Pups Pub closed its downtown Orlando location in April 2025. The reason the owners gave wasn't rent or competition. It was the neighborhood itself: rising crime, homelessness, and what they described in their own statement as "near-weekly shootings" near the Orange Avenue bar. A concept built around dogs playing off-leash while their owners had a beer needed a place that felt safe enough for people to relax and let their guard down. Downtown Orlando, by their own account, had stopped being that place.
They picked Clermont instead. Specifically, a former auto repair shop at 898 W. Montrose Street, a block off Waterfront Park.
That decision is worth sitting with, because it explains something about downtown Clermont that a simple "what's new" roundup won't tell you. This isn't a corridor filling up with restaurants because restaurants are trendy. It's filling up because a very specific window of the day, roughly two in the afternoon until dinner, used to be dead here, and a run of new businesses has figured out how to make money in exactly that window.
The corner that needed a driver
Property owners Issam and Nadia Harb paid $1.05 million for the Montrose Street building in a deal brokered by Orlando's Settineri Group, and Pups Pub signed a 10-year lease on the space. Broker Chris Settineri put the logic plainly: that corner "really needed a driver for the afternoon to evening hours."
The build-out backs up the timing bet. The 2,500-square-foot open-air space, converted from the old garage, keeps its bay doors for an indoor-outdoor feel and includes roughly 0.3 acres of outdoor play area for dogs. Its posted hours run Monday through Thursday from 5 to 10 p.m., Friday 5 to 11 p.m., and on weekends it opens at noon, Saturday to 11 p.m. and Sunday to 10 p.m. That weekend noon opening isn't incidental. It's the exact hour downtown Clermont's biggest weekly draw, the farmers market, starts winding down.
Pups Pub opened this spring, and its weekday doggy daycare is set to start this month, giving that afternoon stretch a second reason to exist even on days without a happy hour crowd.
The same math, different menus
Once you notice the pattern at 898 Montrose, it shows up everywhere else downtown has grown this year.
- Fumao Table, a Cuban street food spot at 646 7th Street, opened in late June with sandwiches, empanadas, and coffee, the kind of menu built for a two o'clock stop as much as a dinner reservation.
- Back 40 Wine Co., now open at 719 W. Ave, runs a wine bar and kitchen menu that stretches from small plates to caviar, the sort of place you can sit at 3 p.m. with a glass and stay through dinner without ever feeling like you're in the wrong slot.
- Huarike Peruvian Restaurant, tucked at the corner of Montrose and West Ave, has built a 4.9 Google rating since opening, largely on the strength of an intimate room that works for both a late lunch and a full dinner.
- The Station, on W. Desoto Street, took over the space left by the closed Clermont Brewing Company and added live entertainment to the same all-day, all-evening formula.
Then there's the smaller-format tier, which tells the story even more directly. Gurch Coffee, in the West End Plaza on W. Minneola Ave, built its identity around sustainably sourced beans and compostable to-go cups. A few doors down, Main Squeeze sells fresh-squeezed, canned-to-order lemonade, including a Citrus Sunrise flavor with mango and blood orange, and the same plaza holds Teamont Boba. None of these are dinner destinations. They're built for the exact stretch of afternoon that used to send people home.
What was already anchoring the schedule
Downtown Clermont didn't need to invent foot traffic. It already had two rituals that just never had anywhere to send people once they ended.
The Clermont Farmers Market runs every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 691 W. Montrose Street, with around 40 vendors selling produce, honey, seafood, and handmade goods. It's been drawing steady crowds for years. But the market has always packed up at 2, which is precisely when the corridor used to go quiet.
Saturday mornings have their own version. The Clermont Waterfront parkrun, a free, timed 5K along the paved shoreline of Lake Minneola at Lake Hiawatha Preserve, starts at 7:30 a.m. and draws walkers, runners, and dogs on leads. Afterward, regulars gather for coffee at Cheeser's Palace café. That's the end of the ritual. Or it was.
Here's how the week actually reads now:
| Day | Established anchor | The old dead window | What fills it now |
|---|---|---|---|
| Saturday | Waterfront parkrun, 7:30 a.m. at Lake Hiawatha Preserve, coffee after at Cheeser's Palace | Late morning through afternoon | Pups Pub open from noon; Back 40 Wine Co. serving small plates |
| Sunday | Farmers Market, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., roughly 40 vendors | 2 p.m. onward | Pups Pub open from noon; Gurch Coffee, Main Squeeze, and Teamont Boba catching the after-market crowd |
Neither anchor changed. What changed is everything that used to have nowhere to go after it.
The one-off calendar stacking on top
Layer the recurring events onto this and the afternoon window gets crowded fast. The Clermont Main Street Wine Stroll returns Saturday, August 15, with sampling at more than 20 downtown businesses starting at 6:30 p.m. Family Food Fest, a monthly rotating lineup of food trucks and live music, ran August 1 and returns September 5. The Anime Night Market takes over downtown September 12 from 4 to 8 p.m.
Athletics add their own rhythm. Waterfront Park carries an official World Triathlon Destination designation, and the AdventHealth Cool Sommer Mornings series keeps running through early fall, with the next installment, nicknamed Mysterious Kraken, set for September 13. The 36th Annual Great Floridian Endurance Festival follows on October 17. None of that used to overlap with a normal Saturday errand run. Now it regularly does.
What The Venue says about where this is heading
The clearest sign the evening side of this equation is scaling up too is The Venue, a new catering and event space at 2400 South U.S. Highway 27, in the building that used to house Grace O'Malley's Irish Pub. It's the latest project from chef Uday Kadam, who has run Guru Indian Restaurant just across the courtyard since 2014, building a reputation strong enough to land recognition among the top 10 percent of restaurants worldwide based on international reviews. The Venue celebrated its grand opening in June. A chef with that kind of track record doesn't bet on a corridor that's guessing.
What this actually changes if you already live here
None of this is really about restaurant openings. It's about a corridor that used to run on two shifts, a farmers market morning and a dinner evening, and now runs on something closer to a full day. If you've noticed downtown Clermont feeling different lately and couldn't quite say why, this is likely it: the two o'clock lull that used to send everyone home is the thing every new business on Montrose Street has been built to solve.
If you're watching this shift and wondering what it means for your own street, your equity, or your next move in this market, that's exactly the kind of question Autumn Makin fields every week from neighbors across Clermont and the surrounding Lake County towns. Schedule your free home consultation and valuation, and let's talk about what a changing downtown means for the house you already own.
