The Breakfast House has spent 17 years serving pancakes and omelets from a yellow bungalow near downtown Sarasota. If owner Wendy Lee Goldberg’s latest plan succeeds, the restaurant’s next chapter will begin about a mile east—in another house, with room for a much larger pancake griddle.

Goldberg is seeking to rezone two adjoining parcels at 128 N. Briggs Ave., near Fruitville Road and Tuttle Avenue, one block east from the CVS Pharmacy on the corner, from Residential Single Family 2 to Urban Mixed-Use 1. The request is for a rezoning without a site plan. 

The two parcels total 45,509 square feet, or about 1.04 acres. Goldberg purchased them for $1.15 million, May 12. The property includes a one-story home built in 1956 with 2,022 square feet of living area. The neighboring 32,009-square-foot parcel is vacant.

Goldberg plans to renovate the existing home into a new Breakfast House. The restaurant’s current bungalow at 1817 Fruitville Road won’t be moved.

“We don’t want to be in a plaza,” Goldberg said during a community workshop covering the rezone topic Tuesday evening at Selby Library. “We want to be in a house.”

The rezoning is needed before a home can become a restaurant. Because Goldberg is requesting the change without a site plan, the preliminary layouts shown at the workshop and on the Sarasota Bungalow Village website aren’t binding plans attached to the application. A future site plan and additional development approvals would still be required.

For a property of this size, the City of Sarasota’s puts the initial rezoning cost at approximately $9,128.44. Goldberg said she intends to handle much of the application process herself rather than hire a large land-use consulting firm.

“This is the first step of it,” she said. “Once this is done, then we move forward with the application.”

Goldberg began searching for a new location after learning that the property occupied by the Breakfast House and 16 other small businesses was under contract for redevelopment. The proposed project would replace the existing cottages and commercial buildings with 324 apartments and a six-level parking garage.

Because that 3.44-acre property is already zoned Downtown Edge and the developer isn’t requesting a rezoning, the apartment proposal is undergoing administrative review rather than the public process required for Goldberg’s Briggs Avenue request. The plans include 36 attainable units and about 433 parking spaces, with no retail space proposed.

Goldberg said in April that her attention was on protecting the Breakfast House rather than fighting the redevelopment.

“I have to relocate,” she said at the time. “This is our family business. I don’t have time to stop it. I need to move.”

Her daughter, Sarah Marie Fields, opened Tuesday’s workshop by describing how deeply the restaurant is tied to the Goldberg family. She and her siblings grew up there, and several now depend on the business to support their own children and families.

“Closing simply wasn’t an option, so we got to work,” Fields said.

The family initially explored houses along Fruitville Road in unincorporated Sarasota County, Fields said, but was repeatedly told that a commercial rezoning wouldn’t be supported. They shifted their search west back into the city.

Fields said Goldberg had first inquired about the Briggs Avenue property in December 2025, when it was already under contract. After that sale fell through, Goldberg contacted the listing agent again and quickly placed the property under contract.

The proposed restaurant would grow from 78 seats to about 110 while retaining the intimate scale of the original. Goldberg plans to convert the existing carport into a covered veranda, giving customers a place to sit outdoors during rain.

Inside, plans call for a coffee and juice bar, a larger kitchen, a separate prep kitchen and more storage. The current restaurant’s roughly 300-square-foot kitchen would be replaced with enough room for a dedicated six-foot pancake griddle—a meaningful upgrade for a restaurant that has promoted its pancakes, made from a family recipe, as the best in Florida.

The family is also exploring gluten-free and dairy-free dishes, expanded coffee choices, fresh juices and “dirty sodas.” The number of bathrooms would increase from two to four.

Parking would be contained on the property. Goldberg described a circular driveway that would allow older customers and people using wheelchairs or walkers to be dropped near an accessible entrance before a vehicle continues into the parking area.

She hopes to keep the restaurant’s current hours of 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Her goal is to close the original location Jan. 2 and reopen the new one around Jan. 15. That schedule depends on the rezoning, which she estimated could take four to six months.

The larger question is whether the remaining land will eventually become the Sarasota Bungalow Village envisioned by Goldberg and several neighboring business owners.

The project’s website describes a new village containing the Breakfast House, Siegfried’s Restaurant & Biergarten, the Artful Giraffe, Discover Sarasota Tours and the Cookie Cottage, arranged around a community green with shaded walkways and mature trees. Its fundraising campaign has a total goal of $2.43 million, with $250,000 sought for the first phase. The Sarasota Bungalow Village campaign is seeking $2.43 million to carry the larger project from planning through relocation and completion. The project website divides the fundraising into three stages, beginning with a $250,000 goal for project development and entitlements, followed by engineering and site preparation and, finally, moving, restoring and preparing the bungalows for the businesses to reopen. Goldberg said at Tuesday’s workshop that the participating businesses aren’t organized as a nonprofit, limiting their access to foundation funding and leaving them to seek support from customers, sponsors and other community donors.

The idea is to move several of the existing Fruitville Road bungalows onto Goldberg’s property, restore them and allow the businesses to remain together. The Artful Giraffe owners Tess and Timothy Craig, for example, currently rent their building and have said affordable commercial space with adequate parking has been difficult to find.

The Artful Giraffe owners Tess and Timothy Craig currently rent their bungalow, where they operate an art studio and gallery representing more than 300 local artists. Tess Craig says finding another affordable commercial space nearby—with enough parking for customers—would be difficult.

Craig says moving the existing buildings could preserve part of Sarasota’s identity while giving the businesses more secure, long-term homes.

“Saving some of this character, I think, is important to everybody,” she says. “We don’t need another Starbucks.”

At Tuesday’s meeting, Goldberg was careful not to present the village as settled, and stayed focused on the rezone while attendees had questions about the village concept.

“We can’t really talk about it because we don’t know if it’s happening or not,” she said. “We would love for it to happen.”

The one bungalow already offered for the project is a single-family home at 1716 10th Way owned by Sarasota Motor Club founder Scott Stevenson, who attended Tuesday’s workshop. Stevenson acquired the house with an adjoining parcel intended for the club’s expanded parking area. Rather than demolish it, he plans to donate the bungalow to Goldberg and put the money he would have spent on demolition toward moving it to the Briggs Avenue property. Goldberg said the building’s attic height still needs to be measured to determine whether it can travel the route to its proposed new home. If the move proves feasible, the house could become the first relocated building in the future village.

At the workshop, she didn’t commit to a final number of buildings and said her immediate priority is securing the rezoning needed for the restaurant.

“Right now at this point, I’m just trying to get it zoned for the restaurant,” she said.

A neighbor also raised concerns about possible traffic on a nearby private, unpaved road. Goldberg said restaurant parking would remain on her property, though the question of whether the city might help improve the road wasn’t resolved during the meeting.

For Goldberg’s family, the new property offers something the restaurant has never had: control over its home.

“It cannot get torn down,” Goldberg said.

One of her daughters added a practical condition. “As long as we pay the mortgage, we own it," she said. "So please continue to support us.”