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.
The Highlands News-Sun reported that Sadie's Place broke ground on March 31 at 139 North Ridgewood Drive, one block off the park, on the former site of the Nan-ces-o-wee Hotel, which had sat vacant for years. Construction is still underway, months from a ribbon cutting.
Circle Park is renovated; Sadie's Place is under construction
Home Town Takeover renovated Circle Park and the Sebring Soda and Ice Cream Works storefront. Circle Park, established in 1912, sits at the center of the "City on the Circle." Sadie's Place is a separate development on the former hotel site.
Circle Park's renovation is complete, while Sadie's Place is still under construction.
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 selected their proposal for the Nan-ces-o-wee site.
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
- One additional storefront was leased at groundbreaking
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. 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, as the first two continue 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
A more specific view of downtown includes a completed park and storefront renovation alongside a new development on a formerly vacant lot.
Brasa Negra is among the businesses expected to open there.
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