Worth Avenue, Palm Beach: New Restaurants Reshaping 2026

For six years, the ground floor windows at 151 Worth Avenue have been the kind of blank you walk past without registering. Butcher paper behind glass, a building permit taped somewhere near the door, a three-story shell that used to be Neiman Marcus and then wasn't anything. Anyone who has lived on the island through that stretch has a version of the same habit: eyes slide off it on the way to Trillion or Cartier or wherever the actual errand is.

That changed on September 9: CBS 12 reported that the Town Council signed off on what goes in there next, and the plan tells you something the empty storefront never could. It is not one big store again. It is a restaurant with more kitchen than dining room, plus a scatter of small shops around it. That detail, buried in a zoning variance, is the same thing that just happened two blocks away at a hundred-year-old hotel and half a mile north at a shopping plaza built in 1957. Three unrelated developers, working on three unrelated buildings, all placed the same bet this year: break the big footprint into smaller pieces and put food in the middle of it. The Worth Avenue plan and the Royal Riviera platform also show that summer need not be the season nothing happens.

What the Neiman Marcus Building Is Becoming

Neiman Marcus held that address for 22 years before closing for good in September 2020. The building itself, a roughly 49,000 square foot department store with two underground parking levels, was purpose built for one large tenant moving a lot of merchandise. What the Architectural Commission approved this month is close to the opposite. A restaurant led by Stephen Starr takes the second floor, with smaller boutique retail spread across the first two levels below it.

The number worth sitting with is the back of house. The plan calls for 165 seats, split between 126 in the dining room, 7 at the bar, and 32 on an outdoor balcony facing the Avenue. That balcony actually expanded in the revised plan, growing from 1,091 to 1,495 square feet while dropping from 48 seats to 32, which means more room per diner rather than more diners. Meanwhile the kitchen, storage, and staff space behind the scenes grew to 3,425 square feet, an increase of 2,475 square feet over the earlier version, plus a new 1,350 square foot third-floor addition that customers will never see. The town had to grant a parking variance for three spaces because the service footprint got bigger even as customer seating went down.

A department store doesn't need that ratio. A restaurant built to run a serious kitchen does. Whatever else ends up in the smaller retail bays on that ground floor, the anchor of 151 Worth Avenue from here on is a dining room, not a sales floor.

Two Blocks Off the Avenue, the Same Math

Walk two blocks north and the pattern repeats inside a building with a longer memory. The Vineta Hotel reopened on March 2, 2026 as the first United States property for Oetker Hotels, the German family company behind Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc on the French Riviera. The building started life in 1926 as the Lido-Venice, took the Vineta name for roughly fifty years, and spent its more recent decades as the Chesterfield, home to the Leopard Lounge, a nightspot known for leopard-print carpet and a 1992 fresco painted by an artist locals called Lino Mario. Rod Stewart reportedly stopped in. Lauren Bacall stayed upstairs. It closed with that reputation intact.

Reuben Brothers bought the building in 2022 and cut the room count from the low fifties down to 41, trading room volume for space and privacy. The Leopard Lounge's old footprint is now Coco's, a Mediterranean restaurant developed with input from Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc's kitchen team, serving 96 seats between a 64-seat dining room and a 32-seat courtyard. A hidden leopard motif in the ceiling is the one wink at what used to be there.

The detail that actually changes a resident's routine is next door. The hotel's pool is restricted to overnight guests, which is standard for a property this size. But The Bar, its cocktail lounge, is open to guests and non-guests alike, seated only, capped at 36 seats. That is a different proposition than what stood there before. The Leopard Lounge was a nightclub anyone could walk into. The Bar is a reservation, or at least the expectation of one, for a room a third its former size.

Same subdivision, same logic: fewer seats, more design per seat, food and drink positioned as the thing that justifies the address rather than volume traffic through the door.

The Restaurant That Actually Touches the Water

Worth Avenue itself runs four blocks from Lake Worth to the ocean, but the shops line the street rather than the water. The building that finally closed that gap sits at Royal Poinciana Plaza, the 1957 John Volk-designed retail complex about a seven-minute drive from Worth Avenue proper. Tutto Mare opened there in early January 2026 as, by its own description, the only restaurant in Palm Beach with direct Intracoastal frontage. It's the work of Gabby Karan de Felice, daughter of designer Donna Karan, and sibling concept to the Hamptons restaurant Tutto il Giorno.

Royal Poinciana Plaza has spent the better part of a decade doing its own version of the subdivision Worth Avenue is only now catching up to. Where the property once housed larger footprint tenants including real estate brokerage offices, it now runs a mix of roughly 50 smaller storefronts, Hermès and Cartier alongside artisanal shops like the Palm Beach Bicycle Trail Shop, with dining anchors including Sant Ambroeus, the Palm Beach Grill, and now Tutto Mare. The plaza was designed from the start to keep a visitor there for hours rather than a single transaction, and the newest tenant to arrive is the one actually built around a water view nobody else on the island's retail corridor has.

A Slow Season That Stopped Acting Slow

The fourth piece of this year's pattern is timing rather than architecture. Royal Poinciana Plaza has spent this summer running a promotional identity called The Royal Riviera, a property-wide platform tying together tenant arrivals, courtyard dinners, and evening film screenings at the plaza's Glazer Hall from July through the end of September. The stated premise is directly against the island's own conventional wisdom, that summer here is the slow season, the months between the traditional October-to-May social calendar when businesses coast.

That platform wrapped in September, and the choice to schedule new tenant openings and programming inside July, August, and September rather than waiting for the fall reopening is its own small data point. A hundred-year-old hotel opened its doors in March, during the traditional season. Tutto Mare launched at the start of a calendar year rather than in the run-up to it. The Worth Avenue plan and the Royal Riviera platform made their moves outside the traditional high season.

The Same Bet, Made Four Times

None of these four projects talked to each other. A restaurant group out of Philadelphia, a German hotel family, a Massachusetts-based shopping center developer, and the Palm Beach Town Council each arrived at a version of the same decision inside a single year: take a large, single-purpose space and turn it into several smaller ones built around food, with timing that ranged from the traditional season to summer.

For anyone walking Worth Avenue or the two blocks around it this fall, that means the corridor asks more of a visit than it used to. A single stop used to cover an afternoon. Now the built environment is set up for a sequence of smaller, more deliberate ones, a reservation at Coco's, a seat at Tutto Mare's water side tables, whatever eventually opens on the ground floor at 151 Worth Avenue once the Starr restaurant is running upstairs. The empty storefront wasn't a pause. It was the corridor deciding what it wants to be next.

If you're tracking how this stretch of the island is reshaping itself and want to talk through what it means for property in the area, Patrick Barnicle is glad to walk through it with you.