Congratulations to my new friends Nhan Nguyen and her husband Hai Chu and their family, the owners of the new Ha Long Bay restaurant, which is now open in the space at 20685 Bruce B. Downs (BBD) Blvd. previously occupied by Aroi Thai-Tsuyu (not to be confused with the still-open Arroy Thai on S.R. 54 in Wesley Chapel).
Several months ago, we announced in these pages that the new restaurant would be a new location of Hana Sushi, but when that deal fell through, Nhan and Hai jumped at the opportunity to open the fourth location of Ha Long Bay (the others are in St. Petersburg, Dunedin and Largo). Nhan and Hai also previously owned Ocean Blue Sushi Bar in Carrollwood.
When the plans were unveiled for AdventHealth (then Florida Hospital) Wesley Chapel a decade ago, there was no question that Wesley Chapelâs first hospital was much needed in the growing community.
But, Dr. Robert Rosequist, the Chief Medical Officer at AHWC, said he didnât expect the response the hospital received when it opened its doors for tours a week ahead of its Oct. 1, 2012, official opening.
âWe thought maybe 1,000 people might come, but 8,000 showed up,â says Dr. Rosequist. To accommodate everyone, partly due to an elevator that could only take up 20 people at a time, the tours lasted from 7:30 a.m. until 8:30 p.m. Some people waited in line for more than an hour.
Dr. Rosequist thought heâd be home in time for the Tampa Bay Bucs Monday Night Football game against the St. Louis Rams that night. But, when his wife called asking where he was, he told her he was pretty sure he wasnât going to make it.
Ten years later, Dr. Rosequist, who is still the hospitalâs chief medical officer, says that day was just the beginning of something special. âIt has been a wonderful experience,â Dr. Rosequist says. âThe 10 years have just flown by.â
Thousands lined up for hours for the chance to tour the newly opened Florida Hospital Wesley Chapel, now AdventHealth Wesley Chapel. (Neighborhood News files)
AHWC may not have been the first large business in Wesley Chapel, but you could argue that, to date, it has made the most impact.
Although the Porter family also has seen the development of a college, a major indoor athletic complex and a mall in its Wiregrass Ranch Development of Regional Impact, developer JD Porter always points to the hospital when asked what his familyâs greatest contribution to the area has been. Built on the very land Porter grew up on, with contributions from Tom Dempsey at Saddlebrook Resort and many others, AHWC gave the local community a place to go for medical (including emergency medical) services and has proven to be an anchor for the community.
âI think we were really the catalyst for the growth here in Wesley Chapel,â says Connie Bladon, the director of community outreach for AHWC. âWhen you think back to when we built the hospital, there wasnât much around us. When the hospital went in, everyone felt more comfortable moving into the area. You always want a good hospital, (as well as) good schools, safety and security, things like that. Having the hospital here catapulted the growth of Wesley Chapel. Everything (else has) sprung up around us.â
Dr. Robert B Rosequist
Dr. Rosequist feels that the hospital has achieved many of its goals, especially those established when it changed over from Florida Hospital to AdventHealth Wesley Chapel on Jan. 2, 2019. He says that when the change was made, AHWCâs management came up with four main things that people wanted in their medical care: to feel safe, to feel loved, that doctors were accountable for their care and for it to be as easy as possible to get that care.
âIf you can do those four things,â Rosequist says, âeverybody is going to love you.â
In 10 years, the hospital definitely has made its mark, not just by marketing its name on facilities like the Center Ice skating rink complex and the indoor basketball arena at the Wiregrass Ranch Sports Campus of Pasco County (both off of S.R. 56), but with medical services that have been lauded nationwide.
Since opening, the hospital has invested more than a total of $400 million in expansion and additional services to provide its award-winning care to more than 800,000 patients. To name a few, AHWC doctors have performed more than 56,000 surgeries and delivered more than 5,000 babies.
A few months after opening, the doors swung open in early 2013 to the hospitalâs popular 100,000-sq.-ft. health & wellness center, which is now called the AdventHealth Wellness Plaza Wesley Chapel.
Thereâs more to come, too. AHWC was designed for growth to accompany the incoming (and still ongoing) Wesley Chapel housing boom. Rosequist, who was on the planning board, said its familiar U-shape was designed to look like the open arms of Jesus, with the intention of having six stories on each of the three wings â north, central and south.
Originally, it opened with just three stories and 83 total beds, because AdventHealth management wasnât sure how fast the hospital would grow. It turned out to be very fast, indeed.
Including a major expansion in 2016, AHWC has grown from 83 beds to 169, from four operating rooms to 12, and from 20 emergency room beds to 35. There is still room for the hospital to expand to 300 total beds.
