Singer Island's Marina Side Finally Has a Kitchen Worth Walking To

For the last few years, a good dinner on Singer Island meant checking into somebody's hotel first. The oceanfront side of the island had it covered: two resorts, two kitchens, and if you wanted a cocktail with a view, you were ordering it off a resort menu. The Intracoastal side, where the bridge drops you onto the island from Riviera Beach, had a marina with the lights off. That's the part of the summer that just changed, and it changed the geography of an evening here more than most residents have noticed yet.

The ocean side has run the show for two years

Walk out to the beach-facing hotels and you can trace exactly when the current dining lineup came together. The Singer Oceanfront Resort reopened in the spring of 2024 following a multimillion-dollar renovation and rebrand. Now part of Hilton's Curio Collection, the 223-room property leans into an early 20th-century aesthetic that feels both transportive and refreshingly unfussy. The rebrand didn't just repaint the lobby. It introduced two new dining concepts alongside a full redesign of guest rooms and public spaces.

One of those concepts is Caretta Caretta, and the name is a small piece of local trivia worth knowing. It's the signature restaurant at The Singer Oceanfront Resort, and its name pays tribute to the loggerhead sea turtle, a beloved resident of Florida's coastal waters. The other addition sits just outside it on the sand. Top Shell is the only beachfront bar on the island, which is a claim worth sitting with for a second. Singer Island has miles of oceanfront, several resorts, and exactly one bar where you can order a drink with your feet near the surf.

Down the beach at the Marriott, the timeline runs almost parallel. ONA Coastal Cuisine was newly opened May 2024, inside the award-winning Palm Beach Marriott Singer Island Beach Resort & Spa, and it's built around Mediterranean-leaning coastal plates. Between the two properties, that's three new or renovated dining rooms on the ocean side, all arriving within months of each other in 2024, and all of them tied to a resort key card whether you're staying there or not.

The Buccaneer brings the marina side back online

While the ocean side was rebuilding, the marina side of Singer Island sat quiet for a long stretch. The Buccaneer opened in the mid-1950s and thrived as the neighborhood's boating hangout for decades, but it eventually fell on hard times and closed in the early 2000s, staying dark for nearly 20 years. Sharfi Holding Inc., which took control of the property roughly a decade before the reopening, called the restoration effort seven years in the making. The dining room's grand opening landed on March 18, 2025, which means by this August it has been serving the island for about a year and a half.

The location matters as much as the history. Buccaneer Marina is the oldest marina on Singer Island, and it sits in Palm Beach Shores, the town that occupies the island's southern tip, on the boat-facing side rather than the ocean-facing side where the resorts sit.

The dining room is back under chef Paul Niedermann, who gained national recognition as the Season 9 winner of Hell's Kitchen on Fox TV in September 2012 before working his way through kitchens at BLT Steak in New York and Los Angeles and BLT Prime in Doral. His menu at the Buccaneer runs from raw bar bites to locally sourced seafood, served waterfront. Palm Beach Shores Mayor Alan Fiers put the nostalgia in local terms when the restaurant reopened:

"The Bucc was the place to be!"

Fiers added that the restaurant would be a welcome addition to the town, and Sharfi Holding partner Ryan Steely described the years of work as an effort to bring back what had once been, in his words, the crown jewel of the area.

The broader resort is still catching up to the restaurant. Palm Beach Illustrated reported in the summer of 2025 that a full transformation of the property would arrive by that fall. As of this summer, the marina is fully open, but the resort itself is still described as being in the final stages of its transformation, meaning the hotel rooms are taking longer than the kitchen did.

Here's the quick geography of it:

What this actually rearranges

Before this year, an evening on Singer Island had a built-in decision: drive off the island for something independent, or accept that your dinner would come with a resort's branding attached. That's not really true anymore. The Buccaneer is the first non-hotel restaurant on the island's marina side in two decades, and it sits closer to the bridge most residents cross by car every day than to the stretch of sand most residents walk to for sunset.

That has a practical effect on foot traffic and boat traffic alike. The Buccaneer's marina slips put it back in the rotation for anyone who boats in for dinner rather than drives, which is a different crowd than the one parking at a resort valet stand. It also means the island's dining map now has two distinct centers of gravity instead of one, split by roughly the width of the island itself.

Meanwhile, the turtles are on their own schedule

The other seasonal shift happening right now has nothing to do with restaurants. John D. MacArthur Beach State Park, at the northern end of the island's beach, runs one of the region's more serious sea turtle nesting programs, and residents who've lived here more than a summer know the rhythm by now.

A few things worth knowing about where the season stands as of August:

• Sea turtle nesting season runs annually March through October, so the beach isn't done for the year just because the guided walks are.
• Park staff begin surveying the beach in February looking for signs of a nesting turtle, and every morning during the season, rangers and trained volunteers survey the beach to track and record the number of turtles that come ashore overnight.
• On average, over 3,000 green, loggerhead, and leatherback sea turtles lay their eggs on the park's 1.6 miles of beach annually.
• This year's ticketed evening walks, where visitors get a shot at watching a nesting turtle up close, opened for reservations on May 4 and ran through June and July.

If you missed the walks, you didn't miss the season. It just gets quieter from here, with the marked nests continuing to incubate on the beach through the fall rather than under a ranger's flashlight. The programs that do run are strict about it too. Anyone who happens to see a nesting sea turtle or hatchling is asked to keep their distance, stay quiet, keep hands off, and keep all lights off, including phones and flash photography.

It's a small overlap worth noticing: the same beach that now has a restaurant named after a loggerhead turtle sits a few miles down the sand from the actual nesting grounds the name is honoring.

The shape of an August evening here now

Put it together and the island reads differently than it did two summers ago. The ocean side has its resort trio locked in, with Top Shell holding down the only true beachfront bar. The marina side has its own anchor again after two decades without one. And the beach itself is in the quieter half of a nesting season that won't close the books until October. None of that shows up on a map, but it's the actual texture of living here right now, and it's worth knowing before the next visitor asks you where to eat.

We spend a lot of time paying attention to details like these because they're the same details that shape what it feels like to actually own a place on this island, not just visit it. If you're curious what else is shifting around Singer Island this year, or you're weighing a move here yourself, IJL Real Estate Group is a good place to start that conversation. Book an appointment when you're ready.