If you've lived near Caloosa Cove long enough, you remember asking someone, at some point between 2018 and 2022, whether the old Safari bar was ever going to reopen. The honest answer for most of that stretch was nobody knew, and the reason had less to do with hurricane damage than most people assumed. Hurricane Irma hit in September 2017. The bar didn't reopen until early 2023. That gap is nearly six years, and the storm only explains the first year or two of it.
What actually explains the rest of the wait is ownership. Caloosa Cove Resort and Marina changed hands in January 2022, when Suntex Marina Investors took over the property at mile marker 73.5. Within roughly a year of that acquisition, the bar had a new kitchen, a redesigned dining room, a landscaped private beach, and a name change to Oceanside Safari Restaurant and Lounge. The physical repair work that took six years under the old ownership took about twelve months once someone with the money and the will to spend it was actually holding the deed.
If you live around Caloosa Cove, that distinction matters more than the reopening itself. It tells you something about how recovery actually works on this stretch of Lower Matecumbe: storm damage sets the clock back, but it's ownership that decides whether the clock ever starts running again.
Habanos Never Skipped a Season
The clearest evidence that the six-year closure wasn't purely a storm story sits just steps from where the Safari used to sit dark. Habanos, the Cuban restaurant on the same fifteen acres, kept serving lunch and dinner through the entire period the Safari was shuttered. Property listings for Caloosa Cove from the marina's own materials describe Habanos as open Tuesday through Sunday without interruption, while the Safari lounge sat marked "temporarily closed due to Hurricane Irma" for years on the same pages.
Same storm. Same fifteen acres. Same flood zone. One building kept its doors open the whole time and the other one didn't reopen until a different company owned the ground under it. If Irma alone explained the closure, both restaurants would have faced the same math. They didn't, because the decision to rebuild the Safari wasn't really about storm damage. It was about whether whoever owned the property wanted to write the check.
What Changed in January 2022
Suntex Marina Investors' acquisition of Caloosa Cove Resort and Marina is the hinge point in this story. The renovation that followed wasn't cosmetic. According to the general manager who oversaw the reopening, Frank Scottoline, the previous version of the lounge had tinted windows and no real outdoor space at all. "You may as well have been in an alley," he told the Keys' local paper. "There was no view."
The rebuild changed that math directly. The new Oceanside Safari seats ninety guests inside and sixty outside, with the outdoor tables taking in what's described as a 180-degree ocean view, a level of waterfront access the old lounge never had despite sitting on the same oceanfront lot the entire time. The building wasn't just repaired. It was redesigned around the water it had been ignoring for four decades.
The New Room Keeps a Few of the Old Bones
Longtime residents will remember the original version of this bar by its unofficial nickname: locals called it the Dead Animal Bar, a reference to the taxidermy mounts that covered the walls after original owner Leslie E. Tassell incorporated the Safari Lounge in 1981 and filled it with trophies from his own hunting trips. Warthog and eland heads, a table built from an elephant leg, a zebra pelt on the wall. It was a Lower Matecumbe institution for decades before Irma shut it down.
The new version doesn't try to hide from that history, it just softens it. There's an elephant at the entrance kids can sit on for photos, a giraffe sculpture picked up in Miami, a wooden lion. No more mounted heads. Scottoline's framing of the redesign gets at the balance: "It's the same old charm in a brand new spot." The menu moved just as far from the original concept, which was mostly drinks and bar snacks. The current lineup runs toward homemade smoked fish dip made with applewood-smoked mahi, conch fritters, fish tacos, and tuna tartare, food built for the same crowd that used to come in for a beer and a burger but expects more of a meal now.
The Rest of the Property Never Waited on the Bar
While the Safari sat closed, the rest of Caloosa Cove kept functioning at its own pace, which is worth knowing if you're trying to understand what daily life here actually looks like right now. The marina holds a Clean Marina certification, meaning it meets both the legal requirements and a set of voluntary best practices around keeping the surrounding water clean, and that status didn't depend on whether the bar upstairs was open. The property sits directly beside the Channel 2 and Channel 5 bridges, water that locals and visiting anglers alike still rank among the better tarpon fishing spots in the Keys, storm or no storm, bar open or closed.
The fishing side of the operation barely paused either. Captain Roy Lindback has been running charters out of Caloosa Cove for 28 years, and Tommy Bressler has worked the tackle shop for close to the same stretch. Neither of their routines depended on the restaurant situation next door. If you're the kind of resident who measures the neighborhood by whether the marina still runs the way it always has, rather than by what's on the dinner menu, the honest answer is that very little actually changed here during those six years.
The resort side kept its rhythm too. Guests and residents alike still have access to a lighted tennis court, a pickleball court, a basketball court, and a shuffleboard setup, all included at no extra charge, the same amenities the property has offered for years. None of that required a renovated bar to keep working.
The Read
The version of this story you'd get from a general news roundup is simple: an old Keys landmark reopened after a long closure. That's true, but it skips the part that actually matters if you live here. The six-year wait wasn't really about storm severity. It was about who owned the building. Habanos never closed. The marina's certification never lapsed. Captain Lindback kept running his charters the entire time. The only thing that sat frozen was the one piece of the property waiting on a new owner with the capital and the reason to finally fix it.
That's worth remembering the next time something around here seems stuck longer than the damage alone would explain. It's rarely just about how bad the storm was. It's about who's holding the deed, and whether they've decided it's worth the investment yet.
If you're weighing what's actually changing on this stretch of Islamorada, or you just want a local read on a specific property near the water, Dominic Rivera and the team at Pine River Realty spend enough time on this part of the Keys to tell you the difference between a rumor and a fact before you make a decision based on either one.
