Walk down Bay Street this month and the hammering doesn't come from one direction. It comes from three. A crew is finishing tile work at Romora Bay's marina side. Another is framing something behind Coral Sands' pool deck. A third is still moving earth on the old airstrip south of town, where a 34-slip marina now sits where planes used to land. In a normal off-season, Dunmore Town absorbs one renovation cycle at a time and everyone adjusts around it. This year the town is absorbing three at once, and that changes what residents should expect both from the noise now and from the dining room options come winter.
This isn't a story about a single restaurant reopening. It's about three separate waterfront properties on different sides of the harbor all mid-project in the same stretch of months, which means the usual staggered rhythm of Briland's shoulder season, one place closed while the others carry the crowd, has broken. Here's what's actually happening at each address, and what it means for anyone who already calls this island home.
The Bay Side Never Really Stopped Since Rotcage
Romora Bay has been a fixture on the harbour side since it opened in the late 1960s, started by a scuba diver and his Scottish wife long before Briland had the reputation it has now. It later passed through the hands of Lionel Rotcage, son of the Parisian nightclub figure Regine, and has carried that mix of low-key marina culture and high-gloss visitors ever since.
The current chapter is a 17-room boutique hotel with a 40-slip marina, full customs clearance for boats coming through, and pickleball courts added alongside the existing amenities. On the food side, Upstairs at Romora now runs breakfast through dinner on a rooftop deck with sunset views over the marina, a shift from the lunch-only service that used to define the property's dining. Sip Sip, the dockside lunch spot that built its following years ago among the fashion crowd that first put Briland on the map, is back in operation after a period of closure. For residents who used the marina side as a reliable lunch stop, this is the return of an option that had gone quiet.
The Beach Side Family Doing This For The Second Time
Coral Sands sits on the ocean side, and it's owned by Tom and Silma Sherman, who know this particular renovation cycle better than most. The Shermans previously owned Coral Sands, then bought the larger Pink Sands resort from Jamaican music producer Chris Blackwell, before eventually selling both properties. Now they're back, reinvesting in the same hotel they started with decades ago.
The visible changes are pickleball courts already in place and a spa and gym in the works. Inside the property, The Pink Mermaid serves Italian-Bahamian food with a lagoon pool and ocean backdrop, a different register from Upstairs at Romora's marina view but drawing from the same instinct: give the island's regulars a reason to choose one side of town over the other on a given night.
Here's how the two harborfront rebuilds compare against the newest arrival on the airstrip side:
| Property | Side of island | What's already open | What's still coming |
|---|---|---|---|
| Romora Bay | Harbour (bay) side | 40-slip marina, pickleball courts, Upstairs at Romora (all-day dining), Sip Sip (relaunched) | Continued refinements to the marina deck |
| Coral Sands | Ocean (beach) side | Pickleball courts, The Pink Mermaid bistro | New spa and gym |
| Briland Club | South end, former airstrip | 34-slip marina, beach club, bar and restaurant, several Bunny Williams-designed cottages | Additional cottages, larger homes, a boutique hotel, restoration of the historic Haunted House into a clubhouse |
The Address That Used to Be a Runway
Most people crossing the south end of the island in a golf cart today have no reason to think about what used to be there. Before it was a marina, that stretch of land was Harbour Island's airstrip. The Briland Club Hotel, Residences & Marina is now built on that footprint, developed by the father-daughter team of Michael and Mélanie Wiener, whose patriarch David has visited the island for a decade before the family began the project.
After four years of construction, the 34-slip marina, a beach club, a bar and restaurant, and several cottages designed by Bunny Williams are open for purchase or rental. The longer arc of the project includes more cottages, larger homes, a full boutique hotel, and the eventual restoration of the Haunted House, a longstanding island landmark, into what the developers describe as the project's clubhouse. As of the most recent reporting on the project, full build-out was still projected to run several more years, which means the marina and restaurant operating now are the first phase of something considerably larger, not the finished product.
For a town whose real estate has always traded on scarcity, three new food and beverage venues opening within a season or two of each other, on top of a brand-new marina with deep-water slips, is a meaningfully different supply story than the one Briland has told for most of the last two decades.
The Calendar That Doesn't Care About Construction Schedules
None of this construction changes the actual rhythm of daily life in Dunmore Town, and that's worth sitting with for a second, because the town's own calendar keeps running underneath the renovation noise:
- National Heroes Day in October still brings patriotic parades, family cookouts, and youth performances that turn the settlement into what it's always been on holidays: a town that shows up for itself first.
- Homecoming weekends, the informal gatherings that bring beachside picnics and church-adjacent socializing, continue on their own schedule regardless of which marina is mid-renovation.
- Golf carts remain the only practical way to get around. You can circle the island in twenty minutes and cross it in five, and the closest thing to a traffic jam is a dog in the road or a Sunday service letting out.
- St. John's, the oldest Anglican church in the Bahamas, dates to 1768, and Wesley Methodist Church went up in 1846. Sunday mornings still empty both onto the sidewalk in a way that has nothing to do with any renovation permit.
- Boaters navigating in from the Eleuthera side still need a shallow draft and local knowledge to get through the Devil's Backbone passage safely, a fact that hasn't changed no matter how many new slips open up on either end of the island.
None of this is disrupted by hammers on Bay Street. It's the part of the island that construction schedules don't touch.
What Changes for You This Winter
If you already live in or spend real time in Dunmore Town, the practical takeaway isn't which restaurant to try first. It's timing. Expect overlapping dust and noise from three different work sites through the fall rather than the usual one-project-at-a-time pattern the island has followed in past off-seasons. Expect that pattern to resolve into an unusually stacked winter, with Upstairs at Romora and Sip Sip both running on the bay side, The Pink Mermaid and Coral Sands' new amenities on the beach side, and the Briland Club's restaurant and beach club adding a third address that didn't exist as a dining option two years ago.
The island isn't getting bigger. It's getting more distributed. Three simultaneous investment cycles from three separate ownership groups, the Rotcage-lineage marina, the Sherman family's second act, and the Wiener family's long-horizon build on the old airstrip, tell you something about how much confidence is currently sitting in Harbour Island real estate, even if none of it shows up as a single headline number.
For anyone tracking what these overlapping projects might mean for property values or timing a purchase on this side of Eleuthera, The Agency Bahamas keeps closer tabs on Harbour Island's market than most, having watched properties in this exact stretch of the island move through past renovation cycles before. If you want a read on how this particular wave of construction is likely to affect what's available, get in touch with the team and start the conversation.
