"If it's impacted us, it's probably given our residents more options in restaurants." Windermere Town Council Member John Armstrong said that in August 2014, when the Grove at Isleworth was still filling out its first wave of leases. He was talking about a shopping center that had just signed a proper restaurant to go with its grocery store and its gym.
Twelve years later, that restaurant is gone, and nothing coming in to replace it eats with anything but a fork you grabbed yourself off a counter.
Dexter's, the full-service tenant that opened alongside the center in 2011, closed in early 2025 after roughly fourteen years anchoring the corner of Conroy-Windermere Road and South Apopka-Vineland Road. Now CAVA is on its way into a suite at 4757 The Grove Drive, according to a May 2026 report from the West Orange Times & Observer, which noted hiring signs already up in the windows even though no opening date had been set. For residents of Isleworth, Tildens Grove, Casa Del Lago, and the other subdivisions that treat this intersection as their weekly errand stop, that's the actual story: the center's one sit-down table is gone, and the newest name signing a lease is a Mediterranean bowl counter, not another restaurant with a host stand.
What's Actually Open Right Now
Walk the center today and here's what you're choosing from. Every single option is order-at-the-counter.
- Hawkers Asian Street Fare: counter service, small plates
- Panera Bread: fast-casual, with a drive-thru
- BurgerFi: counter service
- Chipotle: counter service
- Smoothie King and Jeremiah's Italian Ice: grab-and-go
- The Vineyard Wine Bar: the closest thing left to a lingering seat, though it's a bar program rather than a full kitchen with table service
- Regus, GNC, Chase Bank: the professional and daily-errand layer that fills out the rest of the center
Publix and the LA Fitness Signature Club anchor the whole property, same as they have since the center opened. What's changed is everything built around them.
The Fourteen Years Dexter's Held the Corner
When the Grove at Isleworth opened in 2011 at 4744 South Apopka-Vineland Road, the 2014 reporting from the West Orange Times & Observer named exactly three restaurants filling out the retail mix around Publix: Dexter's, BurgerFi, and Panera Bread. That was the whole dining lineup for the center's first several years. The second phase, which added roughly 31,500 square feet in 2017 and 2018 according to Tavistock Development Company's own project page, brought in Hawkers, Chipotle, a drive-thru Starbucks, and second-floor Regus office space. Dexter's stayed put through both phases. It was the one place in the center where you sat down, ordered off a menu, and had a server bring the check.
It closed in early 2025, and the center has operated without a full-service restaurant since. CAVA's arrival adds another counter-service option rather than a replacement for that sit-down role.
Why a Bowl Counter, Not Another White-Tablecloth Concept
CAVA's signing makes sense once you look at what the corner actually does for traffic. Conroy-Windermere and Apopka-Vineland is a high-volume intersection by any local measure, and a fast-casual concept built around an assembly-line bowl format is built for exactly that kind of drive-by, grab-dinner-on-the-way-home pattern. It doesn't need the same evening dwell time a full-service restaurant depends on to make its rent.
That's a different bet than the one the center made in 2011. Dexter's was a destination in its own right, the kind of place you'd choose specifically, not just end up at because it was between the gym and the grocery store. CAVA doesn't need to be a destination. It needs to be fast, and it needs the corner's existing traffic to walk in without much persuading.
For Windermere residents who've watched the center's roster shift over fifteen years, this is the pattern worth clocking: the tenant mix isn't getting smaller, it's getting faster. Every addition since 2017 has been counter service. The one full-service holdout just left, and its replacement isn't reaching for that role back.
What This Actually Changes For Dinner
If your Tuesday night plan is a fast bowl, a burger, a burrito, or a wrap, the Grove has you covered better than it ever has, and CAVA will only add to that once it opens. If what you actually want is a sit-down dinner with a server checking on your table, the Grove hasn't been that option for a while now, and it's not about to become one again.
That means a drive east on Conroy-Windermere Road toward Sand Lake Road's Restaurant Row corridor in Dr. Phillips remains the default for anyone in southern Windermere who wants an actual reservation rather than a counter number. Residents in this corner of 34786 have been making that drive for years, but it's fair to be honest about what the Grove is and isn't built to do. It's the place for the Saturday morning Publix run, the after-gym smoothie, the fast dinner on a night nobody wants to cook. It's not, at the moment, the place for the occasion dinner.
Main Street, roughly two miles west in the historic core of downtown Windermere, tells a different story right now. The reopened corner at Main and East 6th has been adding to the town's food scene on the opposite end of the spectrum from fast-casual chains, which makes the contrast between the two ends of Windermere's dining map sharper than it's been in years. One corridor is speeding up. The other is filling in with something slower.
None of this touches Isleworth's reputation as the address that put Windermere on the map for professional athletes and golf's biggest names. The Grove sits at the community's south gate, and it's been the default errand stop for that neighborhood and its neighbors since 2011 regardless of who's behind the counter. What's different is the counter itself. A shopping center that opened with one real restaurant and built out from there has ended up, fifteen years on, with zero.
Whether that's a loss depends on what you actually wanted from the corner in the first place. If it was speed, the Grove has never been better at delivering it. If it was somewhere to sit down without planning ahead, that option just left the building, and nothing signing a lease right now is bringing it back.
Windermere's daily rhythm keeps shifting in small ways like this one, long before any of it shows up in a listing description. If you're weighing a move into this corner of Orange County and want a read on how a neighborhood actually functions day to day, not just what the market data says, Elite Sport Network can walk you through it. Book a private consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.
