Walk north from Clematis Street past the Brightline tracks and you land somewhere that didn't have a name two years ago. North Railroad Avenue, now shorthand to everyone as NORA, has filled a stretch of century-old warehouses with a bagel shop that flies its dough in from New York water, a Boston taco bar, and an ice cream counter that started as a truck on the streets of New York City. A short drive away in the Historic Northwest District, also just north of downtown, sits somewhere with the opposite instinct: a hundred-year-old jazz room that spent years shuttered, then reopened by rebuilding around what was already there, rooftop included.
Both are genuinely new experiences for anyone who already calls West Palm Beach home. Neither is generic. And the fact that they're happening within walking distance of each other, on the same redevelopment timeline, in the same city, says something about how this town is growing that you won't get from a restaurant roundup.
Five Out of Six
When the Palm Beach Post tallied NORA's opening restaurant lineup this spring, five of the six were transplants from the Northeast. Juliana's Pizza came from Fulton Ferry Landing in Brooklyn, the same small historic district where pizza legend Patsy Grimaldi opened his original shop. H&H Bagels shipped its kettle-boiled, New York-water dough south after a career showing up in Seinfeld and Sex and the City. Van Leeuwen Ice Cream started in a yellow truck on New York City streets in 2008 before it became a national name. Loco Taqueria & Oyster Bar crossed state lines from Boston, its first location outside New England. Only Celis Juice Bar, known locally for its Berries N Cream smoothie, was already a West Palm Beach favorite before NORA existed.
That ratio is not an accident of leasing. NORA's development team has been public about how selective the process has been. Its leasing director has talked about reviewing 37 candidates for a single coffee shop tenant before signing the one that felt right. That is not how a neighborhood fills up organically. It is how a developer builds a district meant to feel discovered rather than delivered.
Matthew Grogan, the New Yorker who partnered with Grimaldi to bring Juliana's south, put his own read on it plainly: "I look at Nora as what Fulton was 35 years ago." That comparison is worth sitting with if you live here. Fulton Ferry Landing spent decades as an overlooked industrial corner of Brooklyn before it became one of the borough's most recognizable food destinations. NORA is betting the same arc plays out here, on a compressed timeline and with the benefit of hindsight.
What You Can Actually Walk Into This Month
If you live in West Palm Beach and haven't made it up to North Railroad Avenue yet, here is what's already open rather than still under construction fencing.
| Category | Open now |
|---|---|
| Food and drink | Loco Taqueria & Oyster Bar, Del Mar, Sunday Motor Co., Celis Juice Bar, H&H Bagels, Van Leeuwen Ice Cream, Juliana's Pizza |
| Fitness and wellness | [solidcore], GRO Yoga & Wellness, Sana Skin Studio, ZenHippo, IGK Salons |
| Retail | Warby Parker, Le Labo Fragrances, Pompanos, mint |
| Sports and social | Sports & Rec |
The district itself sits on a defined footprint: North Railroad Avenue runs between Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard to the north and Quadrille Boulevard to the south, bounded by Dixie Highway on the east and the Florida East Coast Railway tracks on the west. That's roughly a mile from the waterfront and close enough to the Brightline station to walk it, which matters if you're weighing a dinner reservation against a drive downtown versus a five-minute stroll from the train platform.
Sunday Motor Co. is worth a specific mention if you haven't tried it. It blends espresso and brunch with a vintage-car aesthetic, and it's become the kind of daytime anchor that gives the district a reason to fill up before happy hour even starts.
What's Still Behind Construction Fencing
The name most people are actually waiting on hasn't opened yet. Pastis, the Parisian brasserie brought south by James Beard Award-winning restaurateur Stephen Starr, is set to anchor the ground floor of the Nora Hotel when it opens later this year. The hotel itself, a 201-key property developed by BD Hotels and Sean MacPherson, the team behind the Bowery Hotel and the Mercer in New York, is designed around Spanish Colonial Revival architecture with a rooftop pool and garden lounge. Multiple outlets covering the project have pointed to a late 2026 opening window, which means the version of NORA you're walking through right now, busy as it already feels on a Friday night, is still missing its intended centerpiece.
That timing matters for anyone who likes getting somewhere before it gets crowded. The district as it stands today, with roughly 150,000 square feet of restored warehouse space and close to two dozen ground-floor tenants, is the version before the hotel opens and before word travels much further south of downtown. Once Pastis and the accompanying social club are operating, the parking and the wait times on a Saturday night are unlikely to look like they do this September.
A Few Minutes Away, a Different Kind of New
If NORA is West Palm Beach importing a finished idea from up north, the Sunset Lounge is the opposite instinct entirely. The venue, at the corner of Eighth Street and Henrietta Avenue in the Historic Northwest District just west of Rosemary and north of downtown, first opened in 1926 as an auto service station with a rooftop garden before it evolved into a two-story lounge. During the 1940s and 1950s, at a time when segregation barred Black performers from mainstream venues across the South, the Sunset Lounge hosted Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington. It closed in 2018 and sat empty for years while the city's Community Redevelopment Agency worked through a legal dispute over who would operate it next.
It reopened in November 2025 after a restoration exceeding $16 million, now built out to roughly 20,000 square feet with a restaurant, bar, and rooftop lounge added around the preserved historic core. The reopening celebration drew nearly 500 guests for a performance by Grammy-nominated saxophonist Boney James, and the venue has since hosted a recurring series called Soul in the City, produced by the city's Community Events Division, with shows that December and into the following spring featuring Valerie Tyson and Copeland Davis.
Where NORA's opening lineup leans on brand names imported wholesale, Sunset Lounge's entire value is that nothing about it was imported. The building, the neighborhood, and the history are the draw, restored rather than replicated. If you're the kind of West Palm Beach resident who already has NORA in a weekend rotation, the Historic Northwest District and its jazz room are worth adding to the list for a genuinely different kind of evening, one rooted in what this city already was rather than what another city already built.
Two Kinds of New in the Same City
Neither approach is the right one and neither needs defending against the other. NORA is proving that a warehouse corridor can support a curated, out-of-state tenant mix without feeling like a strip mall, and the crowds already moving through Loco Taqueria and Juliana's Pizza on a weeknight suggest the bet is working. Sunset Lounge is proving that a building with a hundred years of history doesn't need reinvention, just the resources to bring it back intact.
What's useful for anyone living here now is simply knowing both stories exist at the same time, a few minutes apart. The next time a friend visiting from out of town asks what's new in West Palm Beach, you now have two very different answers, and both of them are true.
If you're the kind of person who likes tracking how a neighborhood changes before everyone else notices, that instinct tends to be useful well beyond restaurant openings. The Burroughs Team spends its time doing exactly that across Palm Beach Gardens and the surrounding communities. If you're curious what a shift like NORA's or a restoration like Sunset Lounge's eventually means for property values nearby, or you just want a second set of eyes on what's happening in your own neighborhood, reach out and request a free home valuation. No pressure either way, just a conversation with people who are already paying attention.
