Worth Avenue's Longest-Vacant Storefront Just Chose Dinner Over Another Boutique

The building at 151 Worth Avenue has sat empty since September 2020, longer than any other storefront on the avenue. On September 9, the Palm Beach Town Council finally approved what replaces it, and the answer wasn't another department store or a fourth or fifth luxury boutique. It was a restaurant. Stephen Starr's team will take the second floor of the old Neiman Marcus building for a 165-seat dining room, with retail filling the two floors beneath it.

That single approval is worth more attention than one new tenant usually gets, because it confirms something that's been building all year without a headline of its own. The newest occupants of Worth Avenue's biggest, oldest addresses are restaurants. The retail energy hasn't gone anywhere, but it's moved into the smaller vias one level below the marquee storefronts, where a different kind of shopping has been quietly taking hold.

Twenty-Two Years, Then Six Dark Ones

The building itself has a specific history. It went up in 1998 as a roughly 49,000-square-foot department store with two underground parking levels, purpose-built for Neiman Marcus, which occupied it for 22 years before the retailer's bankruptcy filing and permanent closure in September 2020. Nothing has operated there since. Six years is a long stretch of dark storefront on a street where vacancy is rare enough to become its own kind of story.

What the Town Council Actually Signed Off On

The plan that finally cleared council converts the three-story former anchor into a multi-tenant property: a restaurant on the second floor, boutique retail across the first two levels, and a renovation that adds Mediterranean-style architectural details, upgraded storefronts, new balconies, and a refreshed arcade. The seating breakdown is specific enough to picture: 126 seats inside, seven at the bar, and 32 on an outdoor balcony overlooking Worth Avenue itself.

The approval also reveals a smaller mechanical wrinkle that held things up. The expanded back-of-house area, now 3,425 square feet and 2,475 square feet larger than an earlier version of the plan, triggered a higher parking requirement under the town's zoning code even though customer seating actually went down from the original proposal. Council granted a variance for three spaces to close the gap. Town staff confirmed the Palm Beach restaurant will be a standalone concept rather than a branch of Starr's operations elsewhere, which matters on a street where "another location of something" tends to read differently than an address built just for here.

The Avenue Already Rehearsed This Move Twice This Year

The Neiman Marcus building isn't the first big footprint on or near the avenue to land on dining this year. Tutto Mare opened in early January at The Royal Poinciana Plaza and became the only restaurant on the island sitting directly on the Intracoastal, a project from Gabby Karan de Felice, daughter of designer Donna Karan and sibling to the Hamptons favorite Tutto il Giorno.

Two blocks from Worth Avenue, the former Chesterfield Hotel, longtime home of the storied Leopard Lounge, closed for a full renovation and reopened March 2 as The Vineta Hotel, the first U.S. property for Oetker Hotels and now owned by Reuben Brothers since a 2022 acquisition. The ground floor's new restaurant, Coco's, works a leopard motif into its design as a nod to what came before rather than an attempt to rebuild the old room. Both projects took large, historically loaded properties and turned them into places to eat and drink rather than places to shop.

Retail Didn't Disappear, It Moved Into the Vias

None of this means retail is losing ground on Worth Avenue. Louis Vuitton opened a new two-story flagship at 222 Worth Avenue late last year, its 14th Florida location and one of only two U.S. stores carrying the brand's newly launched home collection. Big luxury retail is still landing here.

What's changed is where the smaller, more specialized retail energy is showing up. Duck off the main avenue into Via Mizner, Via Parigi, or Via Bice and the register shifts. LOVE Binetti, the concept shop from designer Diego Binetti, found its first permanent Palm Beach home at 313½ Worth Avenue in Via Bice this year after several seasons running pop-ups out of The Colony Hotel and the Paramount Building. Christopher King's eponymous flagship sits inside the historic Worth Avenue Building, its leather goods handcrafted in King's own Florentine factory. Madison Avenue Couture opened its second location, and its first outside New York, in Via Mizner in 2025, specializing in authenticated Hermès and Chanel in the secondary market.

The pattern that emerges isn't retail versus dining. It's a split by scale. The avenue's biggest, most historic footprints are turning into restaurants and hotel dining rooms. The smaller, more personal retail growth is happening a courtyard away, in shops built around a single designer's point of view rather than a global flagship.

What a $43 Million Storefront Says About Six Years of Silence

The building at 225 Worth Avenue, home to Gucci, J.McLaughlin, and G/FORE, sold in March for a recorded $43 million, more than double its share of a 2021 three-property deal that valued it at $18.04 million. At 9,932 square feet, that works out to more than $4,300 per square foot, among the priciest commercial sales on the island by that measure. A few blocks east, The Esplanade, which takes up much of the south side of Worth Avenue's ocean block, sold for $200 million the same year. One broker involved in the 225 Worth deal described the avenue as having become a top-tier institutional trophy corridor.

Read against that backdrop, the six years of darkness at 151 Worth Avenue looks less like distress and more like patience. Landlords weren't struggling to fill an anchor space. They were waiting while the value of everything around it kept climbing, and holding out for a tenant that fit rather than the first offer that came along.

Once construction wraps and the Starr restaurant opens its doors, getting a table there will likely require the same kind of planning ahead that Coco's and Tutto Mare already demand on a Saturday night. The more interesting stop this fall might be one door over, past the arcade, in Via Bice or Via Mizner, where the smaller shops have been adding new names this year.

Worth Avenue changes slowly and then all at once, and this is one of those years. The Jessica Gulick Group keeps a close eye on what shifts along Palm Beach's most storied stretch, not because every new tenant matters to a real estate decision, but because understanding how a street like this actually works is part of knowing the island itself.