Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Java & Jam to open in former Vibe club site
Goodbye, nightclub crowd. Hello, breakfasters, lunchers, brunchers and weekend dinner patrons.
The site of the former Vibe nightclub at 301 E. Las Olas Blvd. in downtown Fort Lauderdale will soon become a mostly daytime breakfast and lunch shop called Java & Jam, one of its developers said this week. The new eatery will also serve dinner on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays.
Tim Petrillo, co-founder and CEO of The Restaurant People, the development group behind Vibe and several other popular local eating and drinking establishments, said the location is being redeveloped as a “coffee shop and modern-day diner.”
Petrillo said he expects the new restaurant to open by year’s end. It hopes to establish a niche among the Las Olas workday crowd by opening at 7 each morning.
“We’ll serve breakfast sandwiches and have baristas doing smoothies and specialty coffee drinks. Plus, grab-and-go food for the downtown folks,” he said.
On nights that it won’t be open for dinner, the site will be available for private events, he said.
Vibe opened in 2010 and closed earlier this year. “We had a nice nine-year run,” he said, “and we could have redone a nightclub [at the site]. But at the end of the day, Las Olas is better suited for a coffee shop than a nightclub.”
The 3,500-square-foot site will have room for 120 patrons. About 60 employees will be hired, but the call for applicants won’t go out until around mid-November, Petrillo said.
The Restaurant People has developed more than 31 restaurants, Petrillo said, including Boatyard; Sun, Surf & Sand; Tarpon River Brewing; Spatch and Centrale.
In addition, the company coowns, with Harren Equity Partners, a 32-unit fast casual chain, Shrimp Basket, that operates in the Florida panhandle, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia and Alabama. The owners plan to migrate the chain southward through Florida in the next few years, Petrillo said.