For as long as anyone with a mailbox on the island can remember, the working definition of Palm Beach summer has been a subtraction problem. Season ends, the seasonal owners fly north, half the dining rooms lock the doors, and the ones that stay open run on a skeleton menu until October. If you live here year-round, you learn the rhythm. You also learn to drive off the island for a real Tuesday night out.
That description held up for decades. It stopped being accurate somewhere between January 2 and March 2 of this year, when three separate institutions opened inside a ten-block radius and, by June, quietly agreed to keep the lights on through September. This post is about what that circuit actually looks like from inside 33480.
The three openings that reset the island calendar
The dates matter, because the compression is the story.
On January 2, Tutto Mare opened at The Royal Poinciana Plaza. On January 22, Glazer Hall raised its curtain in the shell of the long-shuttered Royal Poinciana Playhouse next door. On March 2, The Vineta Hotel reopened at 363 Cocoanut Row after a three-year renovation, bringing the Oetker Collection to the United States for the first time. Three openings, sixty days, all within a walkable arc bounded roughly by Sunrise Avenue to the north and Royal Palm Way to the south.
None of that would matter for a summer resident if the three had followed the seasonal script and dimmed after Easter. They didn't. Which is what makes the second thing worth explaining.
What "The Royal Riviera" is actually promising
In June, WS Development, which owns The Royal Poinciana Plaza, put a name and a date range on what had been forming informally since spring. They call it The Royal Riviera, and it runs July through September 2026. Their own framing:
The Royal Riviera is The Royal Poinciana Plaza's property-wide summer platform… Palm Beach, senza fretta. Without hurry.
Strip out the marketing and the substance is this: a property owner has publicly committed to programming the summer months as a first-class season rather than a caretaker window. Morning coffee, courtyard dinners, and evening screenings at Glazer Hall run continuously instead of pausing after Memorial Day. That kind of commitment from the landlord is the piece that makes tenant decisions like nightly service at Tutto Mare economically sane. It is also the piece that a lot of longtime residents have never actually seen the island commit to.
Tutto Mare, and the reservation to hold
Tutto Mare is the room doing most of the visible work. It is, at the moment, the only restaurant in the Town of Palm Beach that sits directly on the Intracoastal, with a 1,200-square-foot terrace looking west over Lake Worth Lagoon and Palm Harbor Marina. The 200-seat dining room lives inside the reimagined Royal Poinciana Playhouse, under twelve-foot vaulted oak-beamed ceilings, with a restored 1950s ceiling mural by Robert Bushnell, called Venetian Festival, that still holds the caricatures of Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, and roughly a hundred other faces from the Playhouse's Celebrity Room heyday.
The operators are Gabby Karan de Felice, daughter of Donna Karan, and her husband Gianpaolo de Felice, who together built Tutto il Giorno in Sag Harbor, Southampton, and East Hampton starting in 2008. Executive Chef Agostino Petrosino runs the kitchen. The house is open seven nights a week with dinner service starting at 5 p.m. and last seating at 9:30, and lunch daily from noon to 2:30.
Two things worth knowing if you live within walking distance:
- The terrace is west-facing, which means the reservation to hold in July is the one that seats you about an hour before sunset.
- Because service runs to 9:30 nightly, a walk-in after a 7:30 show next door is genuinely realistic in a way that Worth Avenue rarely is on a summer weeknight.
Glazer Hall, and why it matters more than any single show
Glazer Hall is the piece that turns a good dinner into a full evening. It is Palm Beach's first new nonprofit performing arts organization in more than sixty years, founded by longtime residents Avie and Jill Glazer and run by executive director Allison Stockel, who spent twenty-one years running the Ridgefield Playhouse in Connecticut before taking this on.
The room itself is a 400-seat theater inside 24,000 square feet, with retractable seating and a glass back wall that opens the stage sightline to the Intracoastal. The building is the original 1958 John L. Volk Playhouse, which had sat idle for roughly two decades before the Glazer family took on the six-year restoration. When Jill Glazer describes the space, she keeps returning to the word intimate, which is a fair description of what a 400-seat house feels like after years of driving to the Kravis for anything worth seeing.
The summer programming is the part most residents don't yet know exists. A Summer Jazz Series runs through the season. The weekend of July 17 through 19, the house is screening The Odyssey on IMAX, projected on a forty-foot screen with Dolby surround, filmed entirely on IMAX cameras. That is the sort of detail that residents ask each other about at the condo mailroom and nobody has a clean answer for. Now there is one.
Coco's, The Bar, and the Leopard Lounge that refuses to leave
The Vineta is the third leg. The building itself dates to 1926, opened in the same wave as The Boca Raton and The Biltmore in Coral Gables, and spent most of the last thirty-six years as The Chesterfield Hotel. The Reuben Brothers bought it in 2022 and partnered with Oetker Collection, whose sister properties include Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes and Le Bristol Paris. The renovation cut the room count from 53 to 41 and put Tino Zervudachi in charge of the interiors.
For a resident, the hotel rooms are beside the point. The two rooms that matter sit on the ground floor.
Coco's is the signature restaurant. Ninety-six seats, split 64 in the dining room and 32 in a jasmine-scented courtyard, with a menu overseen by Sébastien Broda of Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc and run day-to-day by Executive Chef Brian Rodriguez. The signature dishes read as a deliberate transplant from the Cap: an Eden Roc sea bass with fennel puree, a Steak Diane made with Australian Wagyu ribeye. The room itself has a concealed leopard motif tucked into the design, which is a small joke aimed at anyone who remembers the previous tenant.
That joke gets a room of its own next door. The Bar is capped at 36 seats and functions as the deliberate heir to the old Leopard Lounge. If you spent any of the last three decades on this island, that reference will do its own work.
A walkable July evening, laid out
Here is what none of this looked like eighteen months ago, and what is now possible in a single unhurried loop:
| Time | Stop | Distance from Cocoanut Row |
|---|---|---|
| 6:30 p.m. | Sunset table on the west terrace at Tutto Mare | ~5 min walk |
| 7:45 p.m. | Summer Jazz set at Glazer Hall, 70 Royal Poinciana Way | ~2 min walk from Tutto Mare |
| 9:45 p.m. | Nightcap at The Bar inside The Vineta, 363 Cocoanut Row | ~7 min walk |
Every one of those pins is on the island. None of it requires a car, a bridge, or a reservation on Clematis. In August of 2024, that itinerary did not exist.
What actually changed, and for whom
The temptation with a piece like this is to conflate three good openings with a permanent shift. Worth being honest: some of Palm Beach's oldest summer patterns are unchanged. The Society of the Four Arts still runs a lighter July calendar, with programs like the August 4 community memory quilt workshop rather than in-season lecture nights. Worth Avenue still thins out. Many of the private beach clubs still run reduced hours.
What has changed is that the block bounded by Cocoanut Row, Royal Poinciana Way, and the Intracoastal now behaves like a summer district. A landlord has committed to it in writing through September. Two restaurants and a theater are running full weekly programming inside a five-minute radius. For a resident who has spent a July or two on the island watching the shutters go up, that is not a marketing shift. That is a change in what the calendar can actually hold.
If you have never tried a full island evening in August, this is the summer to test it. Book the 6:30 west-facing table, walk over for the 7:30 set, and let the last stop find you.
Curious how a specific building or block on the island fits into this new summer footprint, or thinking about a lock-and-leave residence within walking distance of it all? Kristen Reilly knows these streets, these buildings, and the closing details that come with each. Let's connect.