For twenty-plus years, one address on 2nd Street did the heavy lifting of Naples dining. Michael's on Naples was where you took your parents when they flew in, where you booked the anniversary table, where the wine list stayed thick enough to justify a second visit. Late in 2025 the restaurant was sold to Kronfli Bros., and the block that had run on a single restaurant for a generation quietly became something else.
By the first week of June this year, it was running on two.
The block that split in half
The through-line is a person, not a brand. Massimo Aronne led Michael's on Naples through its long run before the sale. On February 4, he opened Massimo's Naples at 5616 E. 2nd St., directly next door to the space he used to run. The concept is pared back from what came before: simple Italian pastas, pizza, and wine. The wood-fire oven is a hand-built piece from Giuseppe Crisa of Forno Classico in Santa Barbara, built by hand in a month and installed earlier this year. The marble tables and chandeliers from the old room got refurbished rather than replaced. If you ate on this block in the 2010s, most of the surfaces will feel familiar.
Four months later, on June 1, Long Beach's first Bacari opened its doors, following a friends and family preview that launched beforehand, at 5620 E. 2nd St. That is the actual former Michael's building, next door to Massimo's, now under the ninth Kronfli Bros. concept. Bacari Long Beach is a Venetian-inspired small plates restaurant featuring Mediterranean-influenced dishes by Chef Lior Hillel, the 10th restaurant of Kronfli Brothers, with a rotating curation of small-production wines, eclectic beers, craft cocktails, and a 90-minute open bar special. The two-story buildout kept extremely subtle hints of remnants from Michael's, with the marble bartop on the roof remaining the most obvious, but almost everything else got rebuilt around rich wood flooring, exposed timber beams, textured plaster walls, arched masonry details, vintage-style chandeliers, and uniquely upholstered chairs. There is a rooftop bar and dining area with a retractable covering, plus live music from local artists.
So one block, two doors, one lineage split in two directions. That is the sentence to hold onto.
What that means for a Wednesday night
For anyone who already lives here, the practical read is more useful than the story.
If you want the food and the people from the old Michael's era in a smaller room, that is Massimo's, and the hours are tight. Yelp has it open Wednesday through Sunday, 4:00 to 10:00 p.m., closed Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday and Thursday are still the openings a walk-in has a chance at.
If you want the room itself, meaning the two-story building the block was built around, that is now Bacari, and the operating rhythm is the opposite. It runs seven days, Monday through Thursday 4:30 p.m., Friday until midnight, Saturday and Sunday with brunch service from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and dinner into the late night. That is the first time this block has had weekend brunch and a midnight close since the pre-pandemic era. If you have been driving out to 2nd & PCH or into Belmont Shore for a late Friday drink, that trip just got shorter.
There is a third data point worth folding in. Longbeachize's Brian Addison, who tracks openings across the city, wrote that the dire sense of pending doom in 2026 for the hospitality industry can certainly feel like an unseen weight, but perhaps no story is more uplifting than Massimo's Naples, which will open its doors on February 4. That is one of the more experienced food writers in the region calling the Naples block, specifically, an outlier in a rough year. The reason is the split itself. Two operators on one block, one leaning traditional and one leaning social, is a hedge most neighborhoods don't get.
The rhythm the restaurants sit inside
The restaurants would be a smaller story if the summer around them were quieter. It isn't. The Naples Improvement Association's programming runs concurrent with the openings, and the pattern this year matches what has held for a while.
Concerts return to Colonnade Park through September. Long Beach's official visitor guide describes the format as free concerts held from 6 to 8 p.m., taking place monthly, May through September, with the NIA site as the schedule of record. The venue is the small park at the south end of The Colonnade, a 0.2-acre park overlooking Naples Bay, open 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily. If you have not walked down to a show yet, the sightlines are better on the canal side than the street side, and the palm shadows do most of the work by 7.
Around the concerts, the calendar the NIA has run in recent years anchors the rest of summer: a pancake breakfast and craft fair in early June, an Independence Day bike parade on July 4, a July flea market, and a National Night Out at the start of August. The dates shift by a weekend year to year, but the sequence is stable, and this is the block-captain rhythm the neighborhood keeps returning to.
Then there is the water. Registration for the 2026 Naples Island Swims is now open, and the event historically sells out early and closes registration when it reaches capacity. The starting line sits on the beach between the United States Sailing Center at 5489 E. Ocean Blvd., and on race day Bayshore Ave. is closed to through traffic and parking from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.. If you live on the Bayshore side, that is the one weekend to plan around.
Water temperature is the variable people underestimate. The event organizers put it plainly: in general, summer season water temperatures along the Long Beach coast and Alamitos Bay range from the low 60s to the upper 60s Fahrenheit, and can swing 3 to 4 degrees within just a couple days. Which is to say August is not automatically warmer than June, and the last week of the month can be colder than the first. Plan your paddle days by the sensor, not the calendar.
The through-line
Here is the claim to hang on the wall.
Naples absorbed the loss of its longest-running restaurant not by replacing it with one thing, but by letting it split. The traditional room reopened forty feet away under its old operator. The building itself got handed to a group that runs a different pace, weekend brunch, late Fridays, live music, an open-air rooftop. Neither one is a facsimile of what was there. Both are recognizably of the neighborhood.
That is a specific kind of resilience, and it is not accidental. Bacari's own description of the new space, per Longbeachize, was that its atmosphere would continue its philosophy while adapting it to Naples' slower, neighborhood-driven character. Meaning the operator with eight prior locations chose to slow down to match the block rather than the other way around. Massimo, meanwhile, chose to reopen next door instead of anywhere else in the city he could have gone. Two decisions, same posture: the block gets to keep being the block.
For residents, the summer to-do list writes itself:
- Book Massimo's for a midweek dinner before the summer word-of-mouth catches up.
- Try Bacari's rooftop on a Saturday before Naples finishes the season and the tourists reset the wait times in the fall.
- Bring the folding chairs down to Colonnade for at least one of the remaining concert dates.
- If you swim, check the Alamitos Bay sensor before you commit to a distance.
- Watch the Bayshore closure on race weekend.
None of this is a headline anymore. It is the shape of the season, which is what you actually wanted to know.
If you have been on the island long enough to remember Michael's under Massimo, or you moved in during the boarded-up months and are trying to place what the block feels like now, we are always happy to talk through what is happening at the property level too. Cynthia Voss and Nathan Walter live and work these blocks. Request a Free Home Valuation when you are ready to see what your address looks like against the current Naples market.
