Ask a longtime Esplanade Lake Club resident where they ate last Tuesday and you'll usually get one of two answers. Either "the Bahama Bar" or "we drove out to Coconut Point." For most of this community's life, those were the only two real options. Stay inside the gate, or commit to a twenty-minute drive somewhere else.
That math changed this year, and it changed on the same stretch of Alico Road most residents drive past without a second look.
The building that sat empty for two years
For anyone who has lived at Esplanade Lake Club since before 2023, there's a specific building you know even if you never ate there. The Chili's off Alico Road near Gulf Coast Town Center closed that year and then sat dark. Not for a season. For close to two years, through hurricane season, through construction slowdowns, through a permitting process that outlasted its own timeline.
That building reopened on January 26, 2026, as Chuck Lager Legendary Kitchen, an upscale casual concept built by celebrity chef Fabio Viviani and brought to south Fort Myers by local franchise owner Jim Tovey, who left a financial services career in Boston for Naples back in 2017. Tovey put more than a million dollars into the renovation. The menu leans into the same reimagined American comfort food you'd expect from a Top Chef alum: flatbreads, street tacos, burgers, an Angus ribeye at the top of the board for $40, appetizers running $10 to $22, and more than twenty beers on tap including local Southwest Florida brews. It's open 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and until 11 p.m. on weekends.
None of that would matter much on its own. Restaurants open and close across Lee County every month. What makes this one worth mentioning is the address. It sits on the same short run of Alico Road that Esplanade Lake Club uses to get anywhere, which means a restaurant that took two years and a seven figure renovation to arrive is now a five minute drive from the gate rather than a twenty-five minute one.
The corridor isn't one restaurant, it's a pattern
Chuck Lager is the most visible sign of what's happening along Alico Road, but it's not the only one. Keep going the other direction from the gate and you land at Miromar Outlets, which has quietly built out a weekly calendar that has nothing to do with shopping.
Every Wednesday from 6:30 to 9 p.m., the outlet mall runs a Midweek Music Bingo Bash at 810 Entertainment, mixing chart hits and trivia into a format that's louder and faster than a church hall bingo night. Every Friday, the same venue hosts a No Limit Pub Poker Tour with free Texas Hold'Em tournaments at 6 p.m. and 8 p.m., open to first timers and regulars alike. And on Saturday, October 10, the mall is hosting its Shop, Dine & Dash 5K, checking in runners and walkers at 9:30 a.m. for a race that starts and finishes right there in the retail corridor.
Stack those against each other and a pattern shows up that a single new restaurant wouldn't reveal on its own. Miromar Outlets isn't trying to be a place people drive to once for holiday shopping. It's trying to be a weeknight habit, with a recurring reason to show up on a Wednesday and a different one on a Friday. That's a meaningfully different kind of retail center than the one that opened here originally, and it lines up with a broader shift across this stretch of Fort Myers, where new dining and entertainment options are increasingly clustering along the Alico corridor rather than requiring a drive toward Naples or Bonita Springs.
What the gate itself still offers
None of this replaces what's inside Esplanade Lake Club, and it isn't meant to. The community's own outdoor Bahama Bar and Grille still does the job it was designed for, blending casual pub fare with more polished options for residents who don't want to leave the neighborhood at all. The resort-style pool, the events lawn, the fire pit, and a full-time Lifestyle Manager who plans tailgates and themed dinners give residents a version of a night out that never requires getting in the car.
What's changed is what happens when residents do decide to leave. Before this year, leaving the gate meant committing to a real drive, usually toward Coconut Point or into Naples proper. Now there's a middle option. A resident can be seated at Chuck Lager or standing at a bingo table at 810 Entertainment inside the time it used to take just to get out of the neighborhood's own traffic pattern onto I-75.
That's the actual shift here, and it's easy to miss if you're only looking at one new restaurant in isolation. The interesting story at Esplanade Lake Club this fall isn't inside the gates. It's the five minutes just outside them, which used to be a drive-through corridor and is turning into a destination in its own right.
Putting it on the calendar
For residents mapping out the next few weeks, here's what's actually running right now along that stretch of Alico Road:
- Wednesdays, 6:30 to 9 p.m. Midweek Music Bingo Bash at 810 Entertainment, Miromar Outlets
- Fridays, 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. No Limit Pub Poker Tour, free entry, 810 Entertainment
- Saturday, October 10, check-in at 9:30 a.m. Shop, Dine & Dash 5K at Miromar Outlets
- Daily, 11 a.m. onward Chuck Lager Legendary Kitchen, 9980 University Plaza Drive off Alico Road
None of these require a reservation booked weeks out or a drive that eats the whole evening. That's the point. The corridor between the Esplanade Lake Club gate and the interstate has gone from a stretch you pass through to a stretch you might actually stop at, and that's worth knowing whether you've lived here since the first homes closed or moved in last season.
Why this is worth paying attention to
A neighborhood's daily texture changes slower than its market value, and it usually changes without anyone announcing it. A Chili's closing in 2023 didn't feel like news. A new tenant finally filling that space two years later, backed by a real investment and a name chef, is the kind of quiet signal that tells you a corridor is filling in rather than emptying out. Combine that with a shopping center that's building a weekly social calendar instead of just holiday foot traffic, and you get a fuller picture of what living at Esplanade Lake Club actually feels like week to week, not just what the amenity brochure promised when the first models opened.
That's the kind of detail that doesn't show up in a market report, but it's exactly the kind of thing residents end up telling their neighbors about over the fence, or over a slice at the mall's cheese pizza promotion, or standing in line for a poker seat on a Friday night.
If you're weighing what a home at Esplanade Lake Club is actually worth, in dollars or in daily life, that's a conversation worth having with someone who lives it. Lisa Mishler is a resident and community specialist right here at Esplanade Lake Club, and along with Tim Byal, she leads Waterfront Lifestyle Group, which has spent years tracking exactly this kind of shift across Lee and Collier counties. Reach out when you're ready to talk about what's changing in this neighborhood, whether that's a new restaurant down the road or the value of the home behind your own gate.
