For years, the routine at Old Port Cove was simple. You brought the boat in, tied off, maybe grabbed a sandwich at the boaters' lounge, and drove somewhere else for a real dinner. The 60-acre peninsula off U.S. 1 has always had the water right, the docks right, the sunset right. What it never had was a table worth booking two weeks out.
That changed this year, and it changed because of a building that took much longer to finish than anyone planned.
A Year Late, One Chef Early
Nautilus 220, the twin-tower condominium on Lake Shore Drive at the foot of Silver Beach Road, had originally been promised for a spring 2025 debut. Delays pushed the timeline repeatedly, the kind of slippage that becomes a running joke among people who drive past the construction fencing every week. The building finally cleared its certificate of occupancy on December 24, 2025, just ahead of New Year's Eve parties nobody was sure would happen in time.
By spring, the $300 million project was more than 90 percent sold, with the last two and three bedroom residences priced from $1.3 million to over $4 million. Forest Development's Peter Baytarian called the March 25 grand opening the start of a new chapter for the area, and for once the line wasn't just ribbon-cutting language. The ground floor of that long-delayed building is the reason the peninsula's dinner options look different in September than they did a year ago.
Worth saying plainly: Nautilus 220 sits on the Lake Park side of the municipal line, not technically inside North Palm Beach. Nobody who docks a boat at Old Port Cove or drives over on a Friday night is thinking about that boundary. The marina the building overlooks, the Intracoastal view its restaurant sells, the entire waterfront identity of that stretch of Lake Shore Drive, all of it reads as North Palm Beach to the people who actually use it. The two towns share a shoreline more than they share a border.
What Actually Landed On The Ground Floor
The anchor tenant is SeaHawk Prime by David Burke, a modern American steakhouse and Burke's first restaurant in Palm Beach County. Burke built his name at New York's River Cafe in his twenties, went on to open Smith & Wollensky locations elsewhere in South Florida, and holds a patent on a salt-aging process he uses on the meats here, a Himalayan salt wall built into the back of house specifically to tenderize and concentrate flavor over a longer aging window than a standard steakhouse dry-age.
He described the concept in terms of the room it sits in.
"The waterfront inspired us to balance the menu between land and sea."
The restaurant started dinner service in January, running Thursday through Sunday with Sunday brunch beginning that same month, ahead of a formal public opening in March once the full menu and hours were in place. Its own indoor-outdoor bar seats 44, with garage-style doors that swing up to open the room onto the marina, patio seating running along the north side and front terrace facing the boats and the Intracoastal.
Next door, Burke's second concept, Birdie Dockside Bar & Grill, opened that same March. Birdie is the livelier sibling: high-tech sports simulator bays, elevated American grill fare, a private event space, and a game-day energy built for a Sunday afternoon rather than a date night. The concept sold out its Super Bowl party in January before the space had even formally opened to walk-in guests, an early signal that the demand for a genuine gathering spot on this stretch of water had been sitting there unmet.
SeaHawk Prime alone runs about 7,500 square feet, a real footprint for a single restaurant on a marina lot, with Birdie occupying its own adjacent space next door.
The Peninsula Didn't Need Replacing, Just Completing
None of this displaced what was already working. Old Port Cove itself, under Safe Harbor's ownership since 2018, still anchors the peninsula, one of three marinas in the group that together hold roughly 650 slips for vessels from 20 to 200 feet. Belle's Café, a newer addition inside the marina property itself, still handles the daytime crowd, coffee and a casual bite for boaters who aren't looking for a full dinner. A few minutes down the water, Frigate's Waterfront Bar Grill keeps doing what it has always done: a tiki bar, palapa seating, twenty-two flat screens, and a crowd that arrives as easily by boat as by car.
What the peninsula was missing wasn't volume. It was a room serious enough that you'd plan an evening around it instead of stumbling into it because you happened to already be docked nearby. That's the gap SeaHawk Prime filled, and it's a different kind of business than a marina snack bar or a sports bar, even a good one. A steakhouse with a chef's name on the door and a patented aging process in the back changes who drives over and why.
Six Months In, The Pattern Holds
It's now been roughly half a year since SeaHawk Prime and Birdie moved from soft-launch pop-ups to full public operation. A restaurant tied to a brand-new residential building faces a harder test than most: the initial curiosity crowd from condo buyers and neighbors only carries a room so far. Six months on, the harder test looks like the one worth watching, and a room built around a chef's name and a patented aging process was designed from the start to be a destination rather than a convenience stop.
The peninsula still functions the way it always has. Boats still come and go from Old Port Cove's docks all day. Belle's still handles the coffee run. Frigate's still packs a Sunday afternoon crowd that came by water as much as by car. What's different is that North Palm Beach's marina corridor now has a table people will drive to on purpose, from Juno Beach, from the Gardens, from Palm Beach Gardens itself, rather than one they only find because they were already tying up nearby. A long-delayed building finally opening turned out to be less interesting, on its own, than what it brought with it.
If you're already living along this stretch of water and want to talk about what these kinds of changes mean for property values or timing a future move, David Cooke Real Estate is always glad to have that conversation, no pressure, just a straight read on the market from people who watch it closely.
