If you drive Emerald Coast Parkway with any regularity, you've clocked the empty building at 15015. The orange sign came down back in January, the parking lot emptied out, and for half a year the place just sat there while everyone in town made a guess about what was coming next. A car wash. A vape shop. Another chain nobody asked for. By mid-July, we finally knew, and the answer says more about how Destin eats than any single restaurant review could.
The short version: a Nashville concept called The Stillery bought the building and is gutting it down to the studs. That fact alone is a fine piece of local trivia. But set it next to what's been happening at HarborWalk Village, and a real pattern shows up. Destin now runs two separate restaurant economies at the same time, in the same town, and they change on completely different clocks.
A Building That Sat Empty For Half A Year
Hooters, located at 15015 Emerald Coast Parkway, closed the first week of January after nearly three decades, according to Craig Barrett, broker/Realtor with NBI Properties Inc. The building is 6,000 square feet with 2,000 square feet of outdoor seating, sitting on 2.3 acres. That's not a small footprint to leave dark on one of Destin's busiest corridors, and it stayed empty long enough that the silence itself became the story locals were telling each other.
The buyer turned out to be Steve Sargent, who runs The Stillery out of Nashville and had never actually lived in Destin. He and his wife had been visiting Destin for the past decade and think of it as a second home, coming down two or three times a year for the area, the people, the beach, and the food. A couple of months ago, while visiting, his wife noticed the Hooters building was for sale, and he called on it. "Long story short – we own the building now," he said.
"We're going to do a full renovation. Every wall, floor, bar .... it's getting redone," Sargent said, adding that the patio will get a stage for live music. Permits have been pulled and construction was set to begin July 10, with Sargent aiming to open by late fall or by year's end. So if you've been wondering why the parking lot suddenly had contractor trucks in it a few weeks ago, that's why.
What Actually Moves In
Sargent said every Stillery location is a little different. The Arizona location has a dance floor built for line-dancing, but he said the Destin version will lean closer to the Nashville flagship, which runs live music every day and brings in touring artists. He described the sound as leaning country without being a honky tonk, with more variety built in. On the menu side, he called it a play on comfort food, built around pizza and burgers, and pointed to the Nashville location's hot-chicken mac-n-cheese, which has appeared on the Food Network, as a signature. This will be the first Stillery location in Florida.
That last detail matters more than it sounds. A regional hospitality group chose Emerald Coast Parkway, not the harbor, as its entry point into the entire state. That's a highway-corridor decision, made by someone who visits a few times a year and saw an opportunity in a building nobody local had bought first.
The Harbor Runs On A Different Clock
Down at HarborWalk Village, meanwhile, the additions look nothing like a Nashville import buying a highway parcel. The harbor's new tenants are people already embedded in the Emerald Coast food scene.
- The Edge Seafood Restaurant & SkyBar, built directly over the water on the Destin Harbor Boardwalk, with an adults-only rooftop bar upstairs. It runs a weekday happy hour from 2 to 5 p.m. and live music seven nights a week, plus daytime shows Thursday through Sunday.
- Nonna's Ristorante, a handmade pasta and pizza concept from Chef Tim Creehan, a name that's been on the Emerald Coast dining scene for years, now anchored on the harbor's restaurant row.
Neither business had to explain itself to locals the way The Stillery does. Creehan's reputation and the harbor's built-in foot traffic did that work already.
The bigger difference shows up in how each district changes. The highway corridor changes building by building, sale by sale, sometimes with a year of empty storefront in between. The harbor changes on a published, recurring schedule.
| Emerald Coast Parkway | HarborWalk Village | |
|---|---|---|
| What changes | Which company owns the building | Which act is on the stage |
| How often | Every few years, sometimes with long vacancies | Weekly, on a set calendar |
| Recent proof | Hooters (nearly 3 decades) to The Stillery, Nashville's first FL location | Edge Seafood & SkyBar and Nonna's Ristorante added to restaurant row |
| Who's behind it | Out-of-town operators making a first Florida move | Chefs and hospitality names already known here |
What's On The Harbor's Calendar Right Now
This is the part a Destin resident can actually use this week. HarborWalk Village's Beat the Heat Concert Series runs Saturdays through August 2026, a weekend concert series built around live music and sunset views over the harbor. All-American Thursdays and Harbor Nights, running Thursdays through July and August 2026, adds a weekly summer celebration with live music, stilt-walkers, and a fireworks show over the harbor. Mid-August brings the Summer of Seltzer Fest, a beachside tasting event featuring local and national hard seltzers and craft drinks with live music on the beach patio.
That's the harbor's rhythm for the rest of summer: something on the water most nights of the week, on a schedule that repeats every year with minor variations. It's why a chef like Creehan or a concept like The Edge can open there and be busy immediately. The audience is already walking past the door on a Thursday night expecting fireworks.
Fall brings the harbor's biggest fixed date. The Destin Seafood Festival runs September 25 through 27, 2026, one of Destin's longest-running traditions along the Harbor Boardwalk, featuring fresh local seafood, live music stages, and local artisans, and it kicks off the month-long fishing rodeo that follows in October. That festival has been doing the same job for decades: marking the point where summer crowds thin out and the harbor shifts into its fall identity as a working fishing port again. Destin Harbor is home to the largest fishing fleet in Florida, with roughly 150 charter and party boats running trips daily. The seafood on that festival table isn't a marketing conceit. It's coming off boats tied up a few hundred feet away.
Why This Actually Matters If You Live Here
None of this is really about restaurants. It's about which parts of Destin change quietly and which parts change in public. The harbor's calendar is printed months ahead, which means nothing there ever really surprises a local. The highway corridor works the opposite way. A building sits empty with no announcement, a broker fields inquiries privately, and the reveal happens all at once, the way it did in July when contractor trucks showed up outside a building that had been dark since January.
If you want to guess what's coming next on Emerald Coast Parkway, watching for empty storefronts and pulled permits is a better strategy than checking an events calendar. If you want next Thursday's plans, the harbor already told you.
Either way, it's a good year to be paying attention to both. For a broader read on how Destin's neighborhoods and property types compare once you look past the restaurant marquees, our Destin neighborhood guide breaks down what each part of town actually offers.
Whether you're weighing a move to the harbor side, the highway corridor, or somewhere in between, Destin Sells Destin has spent 25 years watching exactly this kind of change unfold block by block. Find Your Emerald Coast Home.
