July 16, 2026
Last summer, if a friend asked where to eat downtown on a Thursday night, the honest answer was that there were maybe two rooms worth walking to and the rest of the evening happened on the beach. This summer the honest answer is a question back: which downtown do you mean.
Gulfport has quietly grown a second one. The old walkable block on 25th Avenue finally has two new anchors that pull people out of their cars, and the Cowan-Lorraine corridor now has a waterfront room to match the housing and retail that have been landing there for years. For the first time in a while, the resident calendar has two evening centers of gravity instead of one, and the Fourth of July weekend at Jones Park is the seam that stitches them together.
The single biggest change this summer is that the stretch around 25th Avenue is no longer one restaurant with a lot of parking around it. It's a short walk with two openings within four weeks of each other, and both of them chose the block on purpose.
The Downtowner opened its doors in early June, serving out of the old Triplett Day Pharmacy building, which operated in Gulfport for 65 years. The operator is Robert St. John, and this detail is the one worth pausing on: it is his 27th restaurant and his first on the Gulf Coast. A veteran Mississippi restaurateur choosing downtown Gulfport for his coastal debut, and choosing a building most residents have a personal memory of, is not a small signal. The interior is designed to encapsulate memories from as early as 1900 Gulfport up through the 80s and 90s, aiming to be the most Gulfport cafe in Gulfport. If you have a photograph of the old soda fountain sitting in a drawer, they asked for it during construction.
Four blocks of neighborhood away and three weeks earlier, Matthew Bounds, better known online as Your Barefoot Neighbor, opened Neighbors Tap & Table at 1307 25th Avenue, serving lunch, dinner and late night bites, with an after-dark happy hour coming for service industry workers. Bounds took over the old Downtown Bistro space and describes the concept as small plates, good pours and a big community.
Two things about that pairing matter for how the block will feel through August.
First, the two rooms are not competing for the same table. One is a heritage cafe pointed at families and lunch traffic. The other is a small-plates room with a late kitchen and a bar built for people who work in kitchens themselves. That's the recipe for a block that stays lit past nine.
Second, both operators are known quantities who chose 25th Avenue over easier sites on US 49. Restaurateurs vote with their leases, and both leases point to the same block.
The other new pole is out on Bayou Bernard, and it explains a lot about where Gulfport growth has actually been going.
Bacchus on the Bluff opened in mid-March on Lorraine Road. The site is 8813 Lorraine Road, a waterfront spot on the marina. The building is the old Flamingo Landing space, and the operator is Jourdan Nicaud, whose three-restaurant Bacchus brand now sits between the existing outposts in Ocean Springs and Pass Christian. If you have eaten at either of those, you already know the room. The Gulfport location adds an upstairs dining room and a downstairs bar called The Cove, plus a dedicated kids' play area. Boat docks let guests travel between the three Bacchus locations by water.
The location is not a coincidence. The Cowan-Lorraine Road corridor has become more popular in recent years as a slew of development brings new housing, dining and shopping to it. Bacchus is the first waterfront restaurant of any weight to plant itself in that corridor, which changes what a Friday night out there looks like. Before March, the corridor was mostly a place you drove to for a specific errand. Now it's a place you can dock a boat, eat, and stay.
Nicaud himself has been direct about the read on the city. He noted that Gulfport has become exceptionally business-friendly and that the city is getting into a mindset of wanting more businesses to happen in the area. That's an operator's view, not a marketing line, and it lines up with what has been visible on the ground.
Even the chain traffic is following. The new Cook Out at 11464 U.S. 49, in the old Moe's Southwest Grill location, opened in late June, which is not the reason anyone moves to a place but is a reasonable proxy for how a regional chain read the daily-traffic numbers on the 49 corridor a year ago.
For all the new geometry, the calendar anchor has not moved. Jones Park is the headquarters for the 78th annual Mississippi Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, running July 2–5 over the Independence Day weekend, with vendors, carnival rides and live performances alongside the fishing. Prize money this year tops $20,000.
Two things worth knowing if you are planning around it:
The Rodeo is also where the two new downtowns end up meeting. Boats coming in from Bayou Bernard slip toward Gulfport Harbor. Families walking off the carnival midway are five minutes from a table at The Downtowner and ten from Neighbors Tap & Table. The weekend has always drawn around 20,000 attendees, and this is the first year that crowd will spill into a downtown block with two brand-new rooms actually ready to seat them.
If you have lived here long enough to remember when the honest downtown answer was a shrug, the practical change is worth spelling out.
A Tuesday lunch that used to be a chain run on 49 can be a walk to The Downtowner and still get you back to your desk. A Thursday night that used to default to a beachfront room can be small plates on 25th Avenue with people you actually know from the block. A Saturday that used to mean driving to Ocean Springs or Pass Christian for a Bacchus meal now stays in Gulfport, or, if the boat is running, uses Bacchus's own dock-to-dock arrangement to make an afternoon of it.
The 25th Avenue block and the Cowan-Lorraine corridor are not the same downtown. One is walkable, historic, and quiet after ten. The other is waterfront, drive-in, and organized around parking and boat access. What is new this summer is that Gulfport has both, and that a resident can pick between them on the same night rather than picking between Gulfport and somewhere else.
A handful of dates and addresses to hold on to for the rest of the season:
None of this reads as a boom. What it reads as is the first summer in a while where the map of Gulfport nights actually looks different than it did the summer before, and the difference is on the side of the city that already lived here.
The interesting thing about a summer like this one is that it tends to change what a house on a specific block is worth to the person considering selling it, and what a specific street feels like to the person considering buying on it. Those are conversations best had with someone who knew the block a year ago and can tell you what actually shifted.
If that's the conversation you're ready to have, HL Raymond Properties lives and works these blocks, and would be glad to walk you through what the new map means for your street. Discover Gulf Coast Living.
At HL Raymond Properties, your goals are our priority. Whether buying or selling, we bring strategy, care, and professionalism to every step of the process.