Twenty years ago, a young polo player named Nacho Figueras used to dance at the 251 Club, a nightclub on Sunrise Avenue that was, at the time, one of the more fashionable rooms on the island. He was already known for polo and for modeling. He was not known for restaurants. Last December, he opened one, at the same address, in the same room, with his name on the lease.
That's not a coincidence particular to Figueras. It's the shape of what happened on this island over the past nine months. Palm Beach spent late 2025 and early 2026 collecting headlines about new dining rooms, and every single one of them opened inside a building the town already had a name for. Nothing new was built. Three old addresses changed hands.
The Address Outlasts the Concept
The Polo Room, which Figueras opened on December 3, 2025 with restaurateur Thierry Beaud, sits at 251 Sunrise Avenue. Before it was The Polo Room, it was PB Catch Seafood & Raw Bar, which Beaud also owned. Before that, it was the 251 Club. The renovation between PB Catch and The Polo Room took about a month, and the team kept what already worked, including the raw bar, rather than gutting the space to start over.
That pattern repeated twice more within a few miles of the same address.
| Address | What It Was | What It Is Now |
|---|---|---|
| 251 Sunrise Avenue | 251 Club, then PB Catch Seafood & Raw Bar | The Polo Room, opened Dec. 3, 2025 |
| Royal Poinciana Playhouse, 70 Royal Poinciana Way | The historic Playhouse, home to the Celebrity Room | Tutto Mare, opened Jan. 2, 2026 |
| The Chesterfield Hotel, two blocks from Worth Avenue | Home of the Leopard Lounge for decades | The Vineta Hotel, reopened March 2, 2026 |
Tutto Mare, from the husband-and-wife team behind Tutto il Giorno in the Hamptons, moved into the Royal Poinciana Plaza's landmarked Playhouse building and became the town's first and only restaurant sitting directly on the Intracoastal. It seats 200 and includes a 1,200-square-foot terrace looking out over Lake Worth Lagoon and Palm Harbor Marina. But the room the restaurant is built around isn't new construction. It's the restored Celebrity Room, complete with a rescued 1950s mural called "Venetian Festival" that still shows caricatures of Clark Gable and dozens of other stars who once filled the room, painted for an audience that stopped coming decades ago.
Why the Island Recasts Instead of Building
There's a reason this keeps happening here and not somewhere with more room to expand. Palm Beach is a few miles of barrier island. There's no undeveloped block waiting for a developer to break ground on the next big dining concept. When something new arrives, it almost always arrives by taking over something old, which means every opening this year came pre-loaded with a history the operators had to either honor or erase.
Tutto Mare chose to honor it, restoring the mural instead of painting over it. The Polo Room split the difference, keeping the parts of PB Catch that already worked while rebuilding the identity around polo photography from the 1980s and 90s. As Figueras put it when the restaurant opened, "Opening The Polo Room is deeply meaningful to me."
The Vineta Hotel took the biggest swing. The building dates to 1925, formerly The Chesterfield, and its ground-floor bar was the Leopard Lounge for so long that generations of residents used the name as shorthand for a certain kind of Palm Beach evening. Oetker Hotels, the European group behind Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, chose the address for its first U.S. property, reopening in March 2026 with a Mediterranean restaurant called Coco's and a completely reimagined version of the old bar.
The One That's Still Deciding What It Is
Here's the part that a resident, rather than a visitor, would actually notice: the biggest story on the island's bar scene this year wasn't a new opening. It was an old bar closing. A Palm Beach nightlife roundup published this September named the Leopard Lounge's disappearance as the year's most significant development, precisely because the replacement hadn't finished figuring out what it wants to be.
That's a different kind of news than "restaurant opens." It's a reminder that on an island this size, a name can carry more weight than a menu. The Leopard Lounge wasn't just a bar. It was a fixture people organized evenings around for decades. Its replacement gets to borrow the address and the four blank walls, but it has to earn the rest.
September Is When the Island Actually Gets Used
None of this matters much if you can't get a table, and September has historically been the one month when that's not a problem. Flavor South Florida, the region's restaurant month, is running September 1 through 30 this year, its nineteenth edition since launching in 2007. It brought 112 participating restaurants into the fold this time, with prix fixe menus running roughly $25 to $65 for lunch, brunch, and dinner. The event's own organizers built it around a slow patch in the calendar. As CEO Kerri Paizzi put it, "September is traditionally the slowest month of the year for restaurant sales."
On the island itself, the participating list skips past the three newcomers above and instead runs through the restaurants that never needed a reintroduction:
- Café Boulud at the Brazilian Court Hotel
- Stir at The Eau
- Nobu
That's worth sitting with for a second. The restaurants getting discounted this month aren't the ones that just opened. They're the ones that have already proven they don't need the promotion to fill a room, which is its own kind of evidence about how this island's dining scene actually works. The new rooms get the headlines. The old ones get the reservations.
What This Means If You Live Here
If you're trying to guess what opens next on this island, stop looking for open lots. There aren't any left to speak of. Instead, watch which historic buildings quietly change hands or shut down for renovation. That's where the next headline restaurant is going to live, wearing someone else's old address like a new coat.
For now, this is the month to use what's already here. Book The Polo Room to see what a nightclub becomes when a polo player takes it over. Get the terrace table at Tutto Mare and look for Clark Gable in the mural. Stop by the Vineta and decide for yourself whether the room formerly known as the Leopard Lounge has found its footing yet. And if none of that fits the calendar, Café Boulud, Stir, and Nobu are running discounted menus all month for exactly the residents who've already been going there for years.
Leonor Ortiz spends as much time studying what happens inside Palm Beach's buildings as she does tracking what they're worth, because on an island where the addresses rarely change, understanding who's running the room tells you more than any listing sheet. If you're curious how the island's shifting dining scene connects to what's happening in its condo towers and historic buildings, Leonor Ortiz is a call away.
