First look: Meet the restaurants at Pompano Beach’s first food hall, The Bite Eatery

When The Bite Eatery opens later this year, Pompano Beach’s first food hall will become the latest attraction in a city eager to evolve from sleepy bedroom community into touristy beach mecca.

Nine food vendors and one full-liquor bar, ranging from Jupiter Donuts to a New York-style deli, will debut inside the 250-seat food hall at 2715 E. Atlantic Blvd., in the tony Harbor Village Plaza where the city’s main drag meets the Intracoastal drawbridge.

“No one suspected this quick of a comeback after COVID,” says Nguyen Tran, director of Pompano Beach’s Community Redevelopment Agency. “Hospitality rebounded so quickly and now this food hall is really turning Pompano into a destination.”

The Bite Eatery, of course, capitalizes on the still-buzzy food hall trend that began here in 2018 and climaxed with recent openings of Delray Beach Market and Sistrunk Marketplace in Fort Lauderdale. Food halls – picture standalone mall food courts – boast cavernous open-floor plans, tiny vendor stalls and a paralyzing lineup of dishes prepared by chefs in front of diners’ eyes.

The ambitious project features a common dining area surrounded by 350- to 400-square-foot stalls, says the Bite Eatery’s developer, Jessica Gollel. Local bands and DJs will bring live entertainment during the week. Food vendors pay about $3,000 in monthly rent. Customers can order at the counter or from QR coded menus at their dining tables. Gollel plans to employ food runners and bussers to deliver dishes tableside, but there won’t be wait staff, she says.

Here’s a rundown of the vendors:

La Chancla, a Mexican restaurant from first-time restaurateurs Maria and Pedro Olguin, serving tacos, burritos and other fare. The eatery’s named after a projectile well-known to Latin children: mom’s infamous flip-flops flying across the room.

The Lobstar, a seafood stall specializing in Maine lobster rolls from Ivan Garcia and Manuel Arraiz.

A still-unnamed New York-style deli from Alex Yushkovsky, owner of the former Onion Roll in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea. The deli will serve pastrami, brisket and turkey by the pound, along with breakfast and deli sandwiches, bagels, hot dogs and appetizing spreads.

Ceviche Time, specializing in Peruvian ceviche plates from husband-and-wife owners Maria and Angelo Intoccia.

Another franchise of the rapidly growing South Florida chain I Heart Mac & Cheese, which turns the gooey side dish into build-your-own macaroni and cheese bowls and sandwich entrees.

Moop, a sweets shop serving scoops of gelato, waffles and crepes from owner Javier Cavanna

The eighth location of Palm Beach-raised doughnut chain Jupiter Donuts, which will serve sweet confections along with coffee and breakfast sandwiches.

Senbazuru, a Japanese-Spanish fusion restaurant from owner Adriana Yoshii, featuring sushi rolls, ramen bowls, gyoza and Spanish patatas bravas.

A to-be-named Italian restaurant owned by the Bite Eatery

The Beach Bar, a central full-liquor bar owned by the Bite Eatery that will serve wine, craft-beer and craft cocktails.

The most remarkable thing about the Bite Eatery, for Gollel, was how quickly it rebounded from the brink of cancellation. Gollel originally planned to open the Bite last summer, picking a location that’s a 10-minute walk to Pompano Beach’s coastline and the rebuilt Pompano Pier. Then momentum for the project sputtered between March 2020 and January 2021 amid COVID restrictions. Construction never began and, poised to scrap everything, she let the food hall’s pre-pandemic tenants break their leases.

By February, as snowbirds and a wave of New York restaurant operators began flocking to South Florida, Gollel changed her mind: The Bite Eatery would live on.

“The tenants had said to us, ‘We just don’t know what’s going to happen,’ and even we didn’t know if this would come to fruition,” says Gollel, who owns Pompano-based Gollel Family Properties with her father, Richard, and two brothers, Richard and Michael. “Thankfully everything came back strong.”

