Following delays, Naked Farmer to open Sarasota location
By Breanne Williams
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Jun 18, 2024

After extensive delays, Tampa-based Naked Farmer will open its long-awaited University Town Center location on June 19.

The farm-to-table restaurant will fill a 2,300-square-foot space adjacent to Blaze Pizza in the West District at the University Town Center. This will be the company’s seventh location, having opened its sixth restaurant in downtown Miami earlier this year.

Though the restaurant was announced in late 2022, a spokesman for the company said they experienced “quite a few delays” during construction and postponed opening until this year.

“UTC has become a hub for health and wellness, with its variety of fitness studios, free weekly outdoor workout classes and proximity to Nathan Benderson Park, so it was a natural choice for us to grow into this area and serve the health-conscious community,” Naked Farmer founder Jordan Johnson said in a statement.

The company’s mission is to become 100% local in its food sourcing. The menu will be built in conversation with local farmers. Some summer menu items are chili-crunch green beans, street cart corn and farmer’s panzanella. The ingredients are harvested roughly 24 hours before being served.

The company opened its first location in downtown St. Petersburg in 2020 during the pandemic and began offering boxes of farm-fresh vegetables for pickup and delivery in addition to the restaurant menu. It has since expanded across Tampa Bay, Miami and Fort Lauderdale.

The UTC location will feature indoor and outdoor dining as well as pickup, delivery and catering.

UTC is owned by Benderson Development and lies off Interstate 75 and University Parkway on the border of Sarasota and Manatee counties. It totals more than 4 million square feet and features more than 250 specialty stores, more than three hotels, more than 80 restaurants and more than 250,000 square feet of office space.

“The vision set forth by the Benderson family is very inspirational to us,” Johnson said. “We’re grateful to be a small part of it as we continue our mission to build a better food system in the area’s premier lifestyle center.”