What's Actually Open Near Watergrass This Summer

For most of the last five years, a Saturday plan out of Watergrass meant pointing the car south on Curley Road, hitting Overpass, then either merging onto I-75 for Wiregrass or cutting west toward SR 54. The dining strip lived down there. So did the errands. Curley Road itself was a driveway to a driveway.

That map has quietly redrawn itself in 2026. Between a rebuilt interstate interchange minutes from the front gate, a new $24 million retail center at Wesley Chapel Boulevard and Lexington Oaks Boulevard, and a first wave of tenants filling in around Epperson's Innovation Commons, the gravitational pull for a weeknight dinner or a Saturday coffee has shifted north and east. If you already live in Watergrass, this is the season your commute map and your leisure map stop matching.

The infrastructure move that changed everything

The single change most Watergrass residents feel every day is not a restaurant. It is the road. Construction of the diamond interchange at I-75 and Overpass Road is complete, with a flyover ramp for westbound Overpass Road access to south I-75. Overpass itself has been widened to four lanes between I-75 and Old Pasco Road and six lanes between I-75 and Boyette, with Blair Drive realigned to meet Old Pasco.

Read that as a resident, not a planner. The interchange put Watergrass roughly two minutes from an interstate on-ramp that did not exist last decade. Every retail decision downstream, from where Publix's operator sited the Epperson store to where Center Connect chose to build its second Hub, was made with that ramp in mind. The corridor is being built for people who live here, not for people passing through on the way to Tampa.

Where the new openings actually landed

The concentration of activity sits inside a three-mile arc around Watergrass. Here is what has opened, what is opening, and where each one sits.

The Watergrass Nail Bar address matters because it is on Curley Road itself, at the same intersection residents already use for the mailbox run. It is the first upper-tier service tenant to plant a flag inside the immediate community rather than at the Overpass or SR-54 pad sites. Founder Aly relocated from Virginia and opened the doors in February 2026.

Why the Hub at Lexington is the story

Six miles south of Watergrass, at the corner of Wesley Chapel Boulevard and Lexington Oaks Boulevard, sits the development that will absorb the most weeknight traffic from the Watergrass side of Wesley Chapel this year.

"Six of the nine confirmed tenants are food, and most are either first-in-market or first-in-Pasco. That is unusual for a Tampa Bay strip center this size."

The Hub at Lexington is a $24 million project from Center Connect Development, run by siblings Courtney Bissett-Hayes and Paul Bissett, whose first Hub at Bexley opened in 2022. Roughly 40,000 square feet of small-shop retail sits across six buildings designed as a walkable gathering space rather than a linear strip.

The tenant lineup is not category coverage. It is cuisine specificity:

• Saigon Pho Wesley Chapel brings pho, banh mi, and grilled plates from the team behind Banh Mi & Boba at Bexley.
• Bonchon, Korean fried chicken with roughly 70 indoor seats, an outdoor patio, and a full bar stocked with beer, sake, and soju under franchisee Sherry Askander. Effectively the area's first Korean pub concept.
• Farmer's Milk, an Eastern European café and bakery with a sister location in Hollywood, Florida, doing cakes, pastries, specialty coffee, and all-day breakfast.
• La Creación Bistro, a full sit-down sibling to the La Creación Express counter at KRATE at The Grove, with a completely different menu spanning breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
• Hummus Republic, build-your-own Mediterranean bowls, with sign permits filed in April 2026 and hood suppression still in review.
• Brew Bar Self Pour, a self-serve tap room for beer and wine by the ounce plus frozen daiquiris, sibling to the KRATE outpost.
• The Landing Bar and Grill, at 4,528 square feet the largest tenant in the center, a sibling of the Valrico River Hills location with grouper, salmon, cheesesteaks, Aztec chowder, and pierogies.

The service side matters for daily life too. Headlines, a locally owned barbershop chain, opened its seventh location here, running 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. weekdays, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays, closed Sundays. Pet Wants, a small-batch pet food and grooming franchise run by a Pasco County resident, has a 1,091-square-foot buildout targeted for spring 2026.

