The One Storefront in Flamingo Park That Keeps Producing Palm Beach County's Only Michelin Star

Walk south on Dixie Highway past the sandwich counter at Buccan and the tables at Grato, turn onto Park Place, and you will pass a plain glass storefront with no valet stand and no sign trying to get your attention. Sixteen seats. No printed menu in the window. If you didn't already know what happens inside, you would keep walking.

That storefront, 424 Park Place, Unit 101, has now produced Palm Beach County's only Michelin star twice. Two different chefs. Two different cuisines. Four years apart. That is not a coincidence anyone in the neighborhood planned. It is also the most interesting thing happening in Flamingo Park this fall.

The Same Doorway, Twice

Before it was Emelina, this space was Konro, an intimate room built by chef Bickelhaupt, a chef with two Michelin stars to his name from elsewhere in his career. While it operated, Konro held the distinction of being Palm Beach County's only Michelin-starred restaurant. Then it shuttered, and the room sat quiet.

Husband-and-wife chefs Osmel González and Camila Salazar moved in and opened Emelina on February 3, 2026. The two had run a pop-up called EntreNos in Miami Shores that earned both a Michelin Star and a Michelin Green Star for sustainability before it closed. Emelina was their first permanent restaurant, developed with Álvaro Perez Miranda, founder of APM Restaurant Group, the Miami-based hospitality group behind Ogawa, Hiyakawa, and Midorie.

Less than four months later, at the Michelin Guide's Florida ceremony this past spring, Emelina became the first Cuban restaurant in the world to earn a Michelin Star. It also reclaimed the same title Konro once held: the only Michelin-starred restaurant in Palm Beach County. Same address. Same distinction. A different chef, a different cuisine, a different grandmother's name on the sign.

"Great neighborhoods are made not by scale, but by the careful curation of the people and ideas you invite."

That is Gregory Welteroth, president of Welteroth Property Group, the firm that has spent recent years reshaping this stretch of Dixie Highway into what it now calls the Flamingo Park District. His point is worth sitting with. Nobody set out to build a Michelin pipeline on Park Place. What they built was a small room that keeps attracting people who care enough about food to fill it twice in a row with something extraordinary.

What Sixteen Seats Actually Means

Emelina's dining room holds a chef's counter and two tables, sixteen seats total, open Tuesday through Saturday with two nightly seatings. Counter guests are seated at 5 p.m. or 8 p.m., tables at 5:30 or 8:30. Reservations run through Tock, and the tasting menu starts at $275 per person, a price that includes gratuity but not wine. A wine pairing adds $150 more, built around sustainable, grower-driven producers.

That is not a Tuesday night most Flamingo Park residents are booking on impulse. The ten-course tasting unfolds over roughly two hours, and reservations have moved quickly since the restaurant opened, with entire months filling well ahead of the date. For a neighborhood used to walking into Grato or Tacos El Viejón without much planning, Emelina runs on an entirely different clock.

What is actually on the table leans hard on Florida seafood and produce that shifts with the season. One dish, called Minuta, layers tempura-fried black drum with refried tomato and a fried egg emulsion. Another, Rabo Encendido, is a slow braise of oxtail served with Carolina Gold rice, tamarind jus, and pickled daikon. The menu is built around González's own memory of Cuba, expressed through ingredients sourced from the same fishermen and farmers who supply the rest of the county.

The Block Around the Star

None of this means Flamingo Park has turned into a fine dining district overnight. Walk Score rates it the second most walkable neighborhood in West Palm Beach, with roughly 40 restaurants, bars, and coffee shops packed into a compact grid, and almost all of them look nothing like Emelina.

Inside the same few blocks that make up the Flamingo Park District:

• Loot Grocery, a curated market sourcing from independent food makers
• Buccan Sandwich Shop, made-to-order sandwiches with bold, chef-driven flavors
• Grato, house-made pastas and wood-fired pizzas in a casual dining room
• Tacos El Viejón, street tacos and family recipes
• Civil Society Brewing, a neighborhood brewery
• Table 26, a beloved neighborhood spot for globally inspired American cooking
• HIVE Boutiques and HIVE Bakery & Café, retail and pastries a few doors down
• Traphouse, a fitness studio built around community training

The actual Flamingo Park itself, the public park the neighborhood is named for, sits at 1751 S. Dixie Highway with a playground, public art, and benches under the same oak canopy that shades the historic homes around it.

A Michelin star and a sandwich shop share the same four-block walk here, and the neighborhood treats both with the same shrug. That shrug is the real texture of living in Flamingo Park right now. The accolade did not change the rhythm of the block. It just added one more reason people outside the neighborhood are starting to pay attention to it.

What's Actually Arriving This Fall

The next addition comes from the same restaurant group. Midorie, APM Restaurant Group's casual sushi and donburi bowl concept, already runs elsewhere in South Florida, and this fall it lands in Flamingo Park at 500 Palm Street, a short walk from Emelina's counter.

Where Emelina is a $275 tasting menu booked weeks out, Midorie is built for a faster, casual visit. That contrast matters. APM's other properties tell the same story: Ogawa has now retained its Michelin Star for a third consecutive year, and Hiyakawa continues to be recommended by the Michelin Guide, making APM the first Latin-led hospitality group in Florida with every one of its fine dining concepts recognized on the Guide. Midorie's role in that lineup has always been the approachable one, the spot you can walk into without a reservation made a month in advance.

The district's growth this fall is not only about food. Padel X, a padel club, is also listed as coming soon to the same corridor, alongside continued buildout at HIVE's retail and design spaces. The pattern across all of it is small footprints, walkable distances, and operators who already have a track record somewhere else in South Florida before they bring it here.

Why This Corner Instead of Someplace Bigger

Other parts of Palm Beach County chased scale this year. Glossy new districts opened with hotel-anchored retail and big-name national concepts. Flamingo Park did the opposite. Sixteen seats. A casual sushi counter instead of a second tasting room. A sandwich shop instead of a food hall.

Perez Miranda has said Emelina is "one of the most thought-provoking, emotionally-charged, and genuinely exciting restaurants" of his career, a career that has included opening more than 70 restaurant concepts between Tokyo and Miami. What makes Park Place different is not that anyone predicted a second Michelin star would land in the same small room that produced the first one. It is that the neighborhood kept choosing small, careful, chef-led spaces over anything louder, and the room simply did what small, careful rooms sometimes do twice.

For anyone who already lives within walking distance of that storefront, none of this changes what a Tuesday looks like. You are still more likely to grab tacos than a ten-course tasting. But it is the kind of steady, deliberate reinvestment that tends to outlast a single news cycle, and it is exactly the sort of neighborhood detail people ask about long after they have stopped reading the restaurant reviews.

If you are curious what any of this means for your own address in Flamingo Park, or anywhere else in Palm Beach County, Matt and Kate Shaw can walk you through it. Request Your Free Home Valuation and find out where your home stands today.