Three New Restaurants Opened on the Same Stretch of Wickham Road. Together They Cover the Whole Day.
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
Drive North Wickham Road through Suntree this month and you'll pass three restaurants that didn't exist a year ago, each one sitting in a building that used to be something else entirely. Charlie & Jake's Barbecue and Brewery closed in 2022. Niki's Family Restaurant, a fixture on that same road for 35 years, closed its doors on May 31. Somewhere nearby, Mi Jalisco closed too. All three spaces have new tenants now, and the pattern connecting them says more about how this corridor works than any single opening does on its own.
Charlie & Jake's, at 6300 N. Wickham Road, was one of the first restaurants in Brevard County to brew its own beer on-site, a detail that would matter again later. It went dark in 2022 and sat empty for a while before anyone announced what would replace it.
Niki's, at 6947 N. Wickham Road in Suntree Plaza, had a longer run and a bigger footprint in daily life. Thirty-five years is long enough that a restaurant stops being a business and starts being a landmark people use to give directions. When it closed at the end of May 2025, the space it left behind was one that neighborhood diners kept watching, waiting to see who would move in.
Mi Jalisco, further north at 7700 N. Wickham Road, closed as well, though with less fanfare than the other two. Three closures, one road, all within a few years of each other. On paper that could read as a corridor losing its footing. What moved in tells a different story.
The Charlie & Jake's building became Bunky's Raw Bar & Brewery, and the new owners didn't just take over the address, they took over the brewery equipment too. Colin Jones and Douglas Walker, who already run the Bunky's in Indialantic and Charlie & Jake's Barbecue in Indian Harbour Beach, gutted the interior, moved the bar to the center of the room, and rebuilt around a glass-walled brewhouse that once made this spot one of the county's earliest craft breweries. Local brewer Will Brant now runs that operation.
"We really want to go for it and see if we can bring back the integrity of the great beers that came out of that brewery," Jones said.
The rest of the space seats more than 200 people between the dining room and the patio, with a menu built around oysters, clams, smash burgers, and a few newer additions like tuna crispy rice, alongside standards carried over from the Indialantic location.
Jones has a personal history with this stretch of road. He lived in Suntree before eventually relocating to Satellite Beach, and he's said the area had been on his mind for a while before the Charlie & Jake's building became available. He and Walker are also the fourth owners of the Bunky's name since it launched in Satellite Beach in 1981, which means they inherited a brand with decades of turnover behind it and a customer base that already has opinions about what belongs on the menu.
"You'll see that we go to our community and say, 'Hey, what do you love and what would you like to see on the menu?'" Jones said.
That's a different starting position than opening a restaurant cold. The Suntree location wasn't a bet on an unproven concept. It was an established operator extending a format that already worked less than ten miles away.
At the north end of the corridor, the former Mi Jalisco space became Pepe's Cantina, which held its grand opening on September 18 with food, margaritas, and a live DJ. The Suntree location seats about 150 guests and joins five other Pepe's Cantina locations already operating around Florida, with two more reportedly in the works.
Where Bunky's is a legacy Space Coast brand returning to a former home turf, Pepe's Cantina is something closer to a regional group finding its next address. Neither is a first-time restaurant experiment. Both are operators who had already worked out their format somewhere else before bringing it to Wickham Road.
Mimosa's, which replaced Niki's, sits in between those two models. It's a smaller daytime concept, open daily from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. for breakfast, brunch, and lunch, with a menu built around pancakes, crepes, egg skillets, and a rotating list of mimosas, plus lunch options like a veggie reuben and a harvest salad.
Here's a quick way to keep the three straight:
Line up the hours and something clicks into place. Mimosa's closes at 3 p.m., right around when Bunky's is settling into its lunch crowd. Bunky's runs from late morning through dinner on weeknights and stays open later on Fridays. Pepe's Cantina, based on its evening-focused grand opening, is positioned as the dinner and margaritas stop.
None of these three businesses coordinated with each other. Each one made an independent decision about hours, concept, and menu. But the net effect is a stretch of Wickham Road that now covers breakfast through last call without three restaurants competing for the same 7 p.m. table. A year ago, that same stretch had one empty building, one restaurant winding down after 35 years, and a third quietly closing. Now it has three concepts with essentially no overlap in when they're busiest.
That's the part worth sitting with. This wasn't a corridor that got revitalized by a single big project or a coordinated redevelopment plan. It filled back in through three separate decisions, made by operators who already knew what they were doing, landing in a sequence that happens to work.
If you've found a new go-to between Mimosa's coffee and Bunky's raw bar, or you're still working out what's on tap at the new brewery, Ryan Reilly would like to hear about it. He keeps a close eye on how this stretch of Suntree keeps changing, one storefront at a time. Let's Connect.
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