Add the fact that the Hub tenants are almost entirely owner-operated or franchised-by-locals, and you get the contrast with Wiregrass: not a national roster, not a chain-only weekend. That is the pull.

The Wiregrass refresh, quantified

None of that means Wiregrass is standing still. In April 2026, owner TriGate Capital announced the 800,000-square-foot open-air center is adding new retailers, with Lululemon and Kendra Scott landing this year. Face Foundrié, the facial bar owned by Brenda and Elle Vansteenburg, opened April 22. Bosphorous Turkish Cuisine is opening on Paseo Drive as the restaurant's third Tampa location. The North Tampa Bay Chamber's first-quarter briefing also confirmed Fresh Market is coming, with additional "South Tampa-style" restaurants in the pipeline.

For a Watergrass resident, the honest read is that the two centers now serve different weekends. Wiregrass covers national retail, jewelry, athletic wear, and department-store anchors. The Hub covers the dinner-and-a-drink evening, the coffee-and-pastry Saturday morning, the specific cuisine you used to drive to Tampa for.

What sits closest to the front gate

Zoom back in on Curley Road and Overpass Road, and the picture is filling in with lower-profile openings that still matter.

Across from Westbrook Estates and Veterans Elementary, near the Hub at Lexington, a new strip by O'Reilly Auto is starting to lease up with Livewell Animal Hospital, Pet Wants, Prime IV, Pizza World, FS8 Pilates, and Barberitos.

Epperson at Innovation Commons, the 900-acre mixed-use core anchored by the 7.5-acre man-made lagoon that runs alongside Watergrass, is planned for 290,000-plus square feet of retail and commercial space, 577,000-plus square feet of dedicated co-working office, and room for medical, hospital, and university uses. What began with Publix and Chick-fil-A as anchors will keep growing into fast-casual dining, family sit-down concepts, patios, and coffee shops.

The practical result: a full weekend of eating, browsing, and outings can now sit inside a three-mile radius of the Watergrass entrance.

The hospital is a lifestyle change

The largest quality-of-life shift is not on any restaurant list. Florida Medical Clinic Orlando Health Wiregrass Ranch Hospital at 3000 Wiregrass Ranch Boulevard opens with 102 beds, expandable to 300 at full buildout, with nine operating rooms including one hybrid OR that allows real-time imaging during surgical procedures. Directly across the street, Flagship Healthcare broke ground on the 46,000-square-foot Wiregrass Ranch Medical Pavilion I, with initial tenants scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2026.

For a Watergrass household, that translates into an emergency room roughly ten minutes closer than the previous default drive down Bruce B. Downs to AdventHealth. It also seeds the medical office ecosystem, pediatric practices, specialists, urgent care, that will follow a hospital into its immediate radius.

A summer weekend, redrawn

Put it all together and a genuinely local Saturday looks different than it did a year ago:

• Coffee and a pastry at Farmer's Milk once it opens, ten minutes down Overpass.
• Errand loop at the O'Reilly strip and a quick trim at Headlines.
• Afternoon at Epperson Lagoon or the Watergrass amenity center.
• Dinner at Bonchon or Tallo, with the Hub's outdoor courtyard as the fallback for whichever restaurant's wait is shortest.
• First Friday concert at KRATE at the Grove's outdoor stage on 6105 Wesley Grove Boulevard, with the series continuing into the fall.

That is a full Saturday without touching I-75 southbound, without a trip to South Tampa, and without repeating a chain you already know.

The larger point for anyone who bought here five years ago on the promise of what Wesley Chapel would eventually become: the eventually has started arriving in named addresses. If you moved to Watergrass because you liked the Curley Road quiet and the Epperson lagoon proximity, none of that is going away. The difference is that the corridor around your community finally supports the daily life your address always suggested it would.

If you own in Watergrass and are curious what all of this new activity has done to what your home would trade for in today's market, Laura Baker, Your Trusted Tampa Real Estate Pro, can walk you through a considered read on presentation, pricing, and timing. Request a Complimentary Home Strategy & Valuation and let's talk about what your address is worth against the summer's activity.