Malio's has meant steak in Tampa since 1969. This September, the family that built it will open a restaurant designed around the opposite, wild-caught fish, served across a dining room, a patio and a rooftop steps from the beach at Pass-a-Grille.
The restaurant is called Moon, and it will fill roughly 4,000 square feet on the ground floor of the Berkeley Beach Club, the hotel and rooftop venue at 109 8th Avenue on Pass-a-Grille. Owners Derek and Jen Iavarone are planning about 200 seats across the three areas, a coastal seafood menu, and a drinks list that leans European. The rooftop, set above the dining room and patio, will give the restaurant an open-air level looking out over Pass-a-Grille. It will be the family's third restaurant, alongside Malio's Prime Steakhouse in downtown Tampa and Malio's Beach House on St. Pete Beach, three rooms that trace an arc across Tampa Bay from the downtown tower to the Pinellas beaches.
For the Iavarones, the change in direction is deliberate. Malio's Prime, the downtown fixture in the cylindrical Rivergate Tower on North Ashley Drive, trades in Creekstone prime beef, coldwater lobster tails and a wine list more than 200 labels deep. Derek Iavarone has described Moon as the more playful counterpart to the steakhouses, a place where they can work looser and more creatively than a steakhouse format allows. In practice that means the beef gives way to seafood towers, wild-caught entrées, pasta and charcuterie.
The Malio's line runs deep in the city. The original Malio's opened in 1969 under Malio Iavarone, whose family had been running a restaurant since 1945, and the name has stayed with the family across more than five decades and a move into the Rivergate Tower, the downtown cylinder locals know as the beer can building. The name has long meant a steakhouse. Malio's Prime keeps weekday lunches and dinners downtown; Moon steps away in three directions at once, to seafood, to the beach, and to weekend brunch.
The address itself carries a more recent history. The ground-floor space at the Berkeley Beach Club was most recently The Dewey, a restaurant that took damage when Hurricanes Helene and Milton struck the Tampa Bay coast back to back in the fall of 2024, and it never reopened. Moon will bring the room back into service, nearly two years after the storms forced it shut.
The menu the Iavarones have outlined moves across more than one register. At dinner, the kitchen is planning wild-caught seafood, hearty pastas, charcuterie and the seafood towers, with cooking that draws on the family's Italian and Spanish recipes. Lunch comes down in formality, built around burgers, grouper sandwiches and soft-shell crab po'boys, a more casual register than the beef-and-wine format downtown. The bar will pour European wines and Mediterranean-leaning cocktails. Moon is set to serve lunch and dinner Tuesday through Saturday, dark on Sundays and Mondays, with a Saturday brunch planned.
The name is a family one. Moon is the middle name of the Iavarones' daughter, chosen for the full moon that rises over the couple's backyard. It gives the restaurant an identity of its own, a step away from the surname it still carries. Derek and Jen Iavarone run the group together, and Moon puts their daughter's name on the door of the newest room.
Pass-a-Grille, the historic southern tip of St. Pete Beach, sits a short walk from the Gulf. The Berkeley Beach Club, a dog-friendly hotel of beach-themed suites with kitchens and private terraces, sits a few steps from the white sand, and its rooftop lounge draws visitors for the Gulf sunsets. Moon will give the property a full-service restaurant on the ground floor, a third address for a family whose others sit in downtown Tampa and on Gulf Boulevard.
Moon by Malio's is scheduled to open in September 2026 at 109 8th Avenue, Pass-a-Grille. Its arrival will give the Iavarones a steakhouse, a beach house and a seafood house across two counties, Hillsborough and Pinellas, with the newest of the three built around the tide rather than the grill.
