The Friday Surf City's Summer Actually Started

On the morning of June 26, vendors set up folding tables under the oaks at Soundside Park for the Shop the Sound Craft & Farmers Market, open 8 to 11 a.m., the kind of low-key Friday morning where you buy tomatoes and end up talking to three neighbors. By 11:30, a ribbon-cutting crowd had gathered two blocks up Roland Avenue at Coconut Cove, the new waterfront seafood spot across the street from the park. At 3:30 that same afternoon, another ribbon dropped at The Patio at the Surf on Charlie Medlin Drive. And by 7 p.m., the town's free summer concert series, Meet Me at the Sound, kicked off its 2026 run at the same park where the market had packed up hours earlier.

That is not four unrelated stories that happened to land on one date. It is the day Surf City's new restaurant scene revealed what it actually is: not a strip of competing storefronts hoping to pull tourists off Route 210, but a handful of businesses that opened around a calendar the town was already running. If you live here, the useful thing to understand about this summer isn't which restaurant has the better fish taco. It's that the town's parks department, not any single owner, is still the one setting the rhythm everyone else built around.

Three Openings, One Bridge

Surf City's new dining cluster sits on both sides of the swing bridge that connects the mainland to Topsail Island, and each of the three openings landed in roughly the same six-week window this spring and early summer.

• Coconut Cove, 418 Roland Ave, directly across from Soundside Park. Open daily 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. with the kitchen running until 9, serving waterfront seafood on the Intracoastal side of Roland Avenue. Dock seating is listed as coming soon, which tells you the owners expect boat traffic to matter as much as foot traffic.
• The Patio at the Surf, 104 Charlie Medlin Drive, just off the island on the mainland side. Founded by Nhiza Freitas, it opens daily at 6 a.m. and runs a breakfast and brunch menu until 3 p.m., then shifts to cocktails and tapas Thursday through Sunday evenings. It's built as an all-day, pet-friendly spot rather than a dinner destination.
• Marina Joe's, 209 N. New River Drive, on the Intracoastal Waterway just over the bridge onto the island, next door to the Topsail Island Trading Company gift shop. Founder Joe Lyons and his wife Katie built the two-story, roughly 170-seat restaurant with investor partners Scott and Clay Darrohn and Wilmington restaurateur Justin Smith. About 30 of those seats sit on an outdoor deck angled toward the bridge. Darrohn has described the boat-up dockage as the only setup of its kind on Topsail Island, and the group designed the space to run year-round rather than shutter in the off-season, with big screens for sports and a layout built to host weddings and gatherings into the fall.

What ties these three together isn't proximity in the walking-distance sense. Coconut Cove sits close enough to Soundside Park that a market visitor could reasonably wander over for lunch. Marina Joe's and The Patio at the Surf are a short drive across the bridge or just off it. What ties them together is timing: all three chose to open into a calendar the town had already published, rather than try to create their own draw from scratch.

The Park Was Already Running This Calendar

Soundside Park, at 517 Roland Avenue, has hosted the Town of Surf City's summer programming for years, and none of it was built around the new restaurants. It's the other way around.

The concert series drew a different act each date. Scotti Stringz played the July 24 show, and Carl Newton's Review closed the summer run on August 28, both free, both paired with food and drinks from local vendors at the park. Turtle Talks, hosted by volunteers from the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center's Topsail Turtle Project, has been running at the picnic tables since early June, a program that predates every one of this year's restaurant openings by years.

None of this is new infrastructure. It's the same park doing the same job it always has. What's new is that three restaurants opened close enough to it, and early enough in the season, to fold themselves into that existing foot traffic instead of competing against it.

What the Corridor Looks Like Once the Concerts Stop

The Meet Me at the Sound series wrapped for the season yesterday, August 28, with Carl Newton's Review closing things out. That's the real inflection point for anyone trying to read this summer accurately: the free concerts that gave Roland Avenue its Friday-night crowd are done until next year. What's left on the town's own calendar is thinner and further apart. Shop the Sound doesn't return until September 25, and after that its only other confirmed date is October 23. Movies in the Park keeps going later into the year, with a showing of Elf already on the books for November 20, but that's an occasional evening draw, not a weekly one.

So the test for the new restaurant cluster isn't Labor Day weekend, when the island is still full of visitors. It's the first quiet Tuesday in October, when the market's gone dark for a month, there's no concert to walk to, and the only reason to be on Roland Avenue is dinner itself. Marina Joe's ownership has been explicit that this is exactly the scenario they built for. Darrohn has talked about the fall months, when crowds thin out but the waterfront setting still draws people in, as the shoulder season the restaurant is designed to catch, with the layout meant to host smaller gatherings and even weddings once summer traffic fades. Coconut Cove's kitchen hours already run past the tourist dinner rush into a 9 p.m. close, and The Patio at the Surf's early opening and all-day format aren't built around a single seasonal spike at all.

That's the piece of this that a quick scroll through restaurant listings won't tell you. The interesting story in Surf City this year isn't that three places opened. It's that all three opened with an eye toward the calendar the town already runs, and the real read on whether this new stretch of Roland Avenue sticks won't come from a busy June Friday. It'll come from whether people are still showing up in October, after the concerts stop and the market goes quiet for a month, for a season the restaurants planned around and the park never really advertised.

If you're weighing what a stretch like this means for property along the corridor, or just want a neighbor's read on how Surf City's calendar actually moves through the year, Logan Sullivan Real Estate Group knows this bridge, this park, and this block of Roland Avenue as well as anyone working the island. Let's Connect.