The Best Wine List on the Treasure Coast Is Sitting Next to a Winn-Dixie in Hobe Sound

Pull into the plaza on Bridge Road and nothing about it says fine dining. There's a Winn-Dixie anchoring one end, a nail salon, a scattering of the kind of storefronts every South Florida strip center has. Most people drive past without a second look. But tucked into that same row of storefronts is a dining room that has spent six straight years winning one of the wine industry's most selective national honors, and the two people who built it once poured wine for high rollers at the Bellagio.

That restaurant is The Grove, Cucina & Wine, and the mismatch between its address and its résumé says something real about how Hobe Sound works. This is a town that doesn't dress up its best things. It just keeps doing them well, in ordinary buildings, until word gets around.

A Sommelier Couple's Unlikely Home Base

Jen and Luis Reyneri opened The Grove in 2019 after nearly two decades in Las Vegas fine dining, including stints at the Bellagio and the Aladdin, and a stretch living and studying wine across Europe. When they came back to South Florida, they didn't set up in a resort corridor or a downtown restaurant row. They opened in the same Bridge Road plaza as the neighborhood grocery store, in a space that had no built-in reason to be taken seriously.

Wine Spectator took it seriously anyway. The magazine has handed The Grove its Award of Excellence every year from 2020 through 2025, six in a row, and the honor recognizes a wine list built to actual scale: roughly 500 selections and about 1,000 bottles in inventory, according to the restaurant's own listing on Wine Spectator's database. That is not a wine list assembled to look good on a menu insert. It's a working cellar in a strip mall.

When the sixth award came through, Jen Reyneri put it plainly in Wine Spectator's own announcement of the 2025 winners:

"Winning the Wine Spectator Award for the sixth consecutive year is a humbling and heartfelt honor. For us, it reflects more than a passion for wine, it represents a journey of faith, family, fellowship and purpose."

Recognition at that level, held for that long, puts The Grove in rare company. Only a handful of restaurants anywhere on the Treasure Coast carry an active Wine Spectator award at all. The Grove has carried one every single year since it opened, which means a couple who once worked hotel wine programs built in Las Vegas chose to put that same level of craft into a room next to a grocery store checkout line, and the industry's own judges keep confirming they got it right.

The Rest of the Block Is Having Its Own Moment

The Grove isn't the only thing worth watching along this stretch. Bridge Road and the SE Federal Highway corridor it feeds into have turned over more in the past two years than most people driving through on autopilot have noticed.

• Palm & Ivy Kitchen and Cocktails opened in August 2024 on SE Federal Highway, in a space that started life as The Grille at Martin's Landing, a steakhouse concept from Jason Emmett and Carl Berry, the same pair behind Kazu Japanese Restaurant in Stuart and American Icon Brewery in Vero Beach. The two met twenty years earlier at Duffy's Sports Grill, where Emmett ran the company as president and Berry oversaw training, before the franchise sold in 2019. When the steakhouse concept didn't land the way they wanted, they reworked it into something more casual, aimed at neighbors coming in for an app and a drink as easily as a Saturday date night. As of this past summer, Palm & Ivy's own site notes the restaurant is paused for what it calls operational enhancements and culinary redevelopment, with a return promised but no firm date. Worth a call before you plan a night around it.
• Citron Bistro, on Dixie Highway at Bridge Road, has been part of the corridor for longer and is owned by the McLaughlin family, who also run the J. McLaughlin clothing boutique nearby. It's the kind of pairing that only makes sense in a town small enough for the same families to run more than one storefront on the same street.
• Taylor Beach House Cafe sits on what its own site calls the newly renovated main street of downtown Hobe Sound, part of the general refresh Bridge Road has gone through as older buildings get new tenants and new facades.

None of this reads like a coordinated relaunch. It reads like a corridor where a few families keep betting on the same three or four blocks, sometimes swapping concepts, sometimes just repainting, and the town absorbs the changes without ever quite becoming a food destination in the way Jupiter or Stuart get talked about.

What the Plaza Actually Tells You

The easy story here would be "Hobe Sound has good restaurants now." That undersells it. The real pattern is that the town's best work tends to hide in plain sight, in spaces that don't announce themselves. A national wine award sitting fifty feet from a Winn-Dixie entrance isn't an accident of geography. It's a fair description of how this place operates. Nobody is trying to impress you from the parking lot. The polish, when it exists, is inside.

That matters if you already live here and have been driving past that plaza for years without walking in. It also matters if you're the kind of person who assumes a town's food scene tracks its curb appeal, because Hobe Sound keeps proving that assumption wrong. We've written before about how Hobe Sound residents keep discovering things about their own town that outsiders assume they'd already know, and this is another entry in that file. The wine list of record for the entire Treasure Coast has been sitting behind a grocery store sign since 2019, and plenty of longtime locals still haven't stopped in.

If you're new to the area or just haven't made it down Bridge Road in a while, it's worth the drive past the plaza this week. Check what's open before you go, since at least one of these spots is between chapters right now, but the corridor as a whole is worth the loop. You can find more on the neighborhood itself, from waterfront access to the pace of daily life, on our Hobe Sound neighborhood guide.

Hobe Sound doesn't sell itself with a skyline or a marquee restaurant row. It sells itself in exactly this way, one grocery-store parking lot at a time, and the town seems perfectly happy to let the rest of the coast keep driving past.

If Hobe Sound's mix of understated streets and genuine local depth sounds like the kind of place you'd want to know better, whether you're already a neighbor or just starting to look, Lighthouse Realty Group knows this corridor block by block. Schedule a Free Consultation with Kevin Keogh and his team to talk through what life here actually looks like, no matter where you are in the process.