"When it's ready."
That is Richard Gonzmart's answer, every time, when someone asks about The Buccaneer Restaurant. Gonzmart runs the 1905 Family of Restaurants, the group behind the Columbia Restaurant on St. Armands Circle, and he has been giving some version of that answer since 2017. He told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune he thinks of the whole thing the way Confucius did, that it doesn't matter how slowly you go as long as you don't stop, and then signed off with a wink to the pirate theme: patience, mateys, the treasure is worth the wait.
A mile north, on the same road, a different restaurant just got a lot less patient.
Two Buildings, One Road
Gulf of Mexico Drive runs the length of Longboat Key, and right now it's carrying two restaurant stories that could not be moving at more different speeds. At the island's northern tip, near Broadway Street, Whitney's restaurant and bar just bought the derelict office building next door and is on track to demolish it for a major expansion. About a mile south, near Bayfront Park, the vacant lot where The Buccaneer Restaurant has been "coming soon" since 2017 finally has some visible activity, but the building that's supposed to house it hasn't been touched.
Both projects sit within a few hundred yards of the water. Both involve well-known local names. And both tell you something real about how change actually happens on this island, which has less to do with demand for waterfront dining and more to do with what kind of project you're running and how much patience the people behind it have.
The Building Everyone Wanted Gone
Whitney's occupies a former gas station that got a second life as a restaurant, and it has apparently done well enough that its owners, operating as Whitney LBK LLC, bought the property next door for $1.2 million last October. That property is a 5,400-square-foot former bank building at 6960 Gulf of Mexico Drive, and the plan is to tear it down and use the land to grow the restaurant's outdoor seating.
On September 15, 2026, the Longboat Key Planning and Zoning Board took up the two ordinances that would make it possible: a change to the future land use map and a rezoning from Office-Institutional to Highway-Oriented Commercial. The board recommended approval of both. Here's what the application actually proposes:
- Seating capacity growing from 70 to 200
- A new outdoor deck with a slatted canopy structure and landscaping
- 1,370 square feet of new construction, including a commissary kitchen, storage, cooler space and restrooms
- 51 total parking spaces
Eddie Abrams, a former board member and a nearby property owner, spoke in favor of the project at the meeting. "The existing bank building, I feel like, is an eyesore," he said, adding that Whitney's has "been good neighbors." No other members of the public spoke against it. Vice Chair Jay Plager said the only concern he'd heard from neighbors was noise, and proposed a condition barring loud music or sound amplification at the outdoor expansion.
The ordinances now head to the Town Commission for final approval, and the actual site plan will need its own separate review after that. So Whitney's hasn't cleared every hurdle. But it went from purchase to a favorable zoning board recommendation in eleven months, on a small parcel it already owned, for a business that was already generating revenue and had a track record the board could point to.
Fifty Years, Five Identities
Part of why the board's recommendation landed so easily is the building itself. It has had a strange half-century.
- Built in 1976 as a bank, complete with a drive-through, its old traffic light still hanging askew decades after the bank moved out
- In the early 2000s, home to both the Longboat Key Chamber of Commerce and the Longboat Key Historical Society, who used the empty office space for monthly breakfasts and after-hours events
- Vacant since 2008
- Sold in 2015 to Anthony Marterie for $549,000
- At one point owned, briefly, by Aubrey Lee Price, a Georgia pastor turned financial adviser who admitted to bank, wire and securities fraud that cost more than 100 investors over $70 million, and who staged his own disappearance before he was caught, according to a 2014 FBI release
- Part of a failed 2019 proposal by Floridays Development Co. to combine the building, the gas station that's now Whitney's, and neighboring land into a 120-room hotel called the North End Hotel & Beach Club, which 78% of voters rejected at the ballot box
That's a lot of history for one building to carry, and none of it involved a restaurant until now. When Abrams called it an eyesore, he was speaking for a building that spent nearly two decades being nothing in particular.
The Restaurant That Keeps Waiting
The Buccaneer's story runs on a much slower clock. The 1905 Family of Restaurants bought the parcel at 4120 Gulf of Mexico Drive in 2016, the former site of Pattigeorge's, and picked up the adjacent Harbour Square office building the following year for $4 million. Gonzmart announced the project in 2017, calling it the last major project of his career. Pattigeorge's came down in 2018.
Then not much happened, at least not visibly. By 2023, the restaurant group had design plans and had gone out to bid, but construction costs came in higher than expected and the project paused. By October 2025, Town Manager Howard Tipton was telling residents at a community meeting that the project hadn't moved forward with town approval, and that the family had no comment on its plans. The following month, Tipton relayed better news: with prices coming down, the family was hoping to go back out to bid. "He wanted to reassure me that that project is alive and well," Tipton said.
By August 2026, there was finally something to see. Contractors were working on the water side of the property, building eight new boat slips and repairing existing ones behind Harbour Square, enough to accommodate around 16 boats once finished. Jeff Houck, spokesperson for the 1905 Family, confirmed the dock work but was careful about the rest. "We're still in the design phase of the project," he said. "There remains no timetable to complete the project." As of early September 2026, the Harbour Square office building itself was still standing, still empty, waiting for its turn.
Why One Moved and the Other Didn't
The difference isn't about whether Longboat Key wants another waterfront restaurant. Whitney's application argued, and the zoning board agreed, that turning a blighted gas station into a working restaurant already proved redevelopment could work on that stretch of road. That's a much easier case to make than starting from scratch.
The Buccaneer is a ground-up build for an owner who has explicitly said speed isn't the point. Gonzmart is resurrecting a restaurant his own parents loved, the original Buccaneer Inn that ran from 1957 until it closed in 2001, and he's building it as what he's called an architectural gem rather than a quick reproduction. That kind of project survives a pandemic, two hurricanes that damaged the family's other Sarasota-area properties in 2024, and a construction bid that came in over budget, precisely because nobody involved is treating a delay as a failure.
Meanwhile, a mile north, the Village's newest arrival, Guppy's Good Times, opened its doors in the fall of 2024 inside a leased space, no rezoning required, up and running within a couple of months of signing the lease. Small parcel, existing use, quick turnaround. Whitney's expansion follows the same pattern on a slightly bigger scale. The Buccaneer doesn't, because it never was that kind of project.
Drive the length of Gulf of Mexico Drive right now and you'll see both stories at once: demolition equipment queued up near Broadway Street, waiting on a Town Commission vote, and steady dock work behind the Harbour Square office building near Bayfront Park, where the 1905 Family of Restaurants is still working through its design phase.
If you're the kind of person who likes knowing why the island looks the way it does this month and not just what's for sale on it, Stephanie Seacat keeps an eye on stories like these, block by block, long before they show up as a listing photo.