AdventHealth also has added the Central Pasco Free Standing Emergency Department into the Lutz community and two medical office buildings adjacent to the hospital, the Wellness Plaza and, in 2021, when AHWC teamed up with the Moffitt Cancer Center on a new three-story, 100,000-sq.-ft. outpatient cancer and research center.
AHWC was named as one of Newsweekâs Best Maternity Hospitals and the team delivered more than 100 babies in August 2022 alone, a new record for the facility.
The hospital has also achieved 14 consecutive Leapfrog âAâ grades, the only rating system focused exclusively on hospital safety.
And, when it comes to community partnerships, AHWC is all in, having provided more than $307 million in community benefit services.
The hospital helped usher the community through the Covid-19 pandemic, and the community responded by providing meals for overworked doctors and nurses during the most desperate months of the pandemic.
âBeing the first hospital out here was just gratifying, being a part of that,â Dr. Rosequist says. âIâm just so glad the community dug in with us and helped and watched us grow.â
For more information about AdventHealth Wesley Chapel (2600 BBD Blvd.), call (813) 929-5000 or visit AdventHealth.com.
Congratulations to Dew, Preeya & Will (1.-r. in top right photo), the owners of Umu Japanese & Thai restaurant (2653 BBD Blvd., in the same plaza as The Hungry Greek & Dickeyâs BBQ Pit), which held a North Tampa Bay Chamber (NTBC) ribbon cutting in conjunction with its Grand Re-Opening on Sept. 20.
Umu, which was closed for two weeks and for lunch for a while longer, as more focus was being placed on its upscale dinner items, is open again for both lunch and dinner and members of the NTBC got an amazing preview of Umuâs new and revamped menu items during the event.
In addition to huge platters of the restaurantâs always-outstanding sushi, Umu served delicious BBQÂ pork belly, pad Thai, shrimp fried rice, gyoza dumplings, crispy chicken katsu and more.
In other words, if itâs been a while since you visited Umu, you need to go try it again soon â and please tell the owners I sent you!
Umu Japanese & Thai is open for lunch and dinner every weekday and for dinner only on Sat. & Sun. For more information, call (813) 591-6121 or visit UmuJapanese.com. â Gary Nager; all photos on this page by Charmaine George Â
At the Sept. 22 VIP pre-opening event of the new El Dorado furniture store on S.R. 54 at Wesley Chapel Blvd., (above) the ribbon-cutting was celebrated with a shower of streamers.
El Dorado Furniture store, which opened the weekend of Sept. 24, has taken the furniture store concept and glamorized it.
At a VIP event on Sept. 22, flutes of champagne and strawberries were handed to guests entering the massive 70,000-sq.-ft. store, which was alive with bright lights, a live band and a number of spreads of food. Even so, it was impossible to miss the sprawling rooms of elegant furniture throughout Wesley Chapelâs newest business, located at 25171 S.R. 54 (technically in Land OâLakes), across from Millerâs Ale House.
The weekend of its opening, the first 200 families that arrived received $200 gift cards; the first 100 on Sunday received a free comforter set.
Weekend visitors to the two-story showroom were treated to an experience, something that is not offered by other furniture stores. Instead of walking aimlessly between living and dining room set-ups, you are taken down El Dorado Blvd., a strip resembling an old-fashioned city street, right down to the benches and street lamps. Stained glass and Egyptian hieroglyphics dot the facades. The âboulevardâ winds around the showroom, opening up to what feels like individually themed furniture shops, more than 20 in all, offering a stunning array of high-end offerings.
El Dorado, which offers same-day delivery service to a fairly wide area, carries its signature Carlo Perazzi collection, its top seller, as well as others. It is truly a showroom that you need to see to believe.
And, every business needs a good story, and hereâs El Doradoâs:
In 1966, Manuel CapĂł, the son of Simon CapĂł, who started Casa CapĂł in Cuba in the 1920s, fled Cuba after the Castro regime rose to power. He and two of his sons, Luis and Carlos, escaped on a small sailboat named âEl Dorado.â
Just seven months after arriving in the U.S., Manuel and his sons opened their first furniture in the heart of the Little Havana neighborhood in Miami and named it after the boat on which they sailed to freedom â El Dorado.
El Dorado Furniture has grown into the largest Hispanic-owned furniture retail enterprise in the U.S. The Wesley Chapel location is the second in the Tampa Bay area, and El Dorado has 18 showrooms across Florida.
The storeâs hours are Mon.-Sun., 11 a.m.-7 p.m. For more information, visit ElDoradoFurniture.com or call (813) 440-6999. âJohn C. Cotey; photos by Charmaine George
Pastor Garrett Hamblen and his wife Katterine are celebrating the one-year anniversary of Spark Church, which holds its services at B&B Theatres at The Grove at Wesley Chapel.
