Why Vero Beach's Newest Hangouts Keep Showing Up Inside Its Oldest Buildings

Drive down 21st Street on a Friday night now and you will find a parking lot full before 7pm, boots on the pavement, and country music spilling out of a building that has been standing since the 1930s. That is Rowdy Rooster Bar & Grill, and if the building looks familiar to anyone who has lived here more than a decade, it should. It is the old Patio Restaurant, the one Waldo Sexton opened in 1945 and where Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers players used to unwind during the decades the team held spring training in Vero Beach.

Here is the part that took me a minute to connect. Rowdy Rooster is not an outlier. It is the second time in two years that a piece of Vero Beach's old citrus and packing-house architecture has become the town's newest place to eat. Hogan Yards did the same thing a few blocks away, inside a former citrus packing house. Vero Beach is not building its next wave of restaurants and gathering spots from scratch. It is finding them already built, sitting empty, and figuring out how to bring them back without erasing what made them worth saving in the first place.

The building that wouldn't die

Before Rowdy Rooster, the Patio building had a rough run. After the original restaurant closed in the 1990s, it reopened briefly in 2012 for about a year, then cycled through a half dozen tenants, including a seafood tavern that lasted five years and a virtual golf bar and grill that gave up after six months. That last tenant stripped out many of Sexton's original fixtures and decorative details and sold them at auction, then added drywall and insulation because the open, uninsulated space was too expensive to heat and cool.

When Nichole McDevitt and her family, sons Michael and Matt Burns and daughter Brittany Aquaviva, took over the space, they went the other direction. They pulled the white drywall back off and rebuilt the wood accents the previous tenant had covered up.

"That unique character is the reason we chose to open our business at the historic Patio building."

That is how McDevitt put it to Vero News, and it shows in how the family is running the place. Rowdy Rooster leaned into the building's history rather than around it. Beyond the line dancing and the burger menu built around a double-smashed-patty Rowdy Rooster Burger, the family is now adding History Dinners on Thursday or Saturday nights, ticketed evenings that pair a meal with a talk from local historians about Vero Beach's past, with plans to bring in farm-to-table ingredients from local growers. It is a small bet, but it is the kind of bet that only works if you actually value the building you are sitting in.

The lesson from six failed tenants and one that is working is not really about barbecue or country music. It is that the Patio building punishes concepts that fight its character and rewards the ones that build around it.

The packing house next door

A mile or so away, the same pattern played out with less drama but the same logic. Hogan Yards opened in the former Hogan and Sons Packing House on St. Lucie Avenue, a citrus packing building the Corr family bought and restored rather than replaced. Tom Corr partnered with Alden and Valerie Bing, who founded Orchid Island Brewery back in 2014, and John and Heather Chianis, who had already built a following with Pepper & Salt BBQ at their original location on Old Dixie Highway.

The brewery side of that story has its own history worth knowing if you have been in Vero long enough. Orchid Island originally brewed out of a taproom on Ocean Drive, in the Portales de Vero building, until the Bings let the lease go in 2020 during the pandemic. Sailfish Brewing Co. of Fort Pierce took over that spot the following year. Rather than walk away, the Bings partnered with the Corrs in 2021 and kept the Indian River Grapefruit and Star Ruby IPAs flowing through contract brewing out of Largo until Hogan Yards was ready.

Corr talked about the packing house itself in blunt, practical terms.

"It's kind of nice to hold on to it."

That is not marketing language. It is what someone says about a building they actually care about keeping standing. The result is a spot that is part brewery, part barbecue joint, part pickleball courts, with a wraparound porch and rocking chairs and a shaded yard for cornhole, all inside a restored packing house near the airport and the rail line rather than a new build.

Two buildings, two ownership groups, and the same choice. Restore instead of replace. Lean into the character instead of drywalling over it.

What is new beyond the old walls

Not every recent opening fits the adaptive-reuse story, and it would be a stretch to force all of them into it. But the throughline across Vero Beach's current wave of new places is still local ownership with a personal story behind the counter, which is worth knowing if you are trying to figure out where to spend a Saturday morning.

A few worth adding to your rotation:

• Nonna Lina's Italian Market, on 9th Street SW, opened by a longtime New York businessman named Johnny who wanted to recreate the imported meats, cheeses, and made-to-order sandwiches he grew up with, including a sandwich called the Vero Italian that has built its own following.
• Oslo Cafe, a South Vero breakfast and lunch spot that moved into the former Fire & Wine space off Oslo Road, keeping the counter seating that looks into the kitchen.
• Giving Tree Coffee Company, opened by Rich Nelson after 20 years living in Brazil, built around the same idea Rowdy Rooster and Hogan Yards landed on from a different angle: a gathering place people actually want to sit in.
• Dinner Revolution, the downtown eclectic-dining spot on 21st Street that took home Restaurant of the Year at the 2025 Golden Fork Awards in its first year at its new downtown location, a strong result for a business that had just moved.

None of these are inside century-old citrus buildings. But they are all run by people who moved to town, saw a gap, and built something specific to Vero Beach rather than a copy of something that works somewhere else.

What this means if you already live here

If you have been in Vero Beach a while, the practical takeaway is simple. The next interesting restaurant to open is more likely to show up inside a building you already recognize than in a new strip center. Keep an eye on the older commercial buildings around downtown and along 21st Street. The pattern here is that the ones sitting empty longest are often waiting for someone willing to work with what is already there instead of tearing it out.

It is also a decent gauge of the town's direction more broadly. A community that keeps finding ways to reuse its packing houses and its 1930s roadside buildings instead of demolishing them is making a specific choice about what kind of place it wants to remain, one where a Friday night at Rowdy Rooster and a Saturday afternoon at Hogan Yards both happen inside buildings that have been standing since before most of us got here.

If you are already calling Vero Beach home and keeping tabs on what is worth trying next, that is exactly the kind of local detail worth knowing. And if a friend or family member ever asks you what makes this town different from anywhere else they have lived, you now have a better answer than the beach.

For anything else on your mind about property here on the barrier island or around Vero Beach, Steve Borenz is always glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.