Drive north on A1A past Milwaukee Avenue and you will pass a building that has said "Modern Mexx" on its sign for the better part of a year, sitting on land that used to be Fusion 386. Cars still pull onto the shoulder there some evenings, the same legal overflow parking that residents have watched fill up outside other restaurants along this stretch for years. The sign changed before the county ever approved the plans behind it. That gap between the sign going up and the restaurant actually opening tells you almost everything about how dining works in The Hammock right now.
Here is the thing most residents already sense but haven't had spelled out: nobody opens a restaurant on this corridor by just meeting code. Every new kitchen along A1A in The Hammock gets there by cutting a parking deal with whoever owns the lot next door. That is not an aside to the dining story here. It is the dining story.
A Corridor Built Before Anyone Expected This Much Traffic
Fusion 386 ran for 12 years at 5949 N. Ocean Shore Blvd, the address most locals still associate with the building even though the restaurant closed and the site sat dilapidated enough that the new owners called it a safety hazard in their own paperwork. That lot is L-shaped, split-zoned in a way that does not allow restaurant use by right, and small enough that fitting a modern dining room and modern parking requirements on it at the same time is close to impossible.
The new owners, operating as A1A 5949 LLC under Michael Goodman and Bruce Garrison, filed a technical site plan with Flagler County in December 2025 that asked for up to a year to start construction and two more to finish it. That is not a hidden detail. It is the timeline they put in writing, and it means residents who saw the Modern Mexx sign go up in early 2026 should not assume tacos are close. The county's own process moved in fits and starts through the winter and spring: the Planning Board approved setback variances in February, the Commission tabled the parking request entirely in March, and a divided Commission finally approved a scaled-back version in April.
The Numbers Behind The Standoff
What actually stalled Modern Mexx for two extra months was arithmetic, not opposition to Mexican food. Flagler County code required 41 parking spaces for a restaurant this size. The site could only fit 33 without removing a mature oak tree the owners wanted to keep.
Site | Seats | Sq Ft (dining) | Spaces Required | Spaces Approved |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Old Fusion 386 | 64 | 1,900 | n/a (built before current code) | 8 on site |
New Modern Mexx | 92 (incl. 20-seat bar) | 1,500 | 41 | 33 |
That 8-space gap is the entire fight. The owners closed it not by adding pavement but by signing an agreement with the neighboring Debra Jean's Cafe to borrow five of that coffee shop's spaces, since Debra Jean's closes in the late afternoon and its lot sits empty right when Modern Mexx would need it most for dinner service.
The Neighbor's Lot Is The Real Parking Lot
This is not a one-off workaround. It is how The Hammock's dining scene has been solving its space problem for years. Bronx House Pizza, the restaurant Bruno DiFabio founded before co-owning Modern Mexx, ran into the identical wall after it opened and fixed it the same way everyone eventually does here: it bought four neighboring lots in 2025 just to have somewhere for its own overflow parking to go.
Flagler County Commissioner Kim Carney put the pattern plainly during the April vote, pointing out that Bronx House Pizza's outdoor seating had already become the go-to example residents cite when they worry about the next restaurant. Commissioner Greg Hansen was blunter about the county's own role in it, saying the board has been "hornswaggled" every time on Hammock parking and arguing it was time to hold new projects to the letter of the code rather than negotiate around it again.
The Commission ultimately split 3-2. Chair Leann Pennington, along with Carney and Pam Richardson, voted to approve the reduced parking count, with Pennington noting that other Hammock restaurants, The Shape of Water among them, have dealt with the same overflow problem without the county pulling their permits after the fact. Hansen and Andy Dance voted no, unconvinced that a 92-seat restaurant with a 20-seat bar could realistically run on nine staff per shift, the number the owners had settled on after commissioners questioned an earlier, lower estimate.
None of this was residents trying to keep a restaurant out. Ed White, speaking for the Hammock Community Association, told the county exactly what most of his neighbors were thinking: "We are looking forward to the tacos. That's a true statement. We need another restaurant, we just need it built in the right way." Dennis Clark of Scenic A1A Pride pushed harder on scale, calling the project too intense for the size of the lot, but even that objection was about fit, not about whether The Hammock needed the seats.
What's Actually Coming, And What's Already Here
Two changes are worth tracking if you live along this stretch of A1A. Modern Mexx is the bigger one: a curated, non-quick-service concept from DiFabio and his partners, replacing a building that sat empty for months with something built specifically around the tree the owners fought to keep and the borrowed spaces at Debra Jean's next door. Given the construction window the owners filed with the county, a 2026 opening was always the optimistic case rather than the guaranteed one.
The other change is smaller but easier to use in the meantime. Mike and Rachel McDermott, who run Yes Coffee Co. out of a converted church space in Flagler Beach, announced in January 2026 that they were retrofitting the old drive-thru at the former SunTrust bank building on N. Ocean Shore Blvd next to Publix into a drive-thru-only Yes Coffee location, the first drive-thru restaurant of any kind in The Hammock. The rest of that building became a co-working space called Desk.Space. The McDermotts were aiming for a first-quarter opening, hopefully by March. If you've driven past recently, you likely already know whether that held. If you haven't, it's worth a look next time you're heading toward Publix.
Where To Actually Eat While You Wait
The gap left by Fusion 386's closure hasn't been a gap in options so much as a gap in variety. Hammock Grill by JT's is still turning out hand-breaded shrimp, scallops, and catfish under its tin roof, the kind of no-frills Old Florida seafood spot that never depended on a big parking lot to begin with. Bartlett's Gatherings and Gourmet keeps its patio going with flatbreads, cheese boards, and live music from Wednesday through Saturday. Rodie's runs breakfast all day, including the Foil Dog, its foil-wrapped hot dog loaded with Key Lime barbecue sauce and jalapeno Havarti. And if you're driving past Bings Landing, Captain's BBQ, another Goodman project, is worth the stop.
The parking fight over Modern Mexx is really a fight over how much more this handful of small, old A1A lots can absorb before something has to give. For now, the answer keeps being: whatever the lot next door isn't using at the time.
If you're weighing what a home along this corridor is actually like to live with day to day, from the walk to dinner to the reality of finding a parking spot on a Friday night, The Goellner Team has been tracking The Hammock and the rest of Flagler County's coastal neighborhoods closely. Request a Personalized Consultation to talk through what life here actually looks like before you decide if it's the right fit.
