New Restaurants in Wesley Chapel for Summer 2026

For years, a Saturday dinner plan in Wesley Chapel meant the same short loop through The Shops at Wiregrass or the State Road 56 restaurant strip. The summer of 2026 is quietly rewriting that habit. Between a brand-new $24 million retail center off Wesley Chapel Boulevard, a fresh tenant list at Wiregrass, and a Whataburger that finally opened after more than fifteen years of Tampa Bay rumors, the map of where you can go on a weeknight looks different than it did last July.

Here is what is open, what is close, and how the corners connect.

The center of gravity is moving south

If you have driven past the corner of Wesley Chapel Boulevard and Overpass Road recently, you have watched The Hub at Lexington open its first tenants. It is the newest of the area's shopping centers and it is deliberately not a mall. The tenant mix leans local and franchised-by-locals, which sets it apart from the national roster still filling out Wiregrass.

Here is a quick side-by-side of what the two centers are adding this season:

The interesting thing is not any one opening. It is that a resident now has three distinct dining districts within a ten-minute drive, each with its own personality.

What is already serving at The Hub at Lexington

Bonchon Korean Fried Chicken opened May 20 at The Hub at Lexington, joining five other tenants now serving customers at the new $24 million retail and dining center off Wesley Chapel Boulevard. This is not a copy-paste of the nearby Bonchon on State Road 54 in Lutz. Franchisee Sherry Askander is designing an upscale-casual dining room with roughly 70 indoor seats, an outdoor patio, and a full bar stocked with beer, sake, and Korean soju, making this effectively the area's first Korean pub concept.

Around it, the rest of the lineup is coming online in staggered fashion. A few worth knowing by name:

• Saigon Pho Wesley Chapel. A sibling to the Banh Mi & Boba location at The Hub at Bexley, this one will feature Vietnamese fare including pho noodle soups, grilled plates, banh mi sandwiches and more.
• Hummus Republic. A build-your-own Mediterranean bowl concept joining more than 60 locations across 15 states, with its closest existing Florida outpost near USF on East Fletcher Avenue. Sign permits were filed in April 2026 with a hood suppression system still in review, so the kitchen is close but not quite finished.
• Farmer's Milk. An Eastern European-influenced café and bakery with a sister location in Hollywood, Florida, offering decadent cakes and pastries, specialty coffees, and all-day breakfast.
• Brew Bar Self Pour. A self-pour tap room where customers pour their own beer and wine by the ounce, plus frozen drinks like daiquiris, with a sister location already at The KRATE at The Grove.
• La Creacion Bistro. The sister restaurant to La Creacion Express in the KRATEs, serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner with a completely different menu than the container park.

The service tenants are worth a note too. Headlines, a locally owned barbershop chain with locations in Brandon, Sunlake, Land O' Lakes, the Hub at Bexley, Northdale/Carrollwood, and New Tampa, opened its seventh location here with hours of 10am to 7pm Monday through Friday, 9am to 6pm on Saturdays, and closed on Sunday. Pet Wants, a franchised small-batch pet food and grooming brand, has a 1,091-square-foot buildout with a projected Spring 2026 opening, run by a Pasco County resident.

The pattern is worth pausing on. Six of the nine confirmed tenants are food, and most are either first-in-market or first-in-Pasco. That is unusual for a Tampa Bay strip center this size.

Wiregrass gets a polish, not a reinvention

Two miles east, The Shops at Wiregrass, the 800,000-square-foot open-air shopping center in Wesley Chapel, announced it was adding several new retailers and eateries and says several existing ones have expanded. The additions read differently than the Hub list. They are name brands, and they are betting on foot traffic that already exists.

The lineup:

• Bosphorous Turkish Cuisine opens this summer on Paseo Drive, the restaurant's third location in the market.
• Sweet Paris Creperie & Café is coming soon adjacent to Center Court, its first Tampa area location and fourth in Florida, joining three in Miami.
• Lululemon opens this summer across from Anthropologie, the chain's third store in the Tampa market.
• Kendra Scott is coming soon, the company's second store in the Tampa market.
• Face Foundrié, owned by mother and daughter Brenda and Elle Vansteenburg, opened April 22.

The additions land in a refreshed setting. The center went through a refresh last year that transformed Center Court between Paseo Drive and Piazza Avenue with landscaping, an enhanced fountain, large shaded structures, updated lighting, and new seating areas. If you have not walked through since the fountain work finished, the Center Court is genuinely a different space to sit in for an hour.

The SR 56 corridor keeps its drive-thru identity

The State Road 56 strip is doing what it has always done, which is feed people quickly on their way somewhere else. Two openings define the current moment.

On April 16, 2026, at 11 a.m., Whataburger finally opened at 25340 Sierra Center Boulevard, ending more than fifteen years of speculation about the brand's return to Tampa Bay.

The chain's second Tampa Bay location and the first to serve the Wesley Chapel and Lutz area sits near Tampa Premium Outlets. The roughly 2,800-square-foot building sat vacant after Aussie Grill closed, and Pasco County permit records show a top-to-bottom renovation including a rebuilt kitchen, updated restrooms, a remodeled front counter and lobby, and a new dining area, with a drive-thru configured for sustained SR 56 rush-hour traffic and a total construction value of about $1.3 million. That is a lot of investment for a fast-food refit, and it hints at how much volume the operator expects on that corner.

A little further north on Wesley Chapel Boulevard, Sarasota-based Food + Beer opened its eighth location and first in Pasco County the week of Nov. 10 at 25026 Wesley Chapel Blvd. The new restaurant seats 150 guests, features an outdoor patio and a TV wall, and the kitchen is scratch-made, serving food until 1 a.m. or later. If your household includes anyone under 25, this is the answer to the "where can we actually eat at 11 p.m." question that has bedeviled Wesley Chapel for a decade.

Reading the map

Look at the three districts together and a pattern shows up. Wiregrass is doubling down on national retail with sit-down dining as accompaniment. The SR 56 corridor is where high-volume, longer-hours concepts land. And The Hub at Lexington is where the small, local, and franchise-by-neighbor concepts are clustering. A resident deciding where to spend a Friday evening now has a legitimate choice between three different tones without leaving south Pasco.

Two more items are worth having on your radar as the summer moves on:

1. Cooper's Hawk in Wiregrass Ranch has been described as the most anticipated new restaurant opening in Wesley Chapel this year. Watch that footprint through the fall.
2. The Wesley Chapel Black Chamber of Commerce will officially launch in 2026, with a focus on supporting Black and minority-owned businesses and membership open to all. Expect its early events to introduce a set of operators most residents have not met yet.

When you next have out-of-town guests

If someone visits and asks you to show them what is new, the honest answer this summer is that the interesting stuff is not at the mall. Start at The Hub at Lexington for a self-pour flight at Brew Bar and coffee at Farmer's Milk. Move to Center Court at Wiregrass for a walk and dinner at Bosphorous. Save Whataburger for the drive home if it is late enough. The neighborhood has quietly assembled a full evening's worth of new stops, and none of them existed this time last year.

If your own plans for the year include a move within Pasco County or a sale that needs to time itself around the growth on this corridor, The Waugh Group has been walking these blocks for more than twenty-five years and would be glad to talk. Schedule a free consultation or request a home valuation whenever you are ready.