The Central Avenue Building That Just Got A Basement: What's Actually Open At 551 Central This Summer

The largest new food address in downtown St. Petersburg holds the smallest new room. Central Park stacks 27,700 square feet across five stories and fourteen concepts at 551 Central Avenue. Beneath all of it, tucked below the ground-floor beer wall, sits a 22-seat cocktail parlor called The Winfield that opened on a Monday in July and immediately absorbed the reservation attention of everyone downtown who has been watching the building for six years.

For residents who have walked past the construction fencing since 2021, the question this summer is no longer whether Central Park is open. It is which floors are open, in what order, and whether the parts still under wraps are worth planning around. This is a working map of the building as it stands right now, and of the corner of Central Avenue it is reshaping.

What Changed On July 6

The Winfield poured its first drinks on July 6, 2026. The 22-seat cocktail parlor sits beneath Central Park at 551 Central Avenue, and while the food hall above occupies nearly 27,700 square feet over five stories, the basement concept seats just 22 guests. It takes its name from Frank Winfield Woolworth, whose retail chain filled this building through most of the 20th century.

The pricing tells you what kind of room it is. Most cocktails run $16 to $19, with dishes priced between $14 and $32. Hours are 5 p.m. to midnight Wednesday through Saturday, with the last seating at 11:45 p.m. Reservations run through Resy, though they are not required. The Tampa Bay Times critic Helen Freund called it St. Petersburg's newest cocktail bar in a July 24 review, which for anyone who has watched downtown's bar openings in the last two years is a meaningful line.

The Building, Floor By Floor

Central Park is not a single restaurant. It is a stacked development with a different pace on each level. As of this month:

1. Basement. The Winfield, plus a commissary kitchen and restrooms that support the concepts above. Old Florida palette, dark wood, floral wallpaper, a spirits list built around singani, raicilla, and sotol rather than tequila and mezcal.
2. Ground floor. Seven food concepts are currently serving guests: Constellation Burger, Park Pie Pizza, Palm Avenue Deli, Strawberry Fields, Don Ricardo's Taqueria, Speaks Pasta, and Kojo Wok. A full-service bar with a self-service beer wall anchors the middle of the space.
3. Mezzanine. Three concepts are nearing debut: The Meadows, the food hall's dessert café; 27 North, a specialty frozen cocktail bar; and Worth, a retail shop.
4. Fourth floor. Kojo, the full-service modern Asian restaurant, with Bar Hana, its tiki-style rooftop bar, connected to it.
5. Fifth floor. Night Owl, a members-only social club.

If you live within walking distance, the practical read is that four of the fourteen concepts are not yet operational, and two of the four are the highest-ceiling rooms in the building. The rooftop is not yet part of your Friday.

The Basement Is Not A Speakeasy Bit

There is a temptation to dismiss The Winfield as a themed room, another dim-lit basement built to sell $18 cocktails. The menu argues otherwise. The parlor stocks lesser-known bottles including singani from Bolivia, raicilla from western Mexico, and sotol made from the Mexican desert spoon plant. The 1,000-square-foot room pairs those spirits with Asian and Latin ingredients while incorporating modern mixology techniques like forced carbonation and clarification.

"A lot of people know of tequila and mezcal, but we wanted to introduce guests to these less known spirits through our signature cocktails. We want to create that similar experience of education without pretension."

That is Beverage Director Silvia Fridegotto, quoted by St. Pete Rising the week the bar opened. The framing matters. Downtown has had cocktail rooms before. It has not had one where the through-line is a working education in agave-adjacent spirits, and where the food menu next to it lists wagyu carpaccio, Japanese sea bream crudo, homemade pork rinds, and glutinous rice crackers topped with madai, toro, and caviar.

For a resident, the useful piece of information is that the 22 seats fill quickly on weekend nights, but the waitlist is manageable if you pair it with a drink at the ground-floor bar. That is the routine early adopters have already settled into.

What The Opening Changes On The Block

Central Park did not arrive in a quiet stretch. The four-block run of Central Avenue between the EDGE District and the 500 block has absorbed more new concepts this year than any other single corridor downtown. If you are mapping your summer:

• Bosphorous, a Florida-based Turkish restaurant, arrived in downtown St. Petersburg on the first floor of EDGE Collective at 1246 Central Avenue, with a soft opening on February 20 of this year.
• Marcel, a European bistro with a French influence, is bringing French food back to Historic Uptown under Chef Jeremy Duclut, opening a second location at 1225 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street.
• Mei, a Nordic-Japanese restaurant from the team behind Michelin-starred Kōsen, opened earlier this year in downtown St. Pete.
• The Winfield opened July 6.
• Old Northeast Tavern is reopening after nearly two years dark.
• The Central Hotel, a 168-room Marriott Autograph Collection property under construction at 1301 Central Avenue, will house a new flagship concept from Geoffrey Zakarian inside a 2.1-acre mixed-use development. Vertical work on the hotel is expected to begin early this year.

The point is not that any single opening is decisive. It is that the Central Avenue dinner map has more anchor points than it did in January, and the reflex to drive north to Beach Drive for a walkable dinner-and-drink pairing is now defensible only out of habit.

The Founder's Framing Is Worth Reading

Central Park is not a corporate rollout. It is the work of Sarasota-based Hi Hospitality Group, and the naming choice is not incidental. Founder Natalia Levey has said the name comes from being on Central Avenue but also as a tip of the hat to Central Park in New York, where she and her husband used to live, and that Central Park has always felt like the heartbeat of the city.

That framing bears on the room selection. The ground floor is a food hall in the useful sense of the phrase, which means it functions the way Eataly or Time Out Market function in larger cities: you order across concepts to one table, using QR codes or kiosks. The fourth floor is a full restaurant. The basement is a bar with a program. The fifth floor is a members club. Each floor is doing a different job for a different hour of the day, and residents who use the building as a single destination miss the design.

Hi Hospitality Group purchased the building for $3.75 million in 2018 and spent several years redeveloping the property, which previously housed The Dome Grill. The Woolworth building at 551 Central had been a downtown fixture for most of the 20th century, and the naming of the basement bar is a direct line back to that original tenant.

The Point Most Residents Miss

Downtown St. Petersburg has been ranked as a top food city in America by Travel & Leisure, and the ranking is now doing quiet work in the market. It changes what buyers coming in from Sarasota, Naples, and out of state expect when they walk Central Avenue, and it changes the pace at which building owners like Hi Hospitality Group are willing to hold construction risk. A five-year phased opening is not a project that survives a soft market.

For a resident, the read is simpler. The most interesting cocktail room downtown right now is 1,000 square feet in a basement most people walked past for six years without noticing. The building above it will not be finished until the fourth floor and rooftop concepts open later this year. Which means the version of Central Park you visit this August is not the version you will visit at Thanksgiving, and both are worth mapping now while the reservation books are still forming their habits.

Planning a move into downtown St. Petersburg, or thinking through how the corridor's density is reshaping property values along Central Avenue and the neighborhoods that feed into it? Alexis Logan works this market block by block. Let's Connect.