For eleven years, one week every February turned the corner outside TwinEagles into the kind of place golf fans planned trips around. Bleachers went up along the Talon Course. Names like Fred Couples and Bernhard Langer worked their way up a leaderboard broadcast on the Golf Channel. Then it stopped. The tournament moved on, and for a while the corner outside the gates went back to being just an intersection.
It didn't stay that way. Immokalee Road at Collier Boulevard has spent the past several years filling back in, only this time the draw isn't a single week of championship golf. It's dinner, seven nights a week, split between two places that share a zip code and almost nothing else.
The Corner That Used to Host Golf's Biggest February Show
The Chubb Classic, a PGA Tour Champions stop that traces back to 1988 as the Aetna Challenge, spent eleven years at TwinEagles before the event moved to Tiburón Golf Club in 2021, landing on Tiburón's Black Course in what was the first time that layout had hosted professional play. The tournament's own history page still lists TwinEagles among its past homes, alongside stops at The Club at Pelican Bay, The Vineyards, Bay Colony and Quail West, a rotation that has quietly touched most of the area's major private clubs over nearly four decades.
While the Chubb Classic belonged to TwinEagles, the Talon Course, a Jack Nicklaus and Jack Nicklaus II co-design, carried the spotlight. TwinEagles' second course, the Eagle, designed by Steve Smyers, earned its own recognition when Golf Magazine named it Best New U.S. Private Course, a credential that has nothing to do with tournament hosting and everything to do with how the course plays day to day for members. Losing the annual telecast didn't change either course. It changed what happened around them, at the intersection residents pass through on the way to nearly everything else.
What Moved In Instead
The corner's answer to a departed golf tournament wasn't another spectator event. It was groceries, hardware and a rotating cast of restaurants built directly across from TwinEagles' entrance.
Founders Square sits on the former site of Pelican Nursery, at the southeast corner of Immokalee Road and Collier Boulevard, close enough that TwinEagles regularly shows up on lists of communities near the development, alongside Riverstone, Stonecreek and Valencia Trails. Its restaurant-anchored core, The Pointe at Founders Square, opened as a roughly 38,000-square-foot retail plaza built around eight or more restaurants. The first wave included Outback Steakhouse's third Collier County location, the 12th location of Skillets, a breakfast-and-lunch concept that started in North Naples more than 25 years ago, Fuji Sushi Bar & Asian Bistro, I Heart Mac & Cheese, in its first Southwest Florida location, Tacos & Tequila Cantina and Slicers Hoagies.
That was only the first phase. A separate section called The Plaza brought in Sunshine Ace Hardware's tenth location as its anchor. The Naples Press reported that Oar & Iron Raw Bar & Grill was a reimagined concept from RAVentures Hospitality that swapped an earlier planned 110 Grill franchise for an upscale steak-and-seafood menu with a full bar, and that Havana Libre Cuban Cuisine, a family-run restaurant that has operated on Golden Gate Parkway since 2017, added a second location at Founders Square. By last fall, the tenant list had grown again, with Panda Express, T-Yummi Vietnamese Cuisine and Kelly's Roast Beef joining the corner alongside another modern steakhouse concept, according to updates from the property's developer.
None of this reads like a single restaurant opening. It reads like a corner that decided to replace one annual event with a dining district that runs every day of the year.
A Different Kind of New Place, Five Minutes West
Founders Square isn't the only thing that changed near TwinEagles this year. A few minutes west, in the older Pebblebrooke Center strip anchored by Publix, a storefront that had cycled through more than one restaurant concept reopened this year as Bernwood Tavern & Cucina.
As The Naples Press reported, the restaurant is the work of Chef Ron Casterline, a Naples resident of nearly two decades who spent 15 years building a private and personal chef business before opening his first brick-and-mortar location. Bernwood serves Italian and Mediterranean dishes, from a frutti di mare built on lobster tail, clams, mussels, calamari and scallops to a chef's early-bird menu with a complimentary glass of wine included. It seats guests from 3 p.m. to close Monday through Saturday and until 8 p.m. on Sundays, with a happy hour running 3 to 6 p.m. at the bar.
Where Founders Square is built for volume, national chains taking large-format units on a busy corner, Bernwood is built for return visits to one room, run by the person whose name is on the door. They offer different dining experiences. Both sit inside a five-minute drive of TwinEagles' entrance. Almost nothing else about them matches.
What's Actually Open Right Now
For a resident deciding where to go tonight, the two corners are at different points in their own timelines.
- Founders Square's original restaurant wave, Skillets, Outback Steakhouse, Fuji Sushi, I Heart Mac & Cheese, Tacos & Tequila Cantina and Slicers Hoagies, opened years ago and has been running long enough to be fully absorbed into the everyday rotation.
- The Plaza's Sunshine Ace Hardware, Oar & Iron and Havana Libre followed as later additions to the same development.
- The most recent names, Panda Express, T-Yummi Vietnamese Cuisine, Kelly's Roast Beef and the newest steakhouse concept, joined the roster more recently and represent the corner's latest round of build-out.
- Bernwood Tavern & Cucina, in Pebblebrooke Center, opened this year and is already taking reservations for dinner service six nights a week plus Sunday.
The practical takeaway is that a resident who hasn't driven that stretch of Immokalee Road in a year or two will find both ends of it changed, not just one restaurant swapped for another.
The Trade Twin Eagles Actually Made
A single February tournament, however well attended, only ever touched the community one week a year. What replaced it touches the drive to Publix, the decision about where to grab dinner on a Tuesday, and the errand run that used to mean driving further into Naples. TwinEagles didn't get its golf spotlight back. It got a corner that works harder, more often, for the people who actually live behind its gates.
If you're weighing what a golf address like TwinEagles is really like day to day, beyond the course itself, Adam Dearmond tracks these corners because he works this market from the inside. Request Your Free Home Valuation if a change like this one has you thinking about what your own address is worth today.
