Drive the stretch of Wesley Chapel Boulevard near Lexington Oaks Boulevard on a Tuesday night and the block reads like two different projects stitched together. One end has cars in the lot, a lit sign, and a line for Korean fried chicken. The other end has finished buildings, glass storefronts, and nothing moving behind the windows. Both halves belong to the same $24 million project. Only one of them is doing what it was built to do.
The Hub at Lexington Oaks sits at the corner of Wesley Chapel Boulevard and Lexington Oaks Boulevard, a few hundred feet off Interstate 75. It's the second project from Center Connect Development, the sibling team of Courtney Bissett-Hayes and Paul Bissett who built The Hub at Bexley, a 44,000 square foot retail village that opened in Land O'Lakes back in 2022. This one runs smaller, roughly 40,000 square feet spread across six buildings, and the developers' own pitch for it is "Sip, Savor and Socialize." Nine restaurants, a golf simulator, a barber shop, a nail lab, and an EV charging station were all announced as part of the lineup back in January.
Eight months later, fewer than half of them are serving anyone.
What you can actually walk into right now
As of the most recent confirmed openings, seven tenants at The Hub are open for business:
- Headlines Barber Shop — a Tampa Bay chain with locations in Brandon, Sunlake, Land O'Lakes, and Northdale, now on its seventh location here
- Lexington Nail Lab
- The Clubhouse Golf Simulator
- Pet Wants Wesley Chapel — a locally owned franchise unit run by a Pasco County resident
- La Creación Bistro — the sit-down sibling to La Creación Express at the KRATE container park, serving a different menu across breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with a state beverage license issued in March 2026
- Bonchon Korean Fried Chicken — opened Wednesday, May 20, becoming the sixth tenant to turn on its lights, according to a report from Wesley Chapel Community
- Hummus Republic — opened July 20 at 26962 Halter Loop, run by owners Annu and Ashish Kumar, according to a firsthand account from Neighborhood News that sampled the menu across three visits
That's the honest list. Everything else announced for the property, Saigon Pho Wesley Chapel, Farmer's Milk, The Monk's Indian Fusion Cuisine, Island Grill, Brew Bar Self Pour, Urban Crunch Creamery Café, and Cinnaholic, has been named publicly but has not been confirmed as open in any report since midsummer.
The order tells you something the announcement didn't
Look at which businesses opened first and a pattern shows up that the original tenant list never hinted at. The earliest openings were the ones with the simplest build-outs or the shortest learning curve: a barber shop, a nail salon, a golf simulator, a pet supply counter. None of those need a commercial kitchen, a hood suppression system, or a liquor license from scratch.
Bonchon broke that pattern in one direction. Franchisee Sherry Askander built out roughly 70 indoor seats, an outdoor patio, and a full bar stocked with beer, sake, and soju, according to a report from What's New Pasco, which is a heavier lift than most of the food concepts still waiting to open. But Bonchon had an advantage the others didn't: it's an established franchise with an existing fast-casual location on State Road 54 in Lutz, so the operator wasn't building a menu and a kitchen system from zero.
Compare that to Island Grill, which as of an August 2025 check-in was still finalizing its menu with no logo to share yet, even though its buildout permit had been issued more than a year earlier and gone through multiple architectural revisions. Or Hummus Republic, a build-your-own bowl concept with a comparatively simple line, which still took until July to open even though sign permits were filed back in April. The kitchens that needed the most from-scratch work, not the fanciest concepts, are the ones still dark.
That's useful to know if you've been reading the tenant list and picturing a finished food hall. What you're actually looking at is a staggered rollout where the businesses with an existing operational playbook opened first, and the ones building something genuinely new to the market, especially Wesley Chapel's first Desi-Chinese kitchen at The Monk's and its first sit-down Caribbean spot at Island Grill, are taking the longest.
What's still dark, and why it might stay that way a while longer
More than four months after Bonchon's debut, three concepts still have no reported opening date at all: The Monk's Indian Fusion Cuisine, Island Grill, and Cinnaholic. Two more, Farmer's Milk and Brew Bar Self Pour, had signage up by spring but no confirmed launch since. Saigon Pho Wesley Chapel was targeting a July opening according to one report, but no follow-up has confirmed it actually happened.
None of this means the project has stalled. The Landing Bar and Grill, which will be the largest footprint in the center at 4,528 square feet, is relocating an existing Wesley Chapel sports bar rather than building brand new, which suggests it's further along operationally than the ground-up concepts even without a confirmed date. But if you've been waiting for the six-building block to feel like the "downtown" the marketing promised, that promise is still mostly aspirational. Right now it's a genuinely good stop for a haircut, a round on the simulator, and a plate of Korean fried chicken. It is not yet the place where you can cover an entire evening, appetizer to dessert, without leaving the parking lot.
What this actually means for a weekend this fall
If you live in Lexington Oaks, Meadow Pointe, Seven Oaks, or Union Park and you're deciding where to send visiting family or where to land after a Friday errand run, here's what's real today. Bonchon's dining room seats about 70 and runs a full bar menu, so it can handle a group. Hummus Republic is the faster stop, built for a weeknight bowl rather than a sit-down evening. La Creación Bistro is your best bet if you want a meal that isn't fast casual, since it's the only full-service breakfast-through-dinner kitchen currently running on the property.
Everything else on the original list is still a "check back later" item. That's not a criticism of the project. Mixed-use developments built around locally owned and first-to-market concepts take longer to fill than a strip center anchored by national chains that already have a build-out manual. It does mean that anyone treating the January tenant announcement as a done deal is working from information that's eight months out of date.
If you're weighing what this corner of Wesley Chapel is turning into, or you're trying to figure out how a half-finished retail corridor like this one factors into a street's day-to-day livability, that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground read Mazzotta Mallios Homes keeps current for this stretch of Wesley Chapel Boulevard. Reach out if you want the next update before it hits the local blogs.
