"Extra pickles, please." That's Lee County Commissioner Trish Petrosky's plan for her first visit to Lehigh Acres' new Chick-fil-A, whenever it opens. It's a small line, but it points at something real. For years, getting a chicken sandwich without a drive to Fort Myers has not been an option here, and that is finally about to change, along with a second restaurant opening a few miles away that has a more personal story behind it than the corporate logo suggests.
Construction on Lehigh Acres' first-ever Chick-fil-A started in late March 2026 at 1110 North Homestead Road, near the Lee Boulevard corridor. Developers Bowman Consulting Group and Lemonade MM Lehigh Acres LLC told WINK News at the time that they were targeting a late August opening for the 5,614-square-foot building, with indoor and outdoor seating and multiple drive-thru lanes. That target month has now arrived, which makes this a good moment to explain why it took this long, and why a second, very different restaurant is landing at nearly the same time.
The town outgrew its own lunch crowd
Lehigh Acres has been one of Lee County's fastest-growing communities for years, with population estimates putting the town at almost 140,000 residents by late 2025. Rooftops were never the problem. What kept national chains and sit-down restaurants away was something less visible: most of the people living here work somewhere else.
Jay Johnson, owner of Bubba's Roadhouse & Saloon in Cape Coral and head of the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association's Lee County Chapter, put it plainly to WINK News. He explained that most Lehigh Acres residents commute to Fort Myers, Cape Coral, or Naples for work, which leaves the town without the weekday lunch traffic a full-service restaurant needs to survive. A neighborhood can have thousands of new homes and still not generate enough daytime foot traffic to make a sit-down restaurant's math work, because that math depends on people being nearby at noon on a Tuesday, not just at home in the evening.
That gap is exactly what Elizabeth Marrero and her daughter Ella described to WINK News when the Chick-fil-A groundbreaking made local headlines. The two currently drive to Fort Myers whenever they want the chain's food, a routine familiar to plenty of Lehigh Acres households who have built regular restaurant trips around leaving town first.
What's actually going up right now
Two separate projects explain most of the movement residents have noticed along Lee Boulevard this year.
The Chick-fil-A near Homestead Road is the more visible one, if only because a national chain finally decided the numbers worked. As of mid-July, the building's shell was standing, but Chick-fil-A had not released a confirmed public opening date, since that step typically comes after equipment installation and staff hiring are complete. Residents hoping to be first through the drive-thru should watch the restaurant's own announcements and local coverage rather than assume a specific day, since developers' original "late August" estimate was always a target, not a locked date.
The second project is bigger in scope but has drawn less attention: Stonewood Crossing, a 36-acre development at 5600 Lee Boulevard, at the corner of Lee Boulevard and Leonard Boulevard. Developer Guy Paparella began buying the land in April 2024, with Quattrone & Associates handling site engineering and Trinity Commercial Group leasing the space. By June 2026, Gulfshore Business reported that the project had locked in a real tenant roster:
- Suncoast Credit Union
- Culver's, a second Lehigh Acres location
- Goodwill Industries, in a 20,000-square-foot building
- Heartland Dental
- Dunkin'
That list is worth noting because it's an upgrade from what leasing agents were only hoping for a year earlier. When the project broke ground in 2025, Trinity Commercial Group described chasing a national coffee brand, a dental practice, and a sit-down restaurant, without any signed names yet attached. By this summer, two of those wishlist categories had become real leases: a coffee and doughnut brand in Dunkin', and a dental practice in Heartland Dental. The plaza also comes with its own new road infrastructure, including a traffic signal planned at Lee Boulevard where Anselm Way connects into the site, which will matter to anyone who already deals with that stretch of Lee Boulevard during peak hours.
The Culver's that's coming home
The more interesting detail is who is actually building the Stonewood Crossing Culver's, because it isn't a stranger with a franchise agreement. It's Miguel and Samantha Carmona, a husband-and-wife team who currently own and operate the Culver's on Pine Island Road in northeast Cape Coral. Their connection to Lehigh Acres runs deeper than a new lease.
Miguel and Samantha helped open and run the original Culver's in Lehigh Acres, at 2511 Lee Boulevard, back in 2016. Miguel started on the crew, worked his way up to general manager, and completed the company's franchisee program in 2020. The couple's history with the town goes beyond work: their first home was in Lehigh, their four children were all born at HealthPark Hospital, and their two oldest kids attended Lehigh Elementary before the family later moved closer to the Cape Coral restaurant they opened in 2024. According to the Lehigh Acres Citizen, the new Stonewood Crossing location is expected to open in October 2026, and it will make the Carmonas the operators of two Culver's restaurants in the county where they got their start.
That detail matters more than it might seem. Chick-fil-A's bet on Lehigh Acres is a national brand's calculation that population growth has finally crossed a threshold worth the investment. The Carmonas' bet is different. They already know the daytime rhythms of this town, because they lived them for years before the corporate math ever penciled out. One restaurant is arriving because a spreadsheet somewhere said the demand is there now. The other is arriving because two people who never really left decided it was time to come back.
Two different bets on the same gap
Put side by side, these openings say something the population figures alone do not: Lehigh Acres' restaurant shortage was never really about rooftops. It was about whether anyone with local knowledge, whether that's a franchise data team or a couple who once worked the counter themselves, believed the daytime crowd was finally big enough to support something beyond fast food picked up on the way out of town.
Whether that crowd has genuinely arrived, or whether these two openings simply reflect enough new dinner and weekend traffic to carry a location without a lunch rush, will become clearer once both restaurants have been open for a season. Either way, residents who have spent years treating a real chicken sandwich or a fresh ButterBurger as an excuse to leave Lehigh Acres are close to not needing that excuse anymore.
Watching how a town's daily options change is part of how we stay useful to the people who already live here, not just the ones thinking about a move. If you have questions about what else is shifting in Lehigh Acres or anywhere else across Southwest Florida, Let's Connect.
