For more than three decades, the Leopard Lounge did not need an address. Regulars in Palm Beach just said the name and everyone understood: the black lacquer booths, the leopard-print carpet, the leopard statue perched on the piano, a hand-painted ceiling watching over whoever was still there at last call. The Chesterfield Hotel that housed it sold for $42 million to London's Reuben Brothers in April 2022, and the doors closed that September for what was supposed to be a renovation. For close to three and a half years, that corner of Cocoanut Row sat behind construction fencing.
It reopened at the end of February 2026, not as the Chesterfield and not with the Leopard Lounge, but as The Vineta Hotel, the first United States property for Oetker Hotels, the European group behind Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc on the French Riviera. The room where the leopard carpet used to be is now called Coco's, a Mediterranean restaurant with a red Italian marble bar. Look up while you're seated there and you'll find a leopard motif worked into the ceiling, a quiet nod from designer Tino Zervudachi to what the space used to be.
That alone would be worth a resident's attention. What makes it a story rather than a single hotel reopening is what happened at almost the exact same time, a short walk away, inside a completely different building that had been just as dark for just as long.
The Playhouse Came Back in Two Stages
The Royal Poinciana Playhouse sat long-dormant for years, a historic theater complex at the north end of the island that Palm Beach residents drove past without much expectation that it would come back. In January 2026, it did, and not as one thing. It came back as two.
Glazer Hall opened its doors on January 22, 2026, at 70 Royal Poinciana Way. It is a 24,000-square-foot, 400-seat performing arts venue built inside the old Playhouse shell, with a wall of glass behind the stage looking straight out at the Intracoastal. Founded by longtime residents Jill and Avie Glazer, it is Palm Beach's first new nonprofit arts organization in more than 60 years. The opening lineup included the Amazing Acrobats of Shanghai Circus, and the venue has since hosted Christian McBride, Rufus Wainwright, and Herbie Hancock, with a jazz series that carried programming through the summer months, a season the island used to treat as an off switch.
Three weeks earlier, on January 2, 2026, Tutto Mare opened in the same historic Playhouse complex at Royal Poinciana Plaza. It is the Town of Palm Beach's first and only restaurant sitting directly on the Intracoastal, a distinction that sounds minor until you consider how much of the island's waterfront is private dock. The restaurant seats 200 across a main dining room, a private dining room, two wine rooms, and a terrace over Lake Worth Lagoon and the Palm Harbor Marina. It's the work of Gabby Karan de Felice, daughter of designer Donna Karan, and her husband Gianpaolo, whose Tutto il Giorno group built its name in Sag Harbor, East Hampton, and Southampton before making Palm Beach its first stop outside New York. The restaurant also revives the Playhouse's old Celebrity Room, restoring a 1950s mural called "Venetian Festival" that caricatures more than a hundred stars who used to frequent the room, Clark Gable and Joan Crawford among them.
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only heard about one of these openings: they're the same building. One landmarked Playhouse complex, closed for years, came back in January 2026 in two stages, as a theater and a waterfront restaurant, run by two organizations that had nothing to do with each other.
| Venue | Address | Opened | What it replaced |
|---|---|---|---|
| Glazer Hall | 70 Royal Poinciana Way | January 22, 2026 | The long-dormant Royal Poinciana Playhouse theater |
| Tutto Mare | Royal Poinciana Plaza | January 2, 2026 | The Playhouse's original Celebrity Room and restaurant space |
| The Vineta Hotel (Coco's, The Vineta Bar, Pool House) | 363 Cocoanut Row | Late February 2026 | The Chesterfield Hotel, closed since September 2022 |
Two Separate Landmarks, Not One Coordinated Plan
It would be tidy to say the town planned this. It didn't. The Vineta is a private hospitality deal between Reuben Brothers and Oetker Hotels, aimed at hotel guests and the kind of traveler who books Hotel du Cap in August. Glazer Hall is a nonprofit arts venture with no financial relationship to the hotel or the restaurant next door. Tutto Mare answers to WS Development, the company that owns Royal Poinciana Plaza. Three separate capital projects, three separate ownership groups, and all three landed inside an eight-week window at the start of 2026.
That's actually the useful part for anyone who already lives here. This isn't a master-planned entertainment district with a marketing budget behind it. It's three long, expensive, occasionally delayed restoration projects that all happened to finish around the same time, on the same stretch of the island, in buildings that had been landmarks for decades before anyone touched them.
Why This Isn't the Worth Avenue Story
If you think of Palm Beach's evening life as Worth Avenue, that's the old map. Worth Avenue is still where you go for Cartier and a walk past the Clock Tower. But none of this year's three big reopenings happened there. They happened up on Royal Poinciana Way and Cocoanut Row, the corridor that runs off the Flagler Memorial Bridge at the island's north end, an area that's spent years being mostly residential and quiet after dark.
According to ehotelier, Oetker's CEO Timo Gruenert called The Vineta's debut "a monumental moment in the brand's history" when the hotel opened, and it's easy to read that as hotel-industry language until you notice what he's actually pointing at: a European luxury group chose this specific block of Palm Beach, not Miami, not the Hamptons, for its first American address. Glazer Hall's founders made a similar bet on the same corridor with a nonprofit theater. Tutto Mare's owners bet on it with a 200-seat restaurant. None of them were betting on Worth Avenue.
What an Actual Evening Looks Like Now
The practical shift for a resident is straightforward. A year ago, an evening on this end of the island meant driving south for dinner and entertainment, because there wasn't much reason to stay north after five o'clock. Now there's a genuine sequence available within a few minutes of each other: dinner on the water at Tutto Mare, a show or a jazz set at Glazer Hall, a nightcap in the room that used to be the Leopard Lounge. None of the three businesses coordinated that sequence. It exists because they all opened in the same eight-week stretch, in the same corner of the same small island.
Tutto Mare's terrace faces west over the Lagoon, which makes the hour before sunset worth planning around if you're headed there for dinner. Glazer Hall's 2026-27 season runs through the fall and winter with programming already announced. And Coco's kitchen, run by executive chef Brian Rodriguez in collaboration with Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc's chefs, is bringing dishes like Steak Diane and a sea bass with fennel purée to a room that spent thirty years serving something else entirely.
None of this required Worth Avenue to change at all. It didn't. The Clock Tower, the boutiques, the Society of the Four Arts up the road are exactly what they were last year. What changed is that the other end of the island, the end most people drove past without stopping, now has three reasons to stop.
If you've lived on this stretch of Palm Beach for a while and haven't walked into any of the three yet, that's the actual news here. Not that Palm Beach got fancier. It already was. It's that a corner of the island that had been quiet since before most current residents moved in just got un-quiet, three separate times, in the same eight weeks.
If you're weighing what a home near this corridor is actually worth now that Royal Poinciana Way has real evening foot traffic again, or you're simply curious how a specific address here fits into the island's changing map, Kristen Danzig and Amanda Caracuzzo know this stretch block by block. Find it. Love it. Own it.
