Palm Beach After Dark at The Vineta and Royal Poinciana Plaza
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
Look up while you're seated at Coco's, the restaurant now occupying the ground floor at 363 Cocoanut Row, and you'll find a leopard hidden in the plaster above the dining room. It's a small detail, easy to miss between courses. But it's the only trace left of what used to be there: the Leopard Lounge, a room that ran for more than three decades as the loudest, most theatrical nightspot on the island, all leopard-print carpet, a leopard statue perched on a black piano, and a hand-painted ceiling of nude nymphs that regulars credited to an Italian artist they called Lino Mario. Rod Stewart reportedly wandered in once. Lauren Bacall kept a room upstairs. The room ran until the building closed for renovation, and reopened this spring as something almost unrecognizable.
That building is now The Vineta Hotel, and what happened to it says more about how Palm Beach socializes in 2026 than any single restaurant opening could on its own.
The property everyone on the island still calls "the old Chesterfield" sold for $42 million in 2022 and closed that September for a renovation that was supposed to wrap by late 2023. It didn't. The project ran years past its original timeline before finally opening its doors on March 2, 2026, as The Vineta Hotel, the first United States property for Oetker Collection, the German family-owned group behind Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc on the French Riviera and Eden Rock in St. Barths.
The renovation, led by Paris-based designer Tino Zervudachi, didn't just refresh the interiors. It shrank the hotel. The Chesterfield had 53 rooms and suites. The Vineta has 41, including three one-bedroom corner suites and a 1,360-square-foot Presidential Suite with the property's only soaking tub. The building itself remained the same size.
The old Leopard Lounge worked on volume. It was open to anyone who walked in, and for years it was the closest thing Palm Beach had to a nightly public stage, live music, strong drinks, a crowd that knew the bartenders by name.
The room that replaced it works on the opposite principle. The Bar, as it's now called, seats 36 people, full stop, and operates on a seated-only basis, a policy the hotel says exists specifically to control crowding. There's no walking in for a drink at the piano anymore. You reserve a seat, or you don't get one.
The old room let anyone in the door become a regular. The new one asks you to book ahead just to find out if there's a door.
Coco's, the hotel's main restaurant, tells the same story at a slightly larger scale. It seats 96 total, 64 in the dining room and 32 in the courtyard, which sounds substantial until you remember this address used to draw crowds that spilled well past any fixed seat count. Executive Chef Brian Rodriguez built the menu with input from Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc's Sébastien Broda and pastry chef Tarek Ahamada, and the dishes lean directly on that Riviera pedigree: an Eden Roc sea bass with fennel puree, a Steak Diane made with Australian Wagyu ribeye. Poolside, the Pool House serves pizza from Giovanni's, the first location of that trattoria outside the Antibes property itself, a detail that matters if you've ever tried to get a table at the original.
The Vineta has fewer rooms than the Chesterfield, and its bar seats 36. The Plaza offers a different kind of change.
Walk from Cocoanut Row to the intersection with Royal Poinciana Way and you land at The Royal Poinciana Plaza, the landmarked open-air shopping and dining property that architect John Volk designed in 1957 and that WS Development restored to its midcentury shape in 2017 under a 99-year lease. The Plaza has spent years building a tenant roster that reads like a very specific kind of guest list:
In January 2026, the Plaza added something it never had: waterfront dining. Tutto Mare opened as the island's only restaurant sitting directly on the Intracoastal, the vision of Gabby Karan de Felice, daughter of designer Donna Karan and sibling to the Hamptons favorite Tutto il Giorno. It's a genuinely new category for the property, not a swap of one tenant for another. For a shopping center built in 1957 that has spent most of its recent history without a water view attached to a menu, this is the first time the Plaza has offered a table where the Intracoastal is the point, not a backdrop glimpsed from a courtyard.
Put the two projects side by side and the pattern gets hard to miss. The Vineta cut its room count by roughly 23 percent and capped its signature bar at 36 seats in a space that used to hold a nightly crowd with no ceiling on it. The Royal Poinciana Plaza, meanwhile, added exactly one new restaurant this year, and it happens to be the only one on the island with its feet in the water. The two projects are within a two-block walk of each other off Cocoanut Row.
Palm Beach tourism hit a record 10.7 million visitors between 2024 and 2025, an 8 percent jump in a single year. That growth makes the contrast between these two nearby projects especially notable.
If you've lived on the island long enough to remember walking into the Leopard Lounge without a plan, this winter is the first full social season where that option doesn't exist anymore. What exists instead is a corridor, roughly Cocoanut Row to Royal Poinciana Way, where a hotel bar that seats three dozen people sits a short walk from a restaurant with the only Intracoastal table in town. Both require a reservation. Together, they offer two distinct options within this corridor.
If any of this changes how you think about the property behind that address, or you're weighing what a building like the old Chesterfield says about value on this stretch of the island, the team at Your Luxury Listing Group spends its time exactly here. Request a Private Consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.
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