Indaco opened its doors on July 2, serving snapper tartare and wood-fired lamb pizza to a Town Center crowd that had been eyeing the space since the scaffolding came down. It sits close enough to O-Ku that servers from both restaurants share the same sidewalk on a Friday night. That proximity is not an accident of leasing. Indaco and O-Ku are both run by The Indigo Road Hospitality Group, the same company, the same standards, two menus.
Once you notice that, you start noticing it everywhere in Town Center. The market and café that reopened in The Lucian a few years back was not a stranger's bet on a vacant storefront. It came from the couple who already run The Citizen down the block. The children's boutique that took over a beloved home décor shop's old space belongs to the same local designer who opened that first shop. Even the town's own retail brand, the Alys Shoppe, didn't bring in an outside chain when it needed a bigger footprint. It built itself a nicer room.
If you live here, this matters more than a list of openings does. It tells you something about how Town Center actually fills its storefronts, and it changes what you should expect the next time a space goes dark for a few months.
Two Restaurants, One Kitchen Philosophy
Indaco's arrival next to O-Ku is the clearest version of the pattern. The Indigo Road Hospitality Group built Indaco as a modern Italian concept, wood-fired pizzas and hand-crafted pasta under Executive Chef Dakota Watson, in a space designed in collaboration with Powell. The tile work inside, hand-painted blue and white pieces from Red Rock Tile Works, was chosen to sit comfortably against O-Ku's already-established look next door.
The menu leans into shareable plates. The Triangoli and a snapper tartare show up alongside a $65-per-person "For the Table" option, a chef-curated three-course meal built for groups who can't agree on one dish. The bar program follows the same instinct toward specificity: a Dollar Slice cocktail built on pizza-infused gin, an Indigo Spritz with elderflower and blueberry. Brunch service started shortly after opening, giving residents a second reason to walk over on a weekend morning instead of just an evening one.
For someone who already eats at O-Ku, Indaco is not really a new restaurant to evaluate from scratch. It is the same team, the same design sensibility, applied to a different cuisine forty feet away. That is worth knowing before you assume you need to research an unfamiliar operator. You already know how this company runs a dining room.
The Coffee Shop That Wouldn't Stay Closed
Fonville Press closed as a standalone coffee shop in February 2019, and the town missed it enough that Jeremy Walton, who was Alys Beach's Vice President of Resort Operations at the time, kept thinking about how to bring it back. He and his wife Angela already had a restaurant in Town Center, The Citizen, a coastal tavern they opened in January 2021. Rather than let someone else take a run at the old Fonville Press name, they built the second version themselves inside The Lucian, expanding a coffee counter into a full market, café, and indoor-outdoor bar.
The menu came from Chefs Coleman Jernigan and Josh Rockhill, and the team behind the counter includes familiar faces on purpose. Joe Papagni, who managed the original Fonville Press, came back. So did Gray Soper, who had been running Caliza Restaurant and the Beach Club. Walton has said the goal was simple: let people get a little bit of everything in one space and use it morning or night, whether that means a coffee on the way to the beach or cocktails on the plaza after dinner somewhere else.
The town did not go looking for an outside operator to fill the old Fonville Press address. It handed the revival to someone who had already spent years working inside Alys Beach's own Town Center plans, as the Alys Beach team later told it.
The Boutiques Follow the Same Math
The retail side of Town Center runs on the same logic. Mary Clark, the local designer behind the home décor shop MAST, has since opened both SummerStory, which carries on that same design sensibility, and Bebette, a children's boutique that took over MAST's former space. One person, two storefronts, both drawing on the same eye for curation that built her reputation in the first place.
Down the row, the team behind Willow and Willow + Mercer introduced Merit, a jewelry and accessories concept, into a space that needed a new tenant. Same proprietors, new name on the door.
The longest version of this story belongs to Ann Hartley. She and her husband George opened the restaurant George's in 2008, their third eatery on 30A at the time, and sold it in 2015 hoping to settle into retirement. It did not stick. When Alys Beach built out a row of commercial spaces on Castle Harbour Drive and offered her a lease, Hartley took it and opened her own eponymous shop, drawing on a retail concept she had run in Dallas two decades earlier. She has said she and George "failed miserably" at retirement. The town gave her a different kind of storefront instead of a golf course.
Even the Town's Own Shop Just Grew a Bigger Room
The Alys Shoppe is the one case where the operator is Alys Beach itself, and it followed the same instinct. Rather than lease its growing retail footprint out to an outside luxury chain, the town built the Shoppe a permanent home inside The Della, a mixed-use building on Town Center's north end designed by Hart Howerton. The move let the Shoppe expand from apparel collaborations with brands like Peter Millar and Holderness & Bourne into fine jewelry and a broader lifestyle offering, all under a name residents already knew.
Nobody replaced the Alys Shoppe with a national retailer to see if it could pull more foot traffic. The town just built the existing brand a better room.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
None of this means Town Center never changes. It means the changes tend to come from inside the roster rather than from outside it. If you are trying to figure out whether a new storefront is worth checking out, the fastest signal is not the concept name on the awning. It is who actually holds the lease.
That has a few practical effects for anyone walking Town Center this fall. If you already trust O-Ku's kitchen, Indaco is a reasonable bet on a night you want pasta instead of sushi, because it is the same hospitality group applying the same standards to a different menu. If you liked what The Citizen did with a casual tavern format, Fonville Press is worth a morning visit for the same reason, coffee and a flatbread from people who already know how to run a dining room in this specific town. And if a boutique closes, the smart move is to wait a season before assuming the space will sit empty. The proprietor who built the last concept is more likely than not already planning the next one.
It also means the walk from O-Ku to Indaco to Fonville Press to the Alys Shoppe covers most of what actually changed in Town Center this year, and none of it required a single stranger to bet on an unfamiliar address. The same short list of people just keeps getting handed more square footage.
If you're weighing what a home near this kind of Town Center is actually worth, or want a second opinion on how a specific address here holds up against the rest of 30A, Kromer Collective knows this stretch of Alys Beach block by block. Reach out when you're ready to talk specifics.
