Ask a longtime North Palm Beach resident where they went for a special dinner this year and there is a good chance the answer is a restaurant with a Lake Park address. SeaHawk Prime, the marquee new steakhouse from chef David Burke, sits inside Nautilus 220 at 220 Lake Shore Drive, technically in the town just south of the Village line. It has become the most talked-about new table on this stretch of the Intracoastal, and it belongs to somebody else's zip code.
That is not a complaint. It is the shape of the year. The two biggest changes to daily life along North Palm Beach's waterfront right now, a celebrity chef's Florida debut and a 13-acre redevelopment debate, are both unfolding within a few minutes of each other on the same short run of U.S. Highway 1 where North Palm Beach ends and Lake Park begins. Meanwhile the one thing that is unambiguously, permanently the Village's own, a Jack Nicklaus golf course the town has owned since 1962, sits away from all of it and keeps quietly collecting rankings nobody talks about at dinner.
A Steakhouse With Someone Else's Zip Code
Chef David Burke has opened more than 25 restaurants and picked up two James Beard Award nominations along the way, but SeaHawk Prime, which debuted January 1, 2026, marks his first restaurant in Florida. The 7,500-square-foot, 221-seat space was designed by New York-based Lemay_id with a reclaimed vintage clinker boat inside and a hybrid open-air bar that runs from the dining room out to a marina-front terrace on the Intracoastal.
Burke described the concept to Palm Beach Illustrated as a response to the setting itself.
"The waterfront inspired us to balance the menu between land and sea."
He has said the steakhouse leads with prime cuts but leans on fresh local seafood too, with the kind of playful touches he is known for across his other kitchens.
The menu runs from a $15 bread basket, which includes a fish-shaped cornbread muffin Burke picked up the idea for in Thailand, to a $168 tomahawk for two carved tableside off a cart. Sunday brunch started January 18. Next door, Burke's second concept, Birdie Dockside Bar & Grill, sold out its Super Bowl party on February 8 before formally opening in March, complete with golf simulators and a shared terrace.
The restaurant sits inside Nautilus 220, which held its official grand opening on March 25, 2026. At 1.15 million square feet across two 24-story towers, it is now the largest condo-anchored mixed-use project in Palm Beach County, and its address puts it just over the Village line in Lake Park. For anyone keeping a boat at a North Palm Beach marina, that line matters less than the ride. SeaHawk Prime sits a short run down the Intracoastal from the Village's own docks, which is precisely why it already feels like a North Palm Beach restaurant to a lot of people who live here.
The Marina That Never Left
The actual North Palm Beach answer to a big night out on the water has been sitting on a 60-acre peninsula the entire time. Safe Harbor Old Port Cove, described by its own marina network as a five-star yachting and cruising resort in the heart of North Palm Beach, recently added Belle's Café on site, giving boaters and residents a reason to walk the docks rather than just pass through them. The marina's private channel meets the Intracoastal at Coast Guard Channel Marker #27, four miles north of the Lake Worth Inlet, with no span bridges to slow the trip down.
That detail matters more than it sounds. A boat leaving Old Port Cove has an unobstructed run south to Lake Park Harbor Marina, where SeaHawk Prime and Birdie now anchor the ground floor of Nautilus 220. The two docks are close enough on the water that residents can treat both restaurants as part of the same evening, even though only one of them is actually in North Palm Beach. Anchorage Park Marina, the Village's other public waterfront facility off U.S. 1, rounds out the picture of a town whose social life runs along the water first and the map second.
The Same Corner, a Different Fight
The blurriest spot on that map has always been the corner of U.S. Highway 1 and Northlake Boulevard, and it is not a new phenomenon. The old Twin City Mall, which opened there in 1971 and anchored the corridor for two decades, was built straddling North Palm Beach and Lake Park from the start. It closed piecemeal through the 1990s, was partly redeveloped as Northlake Promenade Shoppes with a Publix in 2000, and the rest became the Village Shoppes in 2003.
Now the same corner is the site of Village Place, a proposal to redevelop the remaining 13 acres at 101 U.S. Highway 1 into a mixed-use project that would include, according to the developer's own filings:
- 947 multifamily units
- 206 senior living residences
- 222 hotel rooms
- 131,000 square feet of retail space
The Village Council approved the project's master plan and street layout in a unanimous vote covered by WPTV, though at the time of that reporting the building's ultimate height, size, and design were still pending, with the council giving the developer a year to come back with specifics. Whether those details have since been locked in is worth confirming before anyone assumes a particular skyline, but the site itself and the questions around it are not going anywhere. Reaction from residents at the meeting split along familiar lines. One resident, Joe Blanchard, welcomed the changes and argued they would raise surrounding property values and revitalize a shopping center that had been left to deteriorate. Another, Pam Lawler, described the corridor as already crowded enough that she sometimes waits through more than one light cycle just to get through an intersection.
Whatever height the towers end up at, the location is the real point. The corner where North Palm Beach's biggest pending development sits is a five-minute drive from the corner where its biggest new restaurant just opened in someone else's town. The line between the two places has been soft here since before either of them existed.
The One Thing That's Still All Ours
Away from the water and the mall corner, the Village owns a golf course that does not need a grand opening to matter. The North Palm Beach Country Club traces back to 1926, when it opened as the Palm Beach Winter Club on a Seth Raynor design meant to draw investors who arrived by car or by yacht up Lake Worth. The Village bought the course and clubhouse in 1962, and after a Jack Nicklaus redesign completed in November 2006, it became just one of two municipal courses in the country to carry his Signature title. Nicklaus took a symbolic one dollar for the renovation, and the Florida Historic Golf Trail preserved his own explanation for why.
"I have lived in North Palm Beach for more than 35 years."
He has said the modestly priced course was his way of giving something back to a community that supported his family for decades.
The course has since been ranked the No. 1 municipal course in Florida and 27th in the country by Golfweek, and voted the top public course in Palm Beach County by the Palm Beach Post. Two holes run directly along the Intracoastal, which is as close as this particular piece of North Palm Beach gets to the marina scene playing out a few miles south. The clubhouse's Grill Room serves members and the public with views over the fairways, and the course hosts the North Palm Beach Links 5K Ghost Run, a race that sends runners down the same oak-shaded cart paths Nicklaus laid out.
Nothing about the golf course is borrowed from Lake Park or contested at a podium. It belongs to the Village outright, the way it has since before most of the condos on the Intracoastal existed.
What This Adds Up to for the Rest of Summer
The version of North Palm Beach worth paying attention to this year is not a list of new openings. It is a town whose social geography keeps sliding south along the water while its civic geography holds firm around a golf course it has owned for over sixty years. Residents will keep booking SeaHawk Prime and docking at Old Port Cove in the same week, keep watching the Village Place hearings without much certainty about the skyline they will produce, and keep playing a municipal course that never needed a ribbon cutting to earn its reputation. All three things are true about the same small town at the same time, which is a more useful way to understand it than any single opening ever will be.
If you are thinking about what any of this means for a specific address in North Palm Beach, whether you are weighing a move, a sale, or just curious what a waterfront lot near Old Port Cove is worth in today's market, Brad and Shannon Ball know this stretch of U.S. 1 block by block. Reach out for a free home valuation and a conversation grounded in the actual corner you live on, not the one three towns over.
