Columbia owners buy Harbour Square

An entity controlled by Tampa’s Gonzmart family, owners of the Columbia Restaurant Group, has acquired the three-story Harbour Square office building on Longboat Key for $4 million, property records show.

Harbour Square Real Estate Holdings LLC’s purchase of the 26,000-square-foot building, on Aug. 31, follows its acquisition of the former Pattigeorge’s Restaurant next door for roughly $2 million last year.

The Harbour Square building, which had been owned by a trust controlled by former Sarasota-Bradenton Convention Center operator Oscar Parsons, also provides eight boat slips and 62 additional parking spaces for the restaurant that will replace Pattigeorge’s, officials say.

Longboat Key voters in 2016 voted down Parsons’ request to convert the top floor of the building into 4,200 square feet of penthouse and office space. Parsons, who owned the office plaza since 1985, gave up the right to use the penthouse as a residence five years ago. The only real change the referendum would have allowed was for a business owner to live in the penthouse

Michael Kilgore, the restaurant group’s chief marketing officer, says the “new concept” restaurant at 4120-4134 Gulf of Mexico Dr. will open sometime during the first half of 2019. He declined to say what type of food the new restaurant will serve.

“It won’t be like anything we do now,” Kilgore says of the new offering. “It won’t be a Columbia, it won’t be a Cha Cha Coconuts, it won’t be Ulele. We hope to announce the concept before the end of this year.”

Kilgore adds the company hadn’t planned to expand its footprint on Longboat Key beyond Pattigeorge’s, but that the opportunity to buy the adjacent office building was “too good to pass up.”
“We have no plans to do anything more with the property at this time,” he adds. “There are tenants there with leases in place.”

Columbia Restaurant Group has opened five restaurants in the Tampa area since 2012, including new eateries inside Tampa International Airport and Goody Goody, a revival of an iconic burger restaurant.

The company also is focused on opening Casa Santo Stefano, named after a small Sicilian city with ties to the Tampa area, next year.

“We’re just moving along systematically,” Kilgore says. “And Longboat Key is no different.”