Tran suspects the Bite Eatery’s distinct storefront – within the city’s East CRA area, next-door to high-end eateries Houston’s and the Foundry – saved the project from stalling out.

“What happened is the Bite Eatery picked the right location,” Tran says of Harbor Village Plaza. Tran also worked with landlords there to delay rent payments for tenants until federal stimulus arrived. “We hardly lost any restaurants or takeout spaces on that Atlantic [Boulevard] corridor,” he says.

Tran’s agency also recently spent $2 million to upgrade Harbor Village Plaza with fresh paint and tree-lined streetscaping, which has added to the ongoing beautification of Pompano Beach, he says. There has been a new explosion of upscale shops and restaurants (Oceanic, Beach House Pompano, Lucky Fish, Kilwin’s), luxe high-rises like the beachside Home2Suites by Hilton, new projects like the 20-story high-end Solemar condo (which broke ground May 20), a future botanical garden near the historic McNab House, and an oceanfront parking garage packed full on the weekends.

Now, given the surge in commercial real estate, Pompano Beach looks more attractive for another reason.

“It’s like Fort Lauderdale, but not Fort Lauderdale prices,” Tran says. “We’ve been this bedroom community for so many years with stagnant growth, but now people are starting to notice us.”

Ivan Garcia and Manuel Arraiz, the owners of Broward’s roving Captain Lobstar food truck, will be among the first tenants to join the Bite Eatery. The Venezuela-born partners have stepped foot in New England only once, but they knew enough about snowbird culture to realize buttery Maine lobster rolls would strike big in South Florida.

And boy, did it strike. For Garcia and Arraiz, the move to a food hall climaxes months of success since the pandemic, including the launch of a second Captain Lobstar truck and an international partnership with a lobster-roll restaurant in Spain.

Their 350-square-foot stall, dubbed The Lobstar, will serve Maine lobster piled into top-split brioche buns grilled and slathered with butter and mayo, then topped with garlic-cilantro sauce, avocado and a generous spritz of lemon.

“Customers can’t believe it when I tell them we used to drive FedEx trucks for a living four years ago,” says Garcia, 32.

Why a food hall? Garcia says they’re trending and much cheaper than a storefront, which he discovered would cost at least $200,000 for buildout. The tradeoff, of course, will be navigating their booth’s tight kitchen space.

Not that Garcia is sweating the cramped stall. “We handle 300 menu items every four hours on our food truck,” he says. “All the experience we got comes from a small space.”

When poor pandemic sales one year ago shut down the Onion Roll, a New York-style deli in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, owner Alex Yushkovsky says it felt like “my whole soul was screwed up.”

The Ukranian businessman’s new deli at the Bite Eatery – which will include a smoker and two deli slicers – will turn out pastrami, brisket and turkey by the pound, along with breakfast and deli sandwiches, bagels and appetizing spreads of lox, tuna fish and potato salad.

Although smaller than his old storefront, Yushkovsky thinks his new deli stall at the Bite Eatery – still unnamed – is the smartest way to reinvent himself.

“The brisket is going to melt in your mouth like M&Ms,” he says. “There’s no Jewish delis around here in Pompano, and serving the people keeps me sane. But I’m a little on the wounded side, and if I make one more mistake, I’m broke.”

Adriana Yoshii’s success with a Japanese-Spanish tapas booth, Senbazuru, at Sistrunk Marketplace convinced to open a sister restaurant at the Bite Eatery. Her stall will feature ramen bowls and bento boxes filled with Spanish patatas bravas, dumplings and tayoyaki (snack-size octopus balls). She will also add sushi and Japanese ice cream to her menu.

Like other restaurants, she has been short-staffed for months, but Yoshii sees hope in the convenience of multiple vendors and cuisines blending under one roof.

“Pompano will let us fully blossom, to fully express who we are,” Yoshii says. “By the time the food hall is really, I’m hoping people will also be ready in terms of how they feel about COVID.”