Six months ago, if you wanted trivia, tapas, or a movie that wasn't a matinee rerun, Pace sent you somewhere else. You drove toward Gulf Breeze for a sit-down dinner with atmosphere, or you crossed into Pensacola if you wanted a weeknight out that felt like an actual plan instead of a stop at a drive-thru on Highway 90. Pace had the houses, the schools, the churches, and the traffic that comes with all three. What it didn't have was much reason to stay put after 6 p.m.
That changed this year, and it changed on one road.
Three openings, one corridor
Within the span of a few months, three separate businesses landed on or just off the same stretch of Highway 90 near Woodbine Road: Jim 'N Nick's Bar-B-Q opened its Pace location with a grand opening that drew Santa Rosa County Commissioner Bobby Burkett and the county Chamber of Commerce out to support local owner Rich Rylke. Bar-Celona, a Spanish tapas bar and lounge, opened nearby on Woodbine Road at 5640 Woodbine Rd, built around a concept its owners say northern Santa Rosa County has never had. And just this month, the Ridge Cinema 8, the eight-screen theater that's sat on Highway 90 since it opened in October 2004, got folded into a rebrand under Ashbrie Cinemas, alongside its sister theaters in Gulf Breeze and Crestview, complete with new logos, a refreshed site, and a new marketing push.
None of these three things is a big development in the way Pace usually measures growth, which tends to mean a new subdivision or another traffic light. A barbecue restaurant, a tapas bar, and a theater rebrand don't show up in permit data as anything unusual. But stacked together on the same corridor, in the same year, they add up to something Pace residents will actually notice on a Tuesday night: for the first time in a while, there's a reason to stay on Highway 90 instead of driving past it.
What actually changed at Bar-Celona
The barbecue opening was a ribbon-cutting. Bar-Celona is the one that changed the weekly calendar, because it opened with a schedule built in from day one rather than settling into one over time. The lineup, as posted on the restaurant's own listings, breaks down like this:
- Tuesday: Music Trivia Night
- Thursday: Music Bingo
- Saturday: Live music or karaoke starting at 8 p.m.
- Every night after 9 p.m., the dining room shifts into a late-night tapas sports bar, with games on the TVs and a bar crowd that runs later than most Pace kitchens stay open
- Weekends now open at 2 p.m., giving Pace an actual Saturday and Sunday afternoon option that didn't exist on this stretch before
That's not a restaurant that happens to have a bar attached. It's a restaurant that scheduled its week the way a downtown bar district would, and put it in Pace instead. If you've lived here long enough to remember driving to Gulf Breeze for a Thursday night out, this is the first local answer to that particular problem.
The marquee got a new name, not just a new coat of paint
The Ridge Cinema 8 has been part of the Pace skyline, in the modest way an eight-screen theater on Highway 90 can be, for more than two decades. It's independently owned, it's never chased the stadium-seating arms race the way the big multiplexes in Pensacola have, and most people in Pace have a specific memory tied to a movie they saw there.
What changed is less about the building and more about the name over the door. The Offerdahl family, which has owned The Ridge along with Breeze Cinema 8 in Gulf Breeze and Marquis Cinema 10 in Crestview since each one opened, recently pulled all three under a single new brand, Ashbrie Cinemas, with updated logos, a redesigned website, and a marketing campaign that treats the three theaters as one network instead of three separate local businesses. The Santa Rosa Press Gazette covered the rebrand this month, and the same story ran nearly word for word in the Crestview News Bulletin and Navarre Press, which tells you this wasn't a quiet internal decision. It was a coordinated regional move, and Pace is one of the three anchors of it.
For a moviegoer, the practical difference is small. Same screens, same seats, same box office number. But the fact that a family-owned theater chain thought Pace was worth building a shared regional identity around, rather than letting it stay the smaller, standalone cousin to the Gulf Breeze location, says something about how the ownership group is now thinking about this market.
The math on a Tuesday night
Put the three together and the shape of the change gets clearer. Jim 'N Nick's gives Pace a sit-down dinner option with enough draw that a county commissioner showed up for the ribbon-cutting. Bar-Celona gives it a built-in weekly reason to go out after dinner, on a schedule that didn't exist in Pace before this year. And the Ridge, now flying the Ashbrie banner alongside its Gulf Breeze and Crestview siblings, gives the corridor a third stop that closes out the night without anyone getting back on Highway 90 toward Pensacola.
This is not the same claim as "Pace has new restaurants," which is true of almost any growing town and tells a reader nothing they couldn't find on a review site. The specific thing worth noticing is that these three openings happened close together, on the same road, and each one fills a different part of an evening that Pace previously couldn't fill on its own. Dinner, then something to do, then a movie, all inside a few minutes of driving, is a loop that simply didn't exist here a year ago. It existed in Gulf Breeze. It existed downtown. It didn't exist in Pace.
If you've lived here long enough to have a standing habit of driving out of town for a weeknight plan, this is the year that habit got a local alternative. Trivia on Tuesday, bingo on Thursday, karaoke on Saturday, barbecue whenever you want it, and a movie theater that just told two other towns it considers itself part of the same network. None of it required a new interchange or a new grocery anchor. It required three businesses making the same bet on the same stretch of road within months of each other, and Pace residents are the ones who get to test whether the bet was right.
If you're weighing what's changing in Pace, or you're curious what a home here is worth as the town's day-to-day options keep filling in, the team at Team Bruce Baker, MBA - RE/MAX Infinity knows this corridor as well as anyone. Get Your Instant Home Valuation and see what your Pace address is worth today.
