The New Owner of Your Favorite Bakery Also Wants to Build the Hotel Down the Street

"We did a thing!" Tony Utegaard posted on Facebook in mid-May, breaking the news that he and his wife, Leah, had just taken over Le Merle Coffee Bar and Bakery on West Bay Drive. The post drew the kind of warm, relieved comments a small town gives when a beloved storefront changes hands without changing character. Utegaard called it a passing of the torch. He did not mention, in that post, that he is also the local hotelier trying to build a $30 million to $40 million boutique hotel on the vacant lot directly across the street.

Both things are true, and both are happening at the same time, on the same three blocks. That is the part of the Belleair Bluffs story that gets lost when you list off what opened this year. It is not just that West Bay Drive and Indian Rocks Road are busy right now. It is that a small number of familiar names keep showing up on the deed, the lease, and the zoning application, and if you live here, that is worth knowing before you decide what any of it means for your walk to coffee.

Three Doors, One Family

Start with the corner most residents already know. Chris Scott and Julie Champion have spent a dozen years building Belleair Market into the neighborhood's Cuban sandwich stop, the kind of place where the parking spaces carry hand-painted feel-good quotes. Scott took over the original Belleair Food Mart in 2014. From there the couple added Belleair Cafe, a breakfast spot known for its weekend crowds, and then, last fall, the Belleair Hideaway, a speakeasy-style tapas bar tucked into Antique Alley at 560 Indian Rocks Road.

The Hideaway got its official ribbon cutting from the Bluffs Business Association on April 23, five months after it quietly opened. It is a genuine departure from the couple's other two ventures, a dark, cozy bar space with an outdoor patio that hosts live acoustic music on weekend nights, built out of a former bakery. Scott told the crowd at the ribbon cutting that the space started as a plan to use the kitchen for catering and turned into something else entirely. What matters for anyone tracking ownership on this block is simpler: three storefronts, one family, all within a few hundred feet of each other.

The Same Corner, Two Different Documents

Now look at the other side of West Bay Drive. Utegaard is a 15-year resident of Belleair Bluffs and a 20-year hotelier who has spent his career renovating, consulting on, and developing hotels for other people. In 2025 he asked the city to change its land code to allow hotels in certain commercial districts, arguing that the vacant lot east of the Belleair Causeway was essentially the only site in town where a hotel could legally go. The city commission approved three related ordinances that August. By June 2026, city officials confirmed they had received Utegaard's formal hotel development agreement and were moving it through review with the city attorney and planning board.

That same month, Utegaard closed on Le Merle. The bakery sits at 2985 West Bay Drive, close enough to the proposed hotel site that the two projects share a sidewalk. Nothing about buying a French patisserie requires also building a hotel, and nothing about the hotel proposal required buying a bakery. But in a city with roughly 200 businesses total, according to the city's own account of its commercial base, the fact that one person is now shaping both a daily coffee stop and a multimillion-dollar development on the same corridor is not a coincidence you'd catch by reading either story on its own. It is the kind of pattern that only shows up when you track ownership across storefronts instead of announcements one at a time.

What "Quietly Make It Better" Actually Promises

A few blocks away, at the Plaza at 100 North Indian Rocks Road, a different kind of transition is playing out. E&E Stakeout Grill has anchored that plaza since 1985, when Eugen Fuhrmann and chef Erwin Scheuringer opened it. Scheuringer led the kitchen for four decades before the restaurant recently changed hands to Peter Aramanious, who grew up working in a family restaurant and, in his own words posted to the steakhouse's Instagram in May, saw a 40-year-old institution where his job was to respect it and quietly make it better rather than reinvent it.

That framing matters because the community's reaction to the sale was not neutral. One comment on the restaurant's Facebook page called E&E its go-to for years and said simply, "I hope it remains so." Aramanious is inheriting not just a dining room but an expectation. The test of that promise will not show up in a press release. It will show up the next time a regular orders the same steak they've ordered for twenty years and finds out whether it still tastes the same.

854 Days in the Dark

If E&E and Le Merle represent continuity dressed up as change, the space at 2890 West Bay Drive represents the opposite. Cody's Roadhouse closed there in March 2024, and the storefront sat dark for the better part of two years. The Pappas family, who also own Backwaters in Sand Key, spent that stretch turning the old steakhouse into Tavern in the Bluffs, an upscale sports bar with 41 televisions, an open floor plan, and a menu that puts the wait itself on the drink list. The signature cocktail is called the 854 Margarita, a direct reference to the 854 days between concept and opening night.

The doors opened July 24 with a friends-and-family soft launch. Co-owner Constantinos Pappas told a local reporter that the screens are everywhere but designed to recede, so a table that wants to talk instead of watch the game can do that without feeling like they're missing something. City Administrator Debra Sullivan was among the guests that first night, and she praised the transformation of a space that had been vacant long enough for residents to stop expecting anything to fill it.

The Smaller Storefronts Filling In Around Them

Not every change on this stretch involves a family building a mini-empire or a developer buying his neighbor's bakery. Oovique, a Pilates studio on the north end of Indian Rocks Road, opened quietly enough that most residents heard about it from a city commission update rather than a grand opening. Beach Glow, a bath, body, and home goods shop, moved into the Belleair Bluffs Plaza at the same southwest intersection where Tavern in the Bluffs now sits. City officials also confirmed that Academy of Cream, an offshoot of the well-known Dunedin ice cream shop, is on its way into the same plaza cluster.

Around the corner, the Daf and Dream boutique is not closing but expanding, taking an adjacent storefront in the Plaza at 100 North Indian Rocks Road so it can grow without leaving the block that made it a local fixture in the first place. None of these are dramatic stories on their own. Together they fill in the spaces between the bigger moves, and they are the reason the overall picture reads as booming rather than simply reshuffled.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

None of this requires anyone to do anything differently tomorrow morning. But if you have lived in Belleair Bluffs long enough to have a usual order at E&E or a habit of grabbing a croissant at Le Merle before the causeway, it is worth knowing who actually owns the businesses shaping your daily routine, and worth noticing when the same name appears twice in different contexts. The Bluffs Business Association, led by president Larry Bell, exists partly to keep residents connected to exactly this kind of local ownership story, through ribbon cuttings, mixers, and the kind of small-town networking that makes a city of 200 businesses feel smaller than it is.

The honest version of this summer's story in Belleair Bluffs is not "everything is new." It is that a handful of people, most of them already your neighbors, are making decisions right now that will determine what this corridor looks like for the next decade, whether that means preserving a 40-year steakhouse menu or deciding what gets built on the last empty lot on West Bay Drive.

If you are curious how any of these changes, from a new hotel proposal to a reshaped restaurant row, might affect property values or timing if you ever decide to buy or sell in this part of Pinellas County, the team at The Stuben Group has been tracking Belleair Bluffs and the surrounding coastal communities closely. Reach out any time you want a local, straightforward read on what's actually happening here. Work With Us when you're ready to talk specifics.