The Rusty Hook Is Gone, and It Explains Everything Happening Along Pompano's Waterfront Right Now

If you pulled up to the docks at Sands Harbor Resort & Marina looking for Rusty Hook Tavern this year, you found something else. The no-frills dockside bar that regulars pulled up to by boat for years is gone, and in its place sits Lola's on the Water, a Mediterranean-American restaurant with a poolside bar and a menu built for a different kind of Friday night. It opened in January 2026 at 125 N. Riverside Drive, and the change happened fast enough that longtime regulars are still adjusting to the new sign.

Half a mile north, the Fisher Family Pier looks almost exactly like it did two years ago. Same restaurant lineup. Same pace. Nothing about that stretch of Pompano changed this year, and that gap between the two is the actual story.

What Happened at the Marina

Lola's on the Water didn't sneak up on anyone who watches Harbor Village closely. The Sands Harbor property needed a stronger restaurant to match its 60 guest rooms and full-service marina, and the operators reworked the old tavern into something with an actual kitchen program, an Intracoastal-facing patio, and event space that books out for weddings and corporate parties. Miami New Times covered the opening in January, describing it as Pompano Beach's newest indoor-outdoor waterfront dining destination, situated to catch boat traffic straight off the Intracoastal.

The bones of the building did not change much. The dock is the same dock. What changed is who owns the concept and how fast they moved. Rusty Hook operated under one identity for years. Lola's arrived, opened, and started taking reservations within a matter of months.

The Pier a Half Mile North Runs on a Different Clock

Walk over to the Fisher Family Pier and you're standing on a project that took over a decade to finish. The city began assembling the surface parking lot and surrounding land back in 2010, issued a request for qualifications for a master developer in 2011, and didn't sign the development agreement until 2013. Construction on the six-acre Fishing Village broke ground in January 2017 and continued through 2023. The pier itself, first built in 1963, got its current elevated redesign, built to withstand rising sea levels, starting in 2019 and reopened in 2020, but the city didn't hold the formal dedication ceremony, honoring former mayor and current Broward County Commissioner Lamar Fisher, until April 2, 2022.

The restaurant row that came out of all that planning has barely moved since it opened: Beach House Pompano, Oceanic at Pompano, the tiki-themed Lucky Fish, Burger Fi, Baresco, Kilwins, Cannoli Kitchen, and How You Brewin Coffee Company, all anchored by a dual-branded Hilton Tru and Home2 Suites hotel and a parking garage with an aluminum sail roofline that's become its own landmark. That lineup is the finished product of a single master-developer agreement, and finished products don't turn over every few months.

Here's the shape of it side by side:

Why One Side Moves Fast and the Other Doesn't

The pier corridor exists because the city found one developer and gave that developer a decade to build a district. Old Town and Harbor Village work on a completely different mechanism. The Pompano Beach Community Redevelopment Agency runs a Strategic Investment Program that funds interior buildouts, electrical, plumbing, drywall, HVAC, for individual restaurant and retail tenants, plus a separate Façade and Business Site Improvement Program for exterior work. Both are built for one operator taking over one building at a time, not a single master plan covering six acres.

The CRA's own director explained why that matters for a project like The Vault, a speakeasy-themed bar converting an old bank building on NE 1st Street: the business owner covers most of the buildout, but the grant is often "a deciding factor in the investor's decision to choose our developing area over another more established neighborhood." The Vault kept the original bank vault as its centerpiece and leaned into the building's 1920s history, including murals referencing the Ashley Gang, the crew that actually robbed that bank in 1924. That's a building doing something entirely different from what it did a century ago, funded by a grant program designed to move at the speed of one small business owner's timeline, not a master developer's.

The Same Pattern, a Few Blocks Over

Flamingo Seafood tells the same story from a different angle. It took over a former Marathon gas station on East Atlantic Boulevard, kept the exterior recognizable enough that regulars still call it "the old gas station," and turned the inside into a full raw bar with a liquor license and a retail counter selling the day's catch. Parker, the owner, works directly with local commercial fishermen and personally stocks the oyster selection, the kind of operator-level decision that only happens when one person controls the whole build rather than a developer managing a master tenant mix.

South Bar & Kitchen set the template a few years earlier, when restaurateur Mike Linder, who also built Jet Runway Café, YOT Bar & Kitchen, and Canyon, brought a Cajun-leaning Southern concept into The Backyard, the public plaza that anchors Old Town's redevelopment. That opening proved the model worked before The Vault and Flamingo Seafood followed it. Old Town isn't one project finishing on a fixed schedule. It's a running experiment, building by building, funded a grant at a time.

What This Means for a Weekend in Pompano

If you're deciding where to spend a Saturday along the water right now, the two corridors genuinely offer different experiences, not just different menus.

• Pier corridor, for something settled. Grab tacos at Baresco or a burger at Burger Fi, walk the 900-foot pier to the fish-shaped end and look through the fisheye cutout at the water below, then post up at Pier 6 Rooftop six stories above the Atlantic for sunset. Thursdays run an all-day happy hour, and Saturdays bring Tropic Nights with a DJ.
• Harbor Village, for something new. Book the patio at Lola's on the Water and watch the boat traffic on the Intracoastal, especially around sunset when the marina lights come on.
• Old Town, for something in progress. Stop into Flamingo Seafood for oysters, check on The Vault's build-out, and grab a plate at South Bar & Kitchen in The Backyard plaza while the neighborhood keeps filling in around it.

None of that requires knowing the funding structure behind any of it. But the reason Old Town feels like it's changing every time you walk through, while the pier feels exactly like it did last year, comes down to which mechanism built each place. One corridor finished. The other is still being built out, one small business grant at a time.

If you've been watching this stretch of North Broward shift and you're weighing what it means for your own plans here, whether that's a move, a rental, or just curiosity about what your place near the water is worth these days, Power Duo Group has been tracking Pompano Beach and the surrounding North Broward corridor since 2001. Get your instant home valuation and see where your property stands in a market that's clearly still writing itself, one building at a time.