At 6:30 on a Tuesday evening in August, the walk from a condo near Sunrise Avenue to Royal Poinciana Plaza takes about five minutes, past the clipped hedges along Cocoanut Row and across a stretch of pavement that spent most of the last two decades leading nowhere. The old Royal Poinciana Playhouse sat dark and shuttered through most of that stretch. This summer it doesn't, and that single change has quietly rewritten what an August on the island actually looks like, for some residents.
Not for all of them. That's the part the county-wide dining roundups tend to skip. The real story of Palm Beach's 2026 summer isn't that the island suddenly filled back in while the snowbirds are away. It's that one plaza did, and everyone within a five-minute walk of it now has a genuinely different summer than everyone who doesn't.
What Actually Changed On Royal Poinciana Way
Tutto Mare opened at Royal Poinciana Plaza in the first week of January 2026, and it remains the only restaurant in the town of Palm Beach that sits directly on the Intracoastal. The Mediterranean concept comes from Tutto il Giorno, the restaurant group founded by Gianpaolo de Felice and Gabby Karan de Felice, whose mother is designer Donna Karan, and it fills more than 8,300 square feet of dining room, terrace, and bar space inside the restored Playhouse, seating 200 people with water views the island's dining scene has not had before.
A few doors down in the same plaza, Cartier reopened a permanent boutique, its first standing address on the island in more than a century after debuting only a seasonal presence back in 1924. The two openings sit inside what amounts to a single redevelopment project, and together they turned a plaza that had been closed for renovation into the closest thing the island has to a new front door.
The Arts Wing Makes It A Full Evening, Not Just Dinner
Glazer Hall opened alongside the restaurant as the town's first new nonprofit arts organization in more than 60 years, and it's the island's only performing arts venue directly on the water. The programming has ranged across music, film, and theater. As recently as mid-July, the hall ran a three-night engagement of The Odyssey, shot entirely for IMAX and projected on its big screen, the kind of booking that would have meant a drive to a mainland multiplex as recently as two summers ago.
Karan de Felice has described the appeal of building here in plain terms, telling Cottages & Gardens that Palm Beach offers "the perfect audience and the same clientele from New York and the Hamptons." She's also noted that the family's ties to the area run past the restaurant: her daughter competes as an equestrian in nearby Wellington, a detail that says something about how the island's summer crowd and the county's equestrian season overlap more than either gets credit for.
A Second New Address, Two Blocks Toward Worth Avenue
Oetker Collection, the hospitality group behind Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc and Le Bristol Paris, opened its first U.S. property this year a couple of blocks from the plaza. The Vineta Hotel occupies a nearly century-old Mediterranean Revival building near Worth Avenue, and its courtyard restaurant, Coco's, serves Riviera-leaning Mediterranean food that includes a version of the Hôtel du Cap's steak Diane. The hotel bar carries an older reference for residents who've been here longer than the new signage: it occupies the space that once held the Chesterfield hotel's Leopard Lounge, and the design leans into that history rather than papering over it.
The Catch Nobody's Advertising
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you're reading press releases instead of walking the blocks. None of this reaches the whole island. Royal Poinciana Plaza sits on Royal Poinciana Way, and the walk from the surrounding streets, roughly the stretch from Sunrise Avenue down to Royal Palm Way, takes about five minutes. A resident in that corridor can now string together a full evening without touching a car key:
- Dinner on the water at Tutto Mare
- A screening or performance at Glazer Hall
- A nightcap at The Vineta Bar, under the old Leopard Lounge's roof
Head north past the bridges toward the North End, or south into the Estate Section, and August still looks the way it always has on Palm Beach: quiet streets, closed shutters, a slower rhythm that has nothing to do with a year of construction two miles away. The distance isn't large in a car. It's large in the currency that actually matters for a summer routine, which is whether you want to bother crossing a bridge for a Tuesday dinner or would rather walk.
What Hasn't Moved
Buccan, Clay Conley's longtime small-plates room, remains the island's steadiest table regardless of season. Conley earned recognition in the 2025 Florida Michelin Guide, and the restaurant's pull with year-round residents hasn't shifted with any of the new openings around it. It was busy before Royal Poinciana Plaza reopened and it's busy now.
The Lake Trail hasn't moved either, and that's the point. The roughly six-mile path along the Intracoastal, which residents have used for decades for a morning walk, a bike ride, or a sunset stroll, runs right past the docks below Tutto Mare's terrace. The new restaurant is an addition to an old habit, not a replacement for one.
The Breakers is running special prix-fixe menus through August 31, 2026, at two of its restaurants, open to anyone who books a table, not just guests staying on the 140-acre oceanfront property. One of them, Henry's Palm Beach, actually sits on Royal Poinciana Way itself, which is a useful reminder that the block had a pulse before Tutto Mare and Glazer Hall arrived. What changed this year isn't that the street came alive. It's that a resident can now fill an entire evening there without ever getting back in the car.
None of this changes anything about property values or square footage, and it isn't meant to. It's simply a more accurate way to measure an August on Palm Beach: not by how empty the island feels, but by how far a resident has to walk before that stops being true.
For anyone weighing what a summer like this means for a property near Cocoanut Row, or trying to figure out how a five-minute walk to Royal Poinciana Way should factor into a search on the island, Welles Properties has spent enough seasons here to talk through it plainly. Schedule a confidential consultation with David Welles.
