Drive around The Circle in downtown Sebring today and the paver walkways look freshly laid, the benches sit under trimmed live oaks, and kids still climb on the blue wave play structure that shows up in half the photos anyone takes there. That part of downtown got its fix already. HGTV's Home Town Takeover put Erin and Ben Napier's crew through Circle Park and the Sebring Soda and Ice Cream Works storefront, and the results have been standing since before this year's Soda Festival crowd showed up in April.
What the show didn't touch was the empty lot at 139 North Ridgewood Drive, one block off the park, where the old Nan-ces-o-wee Hotel sat vacant for years. That lot broke ground on March 31, and if you've been past it recently, you've seen the difference between a television renovation and a construction site that's still months from a ribbon cutting.
The park got a facelift. The block behind it got an investor.
Home Town Takeover fixed what a camera crew can fix in a season: the park itself, one storefront, a few blocks of visible charm. It's a real improvement, and Circle Park earned its 1912 title as the center of "the City on the Circle" back. But a TV renovation doesn't lease storefronts or break ground on a defunct hotel site. That part had to happen on its own schedule, driven by people who don't answer to a production calendar.
That's exactly what's happening now at Sadie's Place, and the timing tells you something the show never could: which parts of downtown Sebring were cosmetic problems and which were investment problems.
Sadie's Place is the test case
The project belongs to X-Urban Construction, run by Ken and Liz LeBlanc, the same team behind Journal Plaza in Lake Placid. The Sebring Community Redevelopment Agency picked their proposal for the Nan-ces-o-wee site specifically, which means this isn't a developer who wandered into town. It's the CRA choosing a team it had already watched succeed one town over and betting the same formula plays out on North Ridgewood Drive.
At groundbreaking, four of the plaza's six storefronts were already leased, with a fifth close behind. The lineup so far:
- Brasa Negra, the flagship restaurant, serving Mexican food with an indoor and outdoor dining setup the LeBlancs have described as closer to South Beach than small-town Highlands County
- A food truck concept built into the plaza's layout rather than parked on the side
- An Airstream-based business, one of the more unusual leases in the mix
- Two additional storefronts leased at groundbreaking, with a sixth still being finalized
The site sits directly next to Sadie Kahn Memorial Park, and the project's name isn't decorative. Sadie and Mike Kahn were part of the citrus trade that built early Sebring, and their family ran a department store out of the ground floor of the Nan-ces-o-wee for decades before it closed. Their great-granddaughter attended the groundbreaking. The plaza is filling a hole that's been empty since that store shut down, on the same footprint, a few generations later.
Completion is targeted within a year of the March groundbreaking, which puts a realistic opening somewhere around spring 2027. That's the honest timeline. If you've been eyeing the fencing and wondering when Brasa Negra actually opens, next spring is the number to watch, not this fall.
The restaurant count changed faster than the buildings did
While Sadie's Place is still under construction, two other kitchens beat it to open. Jinsoo Kitchen brought Korean-inspired Asian fusion to Sebring this year, with hot stone bowls, tableside hot pot, poke bowls, sushi, and boba tea in a casual, contemporary space. It's a menu that didn't exist anywhere in Highlands County a couple of years ago.
A few miles apart on the dining spectrum sits The Cellar Grille and Wine Bar, a fine dining steakhouse that opened in January with a mural inside and a mix of bar seating, booths, and dining-room tables built for both a quiet dinner and a bigger group. It's carrying a 4.6 rating on OpenTable, and the seating variety suggests the owners expected both date nights and family celebrations to book the room.
Here's what that means if you've lived in Sebring longer than a couple of years: the town's dining options didn't just add restaurants, they added categories. A modern Asian fusion spot and a wine-forward steakhouse weren't gaps anyone was actively complaining about, because there wasn't a frame of reference for what Sebring dining could look like beyond the diners, the barbecue joints, and the soda shop. Now there is, and Sadie's Place is adding a third category, Mexican with a South Beach lean, before the first two have even had a full year to settle in.
| Spot | What it is | Status as of August 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Jinsoo Kitchen | Korean-inspired Asian fusion, hot stone bowls, sushi, boba | Open |
| The Cellar Grille and Wine Bar | Fine dining steakhouse | Open since January |
| Brasa Negra (Sadie's Place) | Mexican, indoor/outdoor seating | Under construction, targeting spring 2027 |
The rest of the Circle still runs on its own clock
None of this changes the parts of downtown that were already working. The Cottage Market of Sebring still runs its Saturday farmers market from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., with North Commerce Avenue closed between Pomegranate Avenue and Circle Park Drive for the morning. It's the kind of recurring, low-key event that doesn't need a groundbreaking or a TV crew, just a city willing to close a street once a week.
And the racing calendar that put Sebring on the map long before any of this kept going too. The 74th running of the 12 Hours of Sebring filled the raceway back in March, and the National Auto Sport Association's championships land at Sebring International Raceway on September 24, giving the town another weekend of engine noise and out-of-town visitors before the year's out.
What actually changed here
The easy version of this story is "downtown Sebring is coming back," which is true but says nothing you couldn't have guessed. The more useful version is narrower: the visible renovation everyone associates with Sebring's comeback was a television production fixing a park and a storefront in a single season. The slower, harder-to-photograph part, private capital choosing to build on a vacant lot that sat empty for years, is happening now, on a normal construction timeline, without a camera crew making it look faster than it is.
Sadie's Place is the proof that the CRA and outside developers think the momentum from the show is real enough to bet on with brick and mortar, not just paint and paver stones. Whether that bet pays off the way Journal Plaza did in Lake Placid is something you'll be able to judge for yourself next spring, when the fencing comes down and Brasa Negra opens its doors next to the park the Napiers already fixed.
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