West of the Turnpike, East of the Mall: Palm Beach Gardens Finally Finishes What It Started

On the morning of August 20, H&H Bagels opened its doors at Avenir Town Center, following a soft opening three days earlier. The chain traces its water-bagel method back to Manhattan's Upper West Side in 1972, and for a resident on the western side of Palm Beach Gardens, driving to get one used to mean an actual trip. Connie McGinnis of Avenir Real Estate Services put it simply: it's the kind of spot you find yourself at every single day. Carmela Coffee followed the next day with its own soft opening.

One bagel shop is not a headline. But look at what else finished around it this year, on both sides of the city, and a different story shows up. Two separate developments that had each been stuck for years both crossed the finish line within the same few months. That has not happened here before, and it changes something real about how a week in Palm Beach Gardens actually runs.

The West Side Finally Got Its Front Door

Avenir sits off Northlake Boulevard, west of Florida's Turnpike, and its Town Center was supposed to be open by the 2024 holidays. It wasn't. Construction delays, including storm damage tied to the tornado outbreak that came with Hurricane Milton in October 2024, pushed the anchor Publix back more than a year past its original target. It finally opened this past May, a 49,000-square-foot store with its own Publix Liquors counter and café seating, the first full-line grocery residents on that side of town could reach without crossing the Turnpike.

Everything since has arrived in stages rather than all at once. Walgreens followed Publix. Then, this month, H&H Bagels and Carmela Coffee gave the west side its first walkable coffee-and-breakfast anchor. Still rolling in through fall: Sloan's Ice Cream, which already has five other locations across Palm Beach County, and Seppe Pizza Bar, whose only two existing locations are both in New York, making Avenir its first Florida address. Smoke and Maple, a gastropub with craft cocktails and local beers, is opening its first location anywhere here. Field of Greens is coming too, though the brand didn't wait on Avenir to reach the area. It already opened two locations on Donald Ross Road in March and April.

What's actually open right now at Avenir:

• Publix and Publix Liquors, since May
• Walgreens
• H&H Bagels, grand opening August 20
• Carmela Coffee, soft opening August 21

Still phasing in: Sloan's Ice Cream, Seppe Pizza Bar, Smoke and Maple, and a Field of Greens location built into the Town Center itself. The whole complex is connected by golf cart paths, so for residents inside Avenir, none of this requires starting a car.

The East Side Stopped Joking About "Permanently Under Renovation"

Meanwhile, on the other side of the city, next to the Gardens Mall, a different long-stalled property has been going through its own overdue reset. Downtown at the Gardens opened in 2005, and its current owner is its fifth since then. Locals had taken to calling it permanently under renovation, and the joke had some truth to it. When EDENS, a Fort Lauderdale-based retail developer, bought the property in July 2024, it inherited roughly 85,000 square feet of vacant space behind construction fencing.

That has turned around fast. Since acquiring the plaza, EDENS has signed 13 new tenants and pushed occupancy up to 85 percent. Van Leeuwen Ice Cream and its Florida-exclusive Key Lime Pie flavor are open. So is Muse Paintbar, Go Yummy, and a growing lineup of fashion and wellness tenants including J.Crew Factory and Pura Vida Miami. The property has also cleaned up its own bottlenecks, with a walkway now cutting straight through the section near REI and CMX Cinemas instead of forcing shoppers around it. EDENS managing director Nicole Shiman described the pull driving all of it as an explosion in terms of growth that's happened in northern Palm Beach County, pointing to families and professionals settling here year-round rather than the seasonal, retiree-heavy crowd the plaza was originally built for.

The momentum has reached past the plaza's own property line too. A few blocks over on Lake Victoria Garden Avenue, Phatboy Sushi Kitchen & Bar, the brand's seventh location, had targeted a mid-to-late July opening, an 80-seat dining room plus a 40-seat patio riding the same foot traffic Downtown at the Gardens has pulled back in.

Two Timelines, One Season

Here is the part a scroll through restaurant openings won't tell you. These two projects were delayed for completely different reasons. Avenir's holdup was a construction and weather problem, a single building knocked off schedule by a specific storm. Downtown at the Gardens' holdup was a structural one, a plaza that sat through four ownership changes in twenty years before a fifth owner finally committed to fixing it. Different causes, different timelines, and yet both landed in the same handful of months in 2026.

That overlap is the actual news here, more than any individual restaurant. For the first time, Palm Beach Gardens has a finished, anchored commercial center on each side of town at the same time. Residents west of the Turnpike aren't waiting on Avenir anymore. Residents near the mall aren't waiting on Downtown at the Gardens anymore either. Both waits ended in the same season, essentially by coincidence.

It isn't only these two. Panther National's 55,000-square-foot clubhouse, still under construction, is targeting a fall 2026 opening to complete a golf course that has already been playable since November 2023. Another project, years in the making, closing out in the same window. Palm Beach Gardens spent a long stretch as a city full of half-finished promises. This year, several of them finished at once.

For a resident, that shows up in small, specific ways. The Saturday grocery run doesn't automatically mean the Publix on Northlake and Coconut or the one on PGA Boulevard anymore, not if home is on the western side of the community. A weeknight dinner doesn't have to mean driving toward PGA Commons if Seppe Pizza Bar or Kitchen is close enough to walk or golf cart to instead. And a Saturday stroll near the mall finally has somewhere to land besides the same three restaurants that survived the years of fencing.

None of this required a single new road or a change in the city's footprint. It required two developers, working on unrelated timelines for unrelated reasons, to both stop stalling in the same calendar year. Palm Beach Gardens has waited long enough for both stories that it's worth noticing when they resolve together.

If you're weighing how a specific pocket of Palm Beach Gardens actually lives day to day, not just how it photographs, Leila Kallop has spent years tracking these shifts across the Treasure Coast, from Jupiter Island's oceanfront down through corridors like Northlake Boulevard. For more on how daily routines are shaping up across the city's golf communities, see our related look at everyday life in Palm Beach Gardens' golf communities, or explore the Palm Beach Gardens neighborhood guide for a closer look at the area. Request a private consultation anytime you'd like a local, unhurried read on where things stand.