About BellyUp St. Pete

You don't really know a place from its menu. You find out by Bellyin' Up to the table.

BellyUp St. Pete covers 185 restaurants and bars across 27 neighborhoods. That includes St. Petersburg, Gulfport, St. Pete Beach, Pass-a-Grille and Treasure Island.

Every one is built from what the place itself makes public. Where we could not confirm something, we left it blank and said so.

The clearest thing we found in St. Pete

Datz closed in October 2025. It was the last Datz anywhere.

We opened its website on 6 October 2026, a year later. The menu bar still says Order Now and Book A Table. It still sells gift cards. The bottom of the page still prints the Central Avenue address, a phone number and the year 2026.

Nothing on it says the restaurant is closed.

A person reading that page would drive downtown. An AI assistant asked for a place to eat on Central Avenue would read the same page and send them.

Datz is not alone. Squeeze Juice Works closed in January 2025 and its site still tells search engines it is a working business at its old address. Baba closed in July 2026 and its site still says to call for reservations. Our closed list has every date.

And the other direction: open, but reported closed

The Chattaway is open. It has been on 22nd Avenue South since 1951. In 2026 the news said it was closing for good after 75 years, and in mid-July it did shut.

Then three local owners bought it and reopened it on 25 September 2026. The "closing forever" headlines are still the first thing you find.

So St. Pete has both problems at once. Closed places that still look open, and an open place that still looks closed.

What the 2024 hurricanes did to this list

Hurricane Helene hit on 26 September 2024 and Hurricane Milton two weeks later. The beach towns and Gulfport flooded.

Some rooms never came back. Woody's Waterfront on St. Pete Beach took more than five feet of water, and after more than 35 years its owners chose to sell the land.

Others took a long time. Caddy's on Treasure Island ran from a tent for more than a year. The Seahorse in Pass-a-Grille, open since 1938, came back in February 2026.

That is why anything written about beach restaurants before October 2024 can be wrong, and why we checked each beach venue against 2026 sources.

How we decide what to publish

Public sources only. We start with the restaurant's own website. Then a named local publication. Then the restaurant's own social post. Nobody's memory of a visit counts, including ours.

If a restaurant does not say it has a patio, we do not tag it with one, even when we are fairly sure it does.

Here is where we stand today, in plain numbers.

• 105 venues are confirmed open by a dated 2026 source.
• 80 venues have a working website with current hours, and we could not find a dated 2026 post to go with it. Those are marked "needs verification" on their pages until we do.

We also keep a list of 44 web addresses we will never link. Some now lead to gambling pages. Some are parked for sale. At least one belongs to a restaurant that is open today, with hidden spam links sitting in the footer of its own site.

What BellyUp St. Pete covers

The City of St. Petersburg, plus three small towns locals treat as part of a St. Pete night out: Gulfport, St. Pete Beach and Treasure Island.

Clearwater, Dunedin and Safety Harbor are outside. They are their own places and deserve their own coverage. That leaves one MICHELIN Recommended restaurant off this site, The Tides Market in Safety Harbor.

Tampa is across the bay and has its own BellyUp.

We made one exception on purpose. Ted Peters Famous Smoked Fish sits in South Pasadena, just over the line. It has been there since 1951 and it prints its own address as St. Petersburg, so it is in.

National chains, stadium stands and airport counters are out.

Why BellyUp St. Pete exists

Every platform a restaurant is already on tracks the same few things: where you are, what you serve and what people scored you. None of them track why somebody would choose you.

The sunset. The dog-friendly yard. The owner. The reason the regulars are regulars.

So we sort those reasons into discovery categories and publish them where any search engine or AI can read them. Then we check whether search and AI can actually see them.

If we have something wrong, tell us. If it is your restaurant, you can claim the profile and correct it for free. We would rather be corrected than be another stale page.