While Spark Church is just a little more than a year old and is still relatively small, Pastor Garrett Hamblen says the church is already making an impactful difference in the community.
Members gather weekly for worship on Sunday mornings at 10 a.m. at the B&B Theatres at The Grove movie theater (located north of S.R. 54, just west of I-75). But, they actually do much more than just that.
The church members have chosen to focus on four community needs they see in Wesley Chapel and the surrounding areas, including foster care, human trafficking, schools and pregnancy care centers.Â
âWe are moving forward in a lot of big ways,â Pastor Garrett says, âand doing things that have never been done in our area, that Iâm aware of.â
For example, Pastor Garrett says that the church members are working to create a foster care support network, with the goal of bringing other churches on board to support the efforts.
âWe had 15 people go through training from a national-level organization that teaches churches how to do this,â he says. âWe want to rally around foster families in the area â even though currently there are none in our church â and meet their physical needs, such as buying new clothes or a bed for a kid who gets dropped off at 2 a.m., or even have our childrenâs ministry do babysitting for foster families.â
He says church members also are working with Bridging Freedom, a local organization that supports minor victims of human trafficking, offering a therapeutic safe home campus community for girls, ages 12-17, who have been rescued from forced prostitution.
Spark Church has formed a partnership to provide support that includes painting, landscaping, helping with the property and working on building a new home, as Bridging Freedom is expanding.
Pastor Garrett says his messages on Sunday mornings currently are focusing on the same theme.
âEach week, we pick a new problem in the community, look at what the Bible says about it, and talk about what the church should do about it,â he says. âThen, we go out and work towards that.â
While Spark Church is growing in the number of people who attend, Pastor Garrett says itâs also growing in âdepth,â with 90 percent of its members serving the church at least once a month. The people who find the church tend to be those who are passionate about making a difference.
âTheyâve been to churches that donât do a ton of outreach, but they want to go deeper,â he says. âThey want their lives to be more meaningful. They want to go out and fight for our community.â
He says they also want to do life together â and not just on Sunday mornings. Pastor Garrett says an astounding 95 percent of church members are involved in weekly âcore groupsâ of people who meet together to study the Bible, support each other and develop friendships. The church also has interest groups, where people go out to dinner together, or get together to do crafts, play disc golf, or pursue some other hobby.
This sense of connectivity may be formed because so many people experienced the isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic, and are now ready to get back into the community and make friends. And, Garrett says the church is ready to respond.
He says he moved to the area several years ago, when he took a job at Loving Hands Ministries, a drug rehabilitation program in Dade City. He also served as the young adult pastor, then executive pastor, for Calvary Assembly of God in Dade City.
He is licensed as a minister through the Assemblies of God and also has a Bachelorâs degree in Business and an Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree, both from Indiana State University in Terre Haute.Â
Garrett and his wife Katterine live in Wesley Chapel, just a few minutes away from the movie theater where the church meets.
On Sunday mornings, Spark Church takes over one wing of the theater, offering worship in a large theater, kidsâ church in a smaller theater, and a nursery in a birthday party room. He describes the kidsâ areas as âlocked downâ for safety, in a corner of the building where no public traffic passes by.
Miriam Ventilato lives nearby in Wesley Chapel and joined Spark Church with her family a little over a year ago.
She, her husband, Tony and their teenage kids â ages 18, 15, and 13 â are all involved in the ministries of the church, from singing with the worship team to putting out advertising flags to draw attention to the churchâs meeting location.Â
âItâs not just one-and-done on Sunday,â Miriam says. âItâs doing small groups, working in ministry together, and volunteering together. You really become like a family, and people notice when youâre not there.â
That great sense of connectivity and willingness to work together leads to the outreach that she and others who participate in the church think is so important.
âWeâre basically showing people the love of God through tangible ways however we can,â Miriam says, âwhether thatâs through partnering in work days or looking for opportunities to serve wherever thereâs a need.â
Miriam adds that itâs easy to get on board with the idea that her church can make a difference in big community problems, just by touching one life at a time. It starts with her pastor and is encapsulated in the name of the church.
âI think that Pastor Garrett is contagious,â says Miriam. âHe says, âWhat fills, spills.â So, we want to fill ourselves up with things that make a difference so we can spill it out into the community, just sparking each other to bring change.â
Spark Church meets at the B&B Theatres Wesley ChapelâThe Grove 16 (6333 Wesley Grove Blvd.) every Sunday at 10 a.m. For more information, visit SparkPasco.com.
