Clematis Street's Old Guard Is Leaving Just as the New Anchors Move In
Grease Burger Bar served its last patty on July 17, 2026, seventeen years after it opened in the 200 block of Clematis Street. Seven weeks earlier, on May 24, City Cellar closed its doors at CityPlace after more than a quarter century in business. Both restaurants belonged to the same operator, Big Time Restaurant Group, the company that has also run Rocco's Tacos, Big City Tavern, Bar Capri, Louie Bossi's, Elisabetta's, and City Oyster & Sushi Bar along this same stretch of downtown West Palm Beach for years.
Neither closure came with an explanation. Grease Burger Bar posted a single "Last Call" message on Instagram and invited regulars to come raise a glass. That is not the kind of thing that shows up in a restaurant roundup, and it is not the kind of thing three other sites will tell you. But it matters, because the same stretch of downtown's calendar that saw one longtime Clematis operator retreat from two of its biggest footprints also saw a very different kind of restaurant group move onto the same three or four blocks.
City Cellar and Grease Burger Bar were not marginal spots. A restaurant that survives 25 years in downtown West Palm Beach has weathered multiple recessions, multiple ownership shifts on the block around it, and a full generation of dining trends. A burger joint that runs 17 years in the same 200-block storefront, gets featured on the Travel Channel, and still closes without public explanation is not a sign that Clematis Street stopped drawing crowds. Big Time Restaurant Group still operates half a dozen other concepts within walking distance. This was not an exit from downtown. It was a retreat from two specific addresses.
That distinction matters for anyone trying to read what is actually happening here. This is not simply "old restaurants close, rents go up." It is one operator choosing to give up ground on two of its longest-held leases in the same season that outside hospitality groups with considerably deeper pockets were locking in space nearby.
In December 2025, Kyma opened its first restaurant outside New York inside the 300 Banyan tower, part of the Banyan & Olive development built by Brand Atlantic Real Estate Partners. The concept, brought to West Palm Beach by owner Mike Angeliades, spans 14,000 square feet split across three named spaces: Kelari, a dining room built around the idea of a Greek wine cellar, Avli, a bar and open courtyard, and Terazza, a 6,000-square-foot rooftop billed as the highest in downtown West Palm Beach.
That same month, on December 5, 2025, Eataly opened its 23,000-square-foot Italian marketplace a few blocks away, inside CityPlace's Harriet Himmel Hall, a building that has stood for close to a century and originally served as a church before becoming CityPlace's performance venue. The West Palm Beach location marked Eataly's 19th store in North America and its second in Florida, following an Aventura debut earlier the same year. Related Ross, the developer behind CityPlace, worked with the city and preservation teams to keep the building's original architecture intact while building out two full restaurant concepts, La Pizza & La Pasta and Il Pastaio, plus a cluster of quick-service counters for espresso, pastries, gelato, and Roman-style pizza.
Set those two numbers next to a single-storefront burger bar. Grease Burger Bar occupied one address for 17 years on one lease. Kyma and Eataly represent a combined 37,000 square feet of build-out, financed by two separate development groups, inside buildings large enough to require years of planning before a single plate goes out. That is the actual shift on Clematis Street this year. It is not that tastes changed. It is that the scale of capital required to hold ground on this corridor moved up by an order of magnitude, and the operators who can meet that scale are increasingly national or multi-city groups rather than the local restaurant families that built the block.
A single-address lease opens on one day and closes on one day, the way Grease Burger Bar did. A 14,000-square-foot restaurant does not work that way. Kyma's ground floor, Kelari and Avli, opened first in December 2025, running daily from 4:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. The rooftop, Terazza, came online as a second phase, with its own separate hours running later into the night on weekends. A monthly Mykonos Brunch launched in January 2026. Offsite catering did not go live until February 2026. At the time of the opening announcement, lunch service was described only as coming sometime later in 2026, with no fixed date attached.
Eataly followed a similar pattern. The marketplace opened with its two sit-down restaurants and its retail counters running in December 2025, while a full catering and private dining program was announced for early 2026, separate from opening day.
If you have walked past either building and assumed "it's open, I've seen the lights on" applies to everything inside, it is worth knowing that is not quite how these builds work. A resident who tried to book Kyma's rooftop the week it opened, or Eataly's private dining room the week the marketplace debuted, would have been looking for something that had not switched on yet. These are not restaurants in the old Clematis sense of one room and one menu. They are multi-phase projects that roll out their full offering over months, which is worth knowing before you plan an event around any single piece of either one.
Underneath the two marquee arrivals, the street still has a working middle tier that residents can use tonight. A few of the current fixtures worth knowing:
None of these four replace the specific history that Grease Burger Bar or City Cellar carried. But they represent the same corridor absorbing new operators at a faster pace than it is losing old ones, even in a year when two of its longest-tenured restaurants closed within seven weeks of each other.
Both Kyma and Eataly announced their fuller programming, catering, brunch service, lunch service, in stages spread across months rather than on a single opening day. That alone tells you these are not corner-restaurant leases. They are anchor-scale bets that a development group is willing to fund and phase in slowly because the space, and the audience, can support it. A 17-year burger bar and a 25-year bistro could not hold their addresses against that kind of capital. Whether the next round of Clematis turnover follows the same pattern is worth watching rather than assuming.
For residents who have lived near downtown for years, that is the actual news buried under the restaurant openings: the block is being rebuilt at a different scale than it was, one large-format lease at a time. For a deeper look at how downtown West Palm Beach fits into the broader corridor, our West Palm Beach neighborhood guide covers what else has been changing nearby.
Kevin Keogh and the team at Lighthouse Realty Group live and work in this part of Palm Beach County, and we pay attention to these shifts because they tell us as much about a neighborhood's direction as any listing does. If you want a local read on West Palm Beach, whether you are already here or just watching from a distance, schedule a free consultation and let's talk about what you're seeing.
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