"It's generation upon generation who have been coming since 1922," Billy's Tap Room manager Joe Oliva told Hometown News Volusia in May, describing a bar that had gone from cardboard-covered windows to standing-room-only in the span of a few weeks. By 4:45 on a Wednesday afternoon, there was already a waitlist for the dining room. Nobody had sent out a grand-opening announcement. The crowd showed up anyway.
That's the kind of return Ormond Beach residents have been waiting on since the building at 58 E. Granada Blvd went dark after developer Bill Jones bought it in 2022. But the Billy's story is really two stories happening at once, and the second one matters just as much if you live here and are trying to figure out where Granada Boulevard is actually headed. While one developer has spent years stitching together a walkable stretch of restored buildings near the bridge, a completely different kind of growth has been filling in a few blocks west, built around national chains and a car-friendly footprint. Both changed this year. Neither looks like the other.
Why a Restaurant Takes Three Years to Reopen
Developer Bill Jones bought Billy's in 2022 for $1.85 million from Doug and Lillian Rand, who had run the restaurant for twelve years before that. What he got was a building constructed in 1920, still running on iron pipes and cloth-insulated wiring that predated the interstate highway system. Jones described the gut renovation to the Observer as, simply, "a demolition."
The building had earned that kind of attachment for a reason. Billy MacDonald opened a combination drugstore, soda fountain and restaurant there in 1922, four years after moving south from a lounge-manager job at hotels in New York. He remodeled the property into the Tudor Revival structure that still defines the block, added a wing along Halifax Avenue, and ran it with his family through Prohibition, when the back rooms reportedly did a little more than sell sandwiches and newspapers. His sons Frank and Billy Jr. kept it going until 1985. After that it passed through a string of owners, the Youngs, Kathy Jones, Monk Noell for seventeen years, Maria Azabad-Reisch starting in 2006, and finally the Rands in 2011, before Jones bought it in 2022 and closed it for the rebuild.
What reopened in April carries that history forward on purpose. The Key West grouper is back on the menu, along with a scallop pot pie and an Allen Brothers Kansas City strip, plus the relish tray regulars remember. The dining room keeps penny tile floors and a room lined with bookshelves named for Billy MacDonald himself. It is not a new restaurant wearing an old name. It is the same address, functioning again.
One Developer, Both Sides of the Bridge
Billy's isn't Jones's only Ormond Beach property, and that's the part of the story that changes how you should think about the whole corridor. His existing restaurant group, 31 Supper Club, Alexander's and The Grind, sits on the west side of the Granada bridge, on the mainland side where downtown Ormond Beach has quietly been rebuilding for years. His broader portfolio also includes Ormond Garage, Rose Villa and Alexander's Prime. Until Billy's, all of that restoration work stayed on one side of the Halifax River.
Buying the Billy's building meant crossing the bridge for the first time. It's the first property in Jones's collection sitting on the beachside stretch of Granada rather than the mainland side. If you've been treating west Granada and beachside Granada as two separate dining strips that happen to share a street name, that's less true than it used to be. One local developer now has a direct stake in both ends of the crossing, and the restoration playbook that rebuilt the west side block by block just landed east of the river.
A Few Blocks West, a Different Kind of Change
None of that overlaps with what's happening at Granada Pointe, further west near Nova Road. That corridor has been filling in with a different growth model entirely: national chains on new pad sites rather than restored buildings.
Culver's opened there with a grand-opening celebration on January 6, 2025, at 655 W. Granada Blvd, on a site the developer originally planned alongside a second Ormond Beach IHOP next door, joining the existing IHOP on S. Atlantic Ave. The same site plan set aside more acreage for future restaurants, roughly two and a half acres near a car wash and Wawa, plus another five acres further west.
This fall adds a name that's new to the whole county. F&D Cantina is taking over the former Rock Bottom space on Granada, its first Volusia County location, with a dining room, a patio, a speakeasy tequila bar, and a rooftop bar built around Mexican dishes and cocktails. It's a genuinely new concept rather than a restoration, and it's arriving at the opposite end of the boulevard's transformation from what's happening at Billy's.
What This Actually Changes About a Night on Granada
If you live in Ormond Beach, this reshapes the calculus of where you park.
Near the bridge, on both the west mainland block and now the beachside anchor at Billy's, you're looking at a cluster of restaurants under connected ownership, close enough together to walk between if you're headed out for the evening. That's the version of Granada built for parking once.
Further out toward Granada Pointe, you're driving to a specific destination rather than wandering a strip, and what's there is trending toward names you'd recognize from anywhere in the country, with F&D Cantina as the one true local newcomer breaking that pattern this fall.
Neither version is better. They're just different answers to the same question, and until this year, most of that difference sat only on the west side of the river. Billy's reopening means the historic end of Granada now has a foothold on both banks, while the newer end keeps building outward from the highway in.
For anyone who grew up driving past the cardboard-covered windows at 58 E. Granada Blvd wondering if the place would ever come back, it has. The bigger shift is that it came back as part of something larger than one building, on a street that's now visibly rebuilding itself from two different directions at once.
If you're the kind of Ormond Beach resident who tracks what's changing block by block along Granada, Stacy Kelly would love to hear which spot you're most excited to try first, Billy's included.
