who treats the Clubhouse markets as their default Saturday morning might not realize In the Loop's Lakeside Market is running the same weekend, a few minutes down the road, with a completely different crowd and a completely different feel.

There's also a fourth date worth circling if you want to see the neighborhood pull outward for once instead of gathering within its usual three spots. Festival de Bomba y Plena lands at Land O' Lakes Heritage Park on October 18, a county-wide cultural event rather than a Bexley-specific one, and it's the rare case this season where the draw isn't a plaza, a brewery or a clubhouse lawn, but a public park built for exactly this kind of gathering.

None of these calendars is competing with the others so much as running in parallel, each serving a slightly different version of what a Saturday in Land O' Lakes can look like. Knowing all three, rather than defaulting to whichever one happens to be closest, is really the only way to get a full read on what this stretch of Pasco County has actually become over the past few years.

If you're weighing a move into this part of Land O' Lakes, or trying to figure out which pocket of Bexley fits how you actually spend your weekends, The Waugh Group has spent more than two decades working these Tampa Bay neighborhoods block by block. Reach out for a free consultation, and we'll walk you through what each corner of the area is really like to live in, not just what the listing photos show.