Palm Beach's New Restaurants in 2026: Coco's and Tutto Mare

For an island ringed by the Atlantic on one side and Lake Worth Lagoon on the other, Palm Beach spent most of its history without a single restaurant that actually faced the water. Plenty of rooms name-checked it. None of them sat on it. That changed twice in the same stretch of 2026, in two buildings a short walk apart, and the two changes tell opposite halves of the same story.

The Room With No Windows Everyone Loved Anyway

The Chesterfield Hotel's Leopard Lounge never needed a view. It had leopard-print carpet, a leopard statue perched on a glossy black piano, a hand-painted ceiling, and a 1992 fresco of nude nymphs by an Italian artist locals knew only as Lino Mario. Light came in through shuttered windows in narrow slits, which was the point. It was a room built for the people already inside it, not the scenery outside. Rod Stewart stopped in when he was in town. Lauren Bacall stayed upstairs. Joan Collins, Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore all turned up over the years, alongside a core of regulars who knew every bartender by name and could close the place down without anyone flagging a cab.

That version of the Chesterfield sold for $42 million in April 2022 to the London-based Reuben Brothers and closed that September for what became a multi-year renovation. The hotel reopened in 2026 under a new operator, Oetker Collection, the German family hospitality group behind Le Bristol Paris, Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc and Eden Rock-St Barths, marking its first property in the United States. It also reopened under a new name, though not really a new one. The building was called the Lido-Venice when it opened in 1926, then the Vineta from 1928 until the late 1970s, before Red Carnation renamed it the Chesterfield in 1989. A century later, it's the Vineta again.

What Stayed, and What Didn't

The renovation, led by Paris-based designer Tino Zervudachi with Spina O'Rourke & Partners as architect of record, cut the room count to 41 to create what Oetker describes as more generous space. Four food and beverage concepts now occupy the ground floor: the courtyard, once shaded and vine-covered, now serves as al fresco dining. A new seated-only cocktail room called The Bar limits crowding by policy rather than capacity alone. Poolside, Giovanni's Pool House pours pizzas and light bites, marking the first location of that residents-only Antibes trattoria anywhere outside Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc itself.

And where the Leopard Lounge used to be sits Coco's, the hotel's main restaurant, anchored by a slab of red Italian marble and built around a menu developed by Executive Chef Brian Rodriguez alongside Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc's Chef Sébastien Broda and Pastry Chef Tarek Ahamada. The food leans Mediterranean now, not the Chesterfield's clubby continental fare, with dishes like sea bass in fennel puree and a seafood tower pulled from the Antibes property's own menus. The one holdover, tucked into the ceiling above the dining room, is a hidden leopard motif, a quiet nod to the room's previous life rather than an attempt to recreate it.

The Water Table Palm Beach Never Had

Two blocks away, a different kind of history was closing a different kind of gap. The Royal Poinciana Playhouse, a landmarked mid-century building designed by architect John Volk within the Royal Poinciana Plaza, had sat mostly dormant for years despite occupying some of the most valuable water frontage on the island. Its old Celebrity Room once entertained the likes of Clark Gable and Joan Crawford, whose likenesses were painted into a 1950s trompe l'oeil mural called Venetian Festival by New York artist Robert Bushnell.

On January 2, 2026, that space reopened as Tutto Mare, and WS Development, which operates the Plaza, described it plainly: this is the Town of Palm Beach's first and only Intracoastal waterfront restaurant. The 15,000-square-foot restaurant seats roughly 200 guests across a main dining room with its own bar, a private dining room, two wine rooms and a 1,200-square-foot terrace looking out over the lagoon and Palm Harbor Marina. It's the first Florida outpost for Tutto il Giorno, the restaurant group founded by husband-and-wife team Gianpaolo de Felice and Gabby Karan de Felice, whose other locations sit in the Hamptons towns of Southampton, East Hampton, Bridgehampton and Sag Harbor. Karan de Felice restored the old Celebrity Room as a lounge furnished in Balinese teak, raising the floor to bring diners closer to the water while they wait for tables, and folded in a small retail corner selling Kelly Klein ceramics and cashmere from her mother Donna Karan's line.

The restaurant sits beside Glazer Hall, the Plaza's newly built performing arts center, on a stretch of the property that WS Development has been steadily repositioning as a cultural anchor rather than just a shopping arcade.

Two Blocks, One Season, Two Different Kinds of Room

Put the two projects side by side and the pattern is specific, not general. Palm Beach's most storied interior room, built to keep the outside world out, has been softened into something Mediterranean and daylight-facing, with its old identity reduced to a single hidden detail in the ceiling. Two blocks over, a building that once turned its back on the water entirely has been rebuilt around nothing but the water, in a town where that kind of frontage had somehow never been used that way before.

Neither change erased what came before it. Coco's kept the leopard in the ceiling. Tutto Mare kept the Celebrity Room's mural and its John Volk bones. But the direction of travel is clear enough that it's now possible to spend an evening in town moving from one instinct to the other: a drink at The Bar inside the Vineta, where the appeal is still the room itself, followed by dinner on Tutto Mare's terrace, where the appeal is what the room is finally facing. That sequence wasn't available on this island as recently as December 2025. It is now, within a walk of a few minutes on either end.

Karen Johnson keeps a close eye on what opens, closes and changes hands on this island, not because it sells homes but because it's the texture of living here. If you want the same kind of current, specific read on Palm Beach real estate that this post gives you on its dining scene, reach out to Karen Johnson.