Drive Highway 90 through Pace on any given Saturday and you will pass at least four signs promising something that does not exist yet. A backhoe idles behind orange fencing. A pole sign wears a fresh coat of paint under a name nobody recognizes. A Facebook post from six months ago says opening soon, and the parking lot says otherwise.
In the summer of 2024, Santa Rosa County approved a cluster of new restaurants and businesses for this stretch of road, all bunched around a handful of addresses near Davenport Lane and the corner of Quintette and Woodbine. Read as a single announcement, it looked like Pace was about to get a new dining district overnight. Two years on, that is not quite what happened. Some of those addresses now have regulars and reviews. Others are still exactly where they were on paper: approved, filed, and unopened.
Knowing which is which is the actual useful information here, because it tells you something the announcement never could: how growth in Pace really moves, and which corner of Highway 90 to turn onto tonight depending on what kind of evening you want.
The Node Near Davenport Lane
The address that anchors this story is 4625 Highway 90, just beside Davenport Lane, in a stretch that already had La Hacienda, KFC, and Chili's doing business nearby. Santa Rosa County's Development Services Center sent an approval letter for a 5,160 square foot barbecue restaurant on that lot: Jim 'N Nicks Bar-B-Q, a chain that started in 1985 out of an old pizza restaurant in Birmingham, Alabama, and had exactly two open Florida locations at the time of approval, in Niceville and Pensacola. Pace would be the first in Santa Rosa County.
The same site plans placed a Buffalo Wild Wings and a Chipotle in that development alongside it, all three restaurants tied to one parcel of paperwork. That detail matters more than it looks. This was never three separate businesses discovering Pace independently. It was one developer's node, approved together, meant to fill in around an existing fast food strip that was already there.
Jim 'N Nicks is the one that landed. By early 2026, customer reviews describe a restaurant that is fully open and running, with regulars praising attentive service and a manager who keeps the room moving smoothly during a dinner rush. Whatever the timeline looked like on a permit application in 2024, the barbecue joint beside Davenport Lane is doing business now.
Buffalo Wild Wings and Chipotle, the other two names on that same site plan, have not shown up in any confirmed opening since. Chipotle was slated to open a location in Navarre that same fall, so the chain was not skipping the region entirely. Its Pace address, tied to the same Highway 90 parcel as the barbecue restaurant, stayed at the submitted stage as of the last available filing, with no opening date ever announced.
The Corner That Opened On Schedule
A few minutes away, at the corner of Quintette and Woodbine, a different kind of business hit its own announced date almost exactly. Happy Place Pub & Play combines a bar, a restaurant, and an arcade at 5661 Quintette Road, and when the owners told the public via Facebook that they would open on Thursday, July 25, that is what happened. It has now been running for two years, with reviews through 2025 still describing loaded nacho fries, a family-friendly arcade room, and a crowd that treats the place as a regular stop rather than a novelty.
That is worth sitting with for a second. A locally run concept with no national backing hit its self-announced opening date. A three-restaurant chain development with far more capital behind it produced one opening out of three, at least so far. County approval and site plans tell you what was allowed to happen. They do not tell you what actually will.
The One That Was Never a Chain to Begin With
The third thread in Pace's recent openings has nothing to do with a site plan at all. Bar-Celona, a tapas bar and restaurant, opened in the Pace area with a concept its owners describe as something northern Santa Rosa County has never had, drawn directly from their own travels across Spain and Europe. There is no national franchise behind it, no matching site plan filed alongside two other restaurants, no corporate real estate team deciding the timeline. It is the kind of opening that does not show up in a county development log at all, which is exactly why it is easy to miss if you are only tracking Pace's growth through permit filings.
Here is roughly how the last two years have actually shaken out along this corridor:
| Business | Node | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Jim 'N Nicks Bar-B-Q | 4625 Highway 90, beside Davenport Lane | Open, first Santa Rosa County location |
| Happy Place Pub & Play | Corner of Quintette and Woodbine | Open since July 2024, still running in 2025 reviews |
| Bar-Celona | Pace area | Open, independent tapas concept |
| Buffalo Wild Wings | Same parcel as Jim 'N Nicks | Approved on site plans, no confirmed opening |
| Chipotle | Same parcel as Jim 'N Nicks | Submitted for Pace, slated for Navarre that fall |
| HTeaO | 5055 U.S. Highway 90 | Plans submitted, no confirmed opening |
| Wawa (two sites) | 7212 U.S. Highway 90 and Berryhill Rd/King George Pkwy | Plans submitted, no confirmed opening |
| McDonald's and Starbucks | Dogwood Drive, near new Publix at Merganser Commons | Planned, no confirmed opening |
Reading the Corridor as Three Different Nights, Not One Strip
The instinct when a county approves a wave of new business is to treat the whole stretch as one story: Pace is growing, Highway 90 is filling in, more options are coming. That is true, but it flattens something worth noticing. What actually opened breaks into three distinct kinds of evening, each with its own character, and none of them substitute for each other.
The Davenport Lane node is the fast casual and chain strip, anchored now by barbecue instead of the wing-and-burrito trio the original plans promised. If you want a quick dinner near the existing La Hacienda and Chili's crowd, that is the corner to know. The Quintette and Woodbine corner is the family node: a pub with an arcade attached, built for a Tuesday night with kids in tow rather than a date. And Bar-Celona sits entirely outside both patterns, a one-off destination built by people who wanted to bring something specific to the area rather than fill a franchise territory map.
None of this required a rezoning or a ribbon cutting to notice. It required watching what a county approval actually turned into over two years, rather than treating the initial announcement as the finished story. HTeaO's plans for 5055 Highway 90, the two proposed Wawa locations, and the McDonald's and Starbucks pairing near the new Publix at Merganser Commons may all eventually open. Some of them may not. The lesson from Buffalo Wild Wings and Chipotle's stalled Pace location is that a site plan approval is a starting gun, not a finish line.
For anyone who already calls Pace home, that distinction is the difference between planning tonight's dinner around a sign that has been up for two years and planning it around a business that is actually taking orders. Right now, that means barbecue near Davenport Lane, an arcade and a pub at Quintette and Woodbine, and tapas somewhere in between that did not need a chain's real estate department to make it happen.
If you are watching this corner of Pace for a different reason, whether you already own here and are curious what the next wave of approvals might mean for your street, or you are weighing whether this stretch of Santa Rosa County fits the kind of daily life you want, Peggy Braun tracks these local shifts as part of representing buyers and sellers across Pace and the wider Gulf Coast. Reach out for a free home valuation and design consultation, and bring your questions about what is actually happening on the ground, not just what got approved on paper.
