Beachside Seafood Restaurant & Market, a Jacksonville Beach fixture for 37 years, is winding down its dining operations in October, leaving only its popular fish market open at the historic building on Third Street South.
Pearl Hospitality Group of Jacksonville, which owns Beachside Seafood, has not yet determined the last day of service for the restaurant, according to The Florida Times-Union. The restaurant at 120 Third St. S. will close indefinitely, but the fish market on the ground floor will remain open for customers who have come to rely on its daily fresh-filleted local fish and wild-caught Mayport shrimp. Beachside Seafood has built its reputation since 1989 on that market identity, along with house-smoked mahi mahi fish dip and Florida lobsters, according to Visit Jacksonville.
A Building With a History of Near-Misses
The two-story building housing Beachside Seafood was constructed in 1954 and spans 3,663 square feet, with the market on the ground level and dining upstairs, per the Times-Union's reporting. Before Pearl Hospitality Group entered the picture, longtime owner Jason Arteaga had operated the restaurant since buying the real estate in 2008 for $900,000. Arteaga reportedly sold the property only after securing assurances that the building would not be demolished, a detail that underscores just how tied the structure is to the neighborhood's identity.
Pearl Hospitality Group's affiliate, AR & JR LLC, purchased the property for $1.2 million on May 1, 2025, according to the Jax Daily Record. At the time, the new owners announced a $100,000 cosmetic renovation budget and promised to preserve customer favorites like Philly cheesesteaks and smoked fish dip, while also aiming to retain the full 25-person staff.
A Company Expanding Rapidly Across Duval County
The wind-down of Beachside Seafood's dining room comes as Pearl Hospitality Group, a division of the Florida hospitality firm Bento Group, has been rapidly building out a portfolio of roughly 50 restaurants across Jacksonville, Tampa, and Orlando. In Jacksonville Beach alone, the company expanded its footprint in late 2025 by acquiring Izakaya Ko at 1198 Beach Blvd., relaunching the Japanese gastropub earlier this year.
Farther afield, the group is developing Norikawa, a 4,149-square-foot waterfront Japanese restaurant with a 2,500-square-foot patio at Downtown Jacksonville's One Riverside development, on the former Florida Times-Union campus site. Just this month, Jacksonville's Downtown Investment Authority approved incentives to help Pearl Hospitality Group reopen the former Bellwether restaurant at 117 W. Forsyth St. as a speakeasy sushi concept called the Temaki Room — a project Hoodline covered ahead of its DIA vote. The group also secured $156,000 in Downtown Investment Authority grant funding last year toward a $692,114 conversion of a 10,460-square-foot space into Koto, a vinyl listening bar and izakaya at 927 W. Forsyth St.
Another Loss for Jacksonville Beach's Longtime Institutions
Beachside Seafood's closure adds to a string of changes reshaping Jacksonville Beach's dining and cultural landscape this year. Earlier this year, Hoodline reported on the Joe's Crab Shack location that became a Bubba Gump, and just days ago, the beloved Springing the Blues Festival announced its retirement after 34 years and an estimated $50 million economic legacy.
For now, Pearl Hospitality Group has not said what will ultimately happen to the second-floor dining space once the restaurant winds down in October, and no timeline for its last day of service has been set. The fish market's survival offers some continuity for longtime customers, even as the sit-down restaurant that anchored the building for nearly four decades prepares to go dark.
