"Every detail was thoughtfully considered to enhance the guest experience while remaining true to the heritage that defines Il Mulino." That's how Brian Galligan, president of Il Mulino New York, described the finished renovation of the restaurant's Acqualina Resort location this spring. Read on its own, it's ordinary hospitality-press language. Read against the calendar, it's a clue. The same year Il Mulino's Miami dining room got its new look, the long-fenced-off hotel a mile south at the Newport Fishing Pier also finished its own renovation and reopened under a new name. The two projects share nothing but a zip code and a year. For anyone who has spent the last few years driving past two separate stretches of construction mesh on the same road, that overlap is the actual news.
The Fence at the Pier Finally Came Down
The Newport Fishing Pier has been part of this stretch of Collins Avenue since 1936, when it opened as the Sunny Isles Pier and quickly became a gathering spot for anglers and beachgoers. It survived a 1980 demolition scare, a 1985 rescue by the resort behind it, then known as the Newport Beachside Hotel & Resort, and a direct hit from Hurricane Wilma in 2005 that shut it down for eight years. It reopened as the Newport Fishing Pier on June 15, 2013, and it remains the last public pier left in Miami-Dade County, free to walk whether or not you're a hotel guest.
The hotel behind it has had a rougher few years than the pier itself. The old Newport Beachside Hotel & Resort went through a $42 million renovation under owner HB Capital Group and came back this year rebranded as The Sunny, part of the Curio Collection by Hilton, with 339 guest rooms and six food and beverage outlets built into the property. If you've lived here through the scaffolding years, the useful part isn't the room count. It's that the pier restaurant is open again, and it's open to the public, not just to guests upstairs.
What's Actually Open Right Now
The oceanfront bar perched on the pier itself, Sandbar at Newport Pier, bills itself as "the only spot in Miami where you can sip a drink right above the Atlantic," and it's back in business with a full bar and a rotating pop-up food menu. Around it, The Sunny has filled in the rest of its ground floor with a handful of new names worth knowing if you haven't been by since the fence came down:
- VIVA!, a Mexican-American restaurant from chef Ray Garcia
- Lovebirds Cafe, a grab-and-go cafe and marketplace for coffee and quick bites
- The Newport Room, an adults-only bar and lounge
- Sandbar at Newport Pier, the oceanfront bar built directly onto the historic pier
None of this requires a room key. The pier has been public since 2013 and stays that way. What changed is that the buildings around it finally caught up to it.
A Mile North, a Different Renovation Finished the Same Spring
Head up Collins Avenue toward 174th Street and a second, unrelated reopening lands at almost the same moment. Il Mulino New York, the fine dining anchor at Acqualina Resort & Residences, completed a full renovation of its dining room, private dining space, and bar, announced in March 2026. The restaurant has been part of Acqualina since the resort opened on May 16, 2006, and this spring's redesign was timed to the property's 20th anniversary, marked with a weekend of events from May 15 through 17 that included the debut of an expanded AcquaMarine Kids Club and a new Seed to Skin Tuscany treatment line at the resort spa.
Acqualina and The Sunny have nothing to do with each other. One is a family-owned hotel coming out of a multi-year capital renovation. The other is an independent luxury resort marking two decades in business with a scheduled refresh of its flagship restaurant. Nobody at either property was waiting on the other to finish. They just happened to land in the same calendar year, on opposite ends of the same two-mile run of Collins Avenue.
Two Owners Who Never Needed to Coordinate
This is the part that's easy to miss if you only think about restaurants one at a time. HB Capital Group and Acqualina Resort & Residences operate on completely different investment timelines, with different ownership structures and different reasons for spending money on the same corridor in the same year. That's not a coordinated redevelopment push. It's two separate bets on the same stretch of beachfront, made independently, that happen to have matured together.
For a resident, that's a more useful data point than either renovation alone. A single hotel reopening tells you about one property. Two unrelated owners choosing the same year to reinvest in dining along the same strip tells you something about the corridor itself, that it's durable enough to attract serious capital from more than one direction at once, without any single company needing to lead the way.
The Market That Never Needed a Renovation
While both ends of Collins Avenue sat behind construction fencing, the middle of town kept running on its own schedule. Gateway Market sets up every Wednesday from 5:30 to 10 p.m. at Gateway Park on Sunny Isles Boulevard, and the Sunny Isles Beach Farmer's Market at Town Center Park on Collins Avenue runs as a year-round open-air market on the first Saturday of the month. Neither one needed a capital renovation or a rebrand to keep going. They're the part of the week that stayed constant while the marquee ends of the strip were closed for work, and they're still there now that both ends are open again.
What This Means If You Live Here
For the first time in a few years, you can walk the full stretch of Collins Avenue between the Newport Fishing Pier and Acqualina and find every headline kitchen actually open. A Wednesday evening might mean a drink at Sandbar with your feet practically over the water. A Sunday might mean the four-course supper at Il Mulino, still built around the same tableside classics that have defined the restaurant since 2006, just inside a freshly redone dining room. Neither reopening happened because the other one did. That's exactly why it's worth noticing when they land in the same year anyway.
If you're weighing a move to this stretch of the coast, or you already live here and want a read on how the corridor is holding up beyond the headlines, Leonor Ortiz has spent years working condo transactions up and down this part of Collins Avenue and can talk through what a given building's board, reserves, or market position actually look like. Request a Consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
