Tampa's Naked Farmer restaurant chain moving HQ to Water Street

Naked Farmer is moving its headquarters to the Water Street Tampa neighborhood in a space several floors above where it operates one of its restaurants.

The Tampa-based chain, whose current headquarters in in nearby Channelside, has signed a five-year lease for nearly 2,000 square feet in the Thousand & One Building. The office will officially open in October and, according to a statement from Strategic Property Partners, will support 10 to 12 employees while serving as a hub for expansion efforts.

SPP is the developer behind Water Street, the $3 billion, 56-acre, mixed-use development just south of downtown Tampa. The 9 million-square-foot neighborhood includes commercial, residential, hospitality, entertainment and retail space.

Naked Farmer is a chain of farm-to-table, fast-casual restaurants founded in 2020. It has eight locations, three of them in the Tampa market and one in Sarasota. It has four other eateries in South Florida.

One of its restaurants is on the ground floor of the 20-story Thousand & One.

The 385,000-square-foot tower opened in 2021 and was the first to be built in downtown Tampa since 1992. SPP says that of the building’s 360,000 rentable square feet, just 28,000 square feet remain.

The Tampa commercial real estate firm Franklin Street handles the leasing for the building.