If the last time you walked into Eau Palm Beach Resort for dinner was around the time Nobu first opened its doors, you ate in a restaurant that no longer exists. Not because the food changed. Because the room did, twice, and neither move came with the kind of announcement that would have made a resident stop and notice.
That matters if you live on South Ocean Boulevard and think of "the Nobu" as a known quantity. It is not the small preview space from late 2024 anymore. It has not been for almost a year.
The Room Moved Before It Finished Moving
When Nobu first arrived at Eau, it landed as a preview, not a permanent restaurant. Chef Nobu Matsuhisa's group took over the resort's Bokēn and Stir Bar & Terrace spaces and opened for dinner service on October 18, 2024, seating about 65 people a night. That was always meant to be temporary. The permanent home was going to be somewhere else in the building.
That somewhere else was Polpo. The Italian restaurant had been at Eau since February 2022, part of a multi-million-dollar renovation of the resort's social spaces, and it had built a following for its linguine with clams and a piano player named George Bugatti who worked the room most evenings. Starting last fall, Nobu began moving into Polpo's old dining room, more than doubling its footprint from 65 seats to 140. The move itself was finished by the end of November. The sushi bar, a 10-seat counter that is arguably the point of going to a Nobu in the first place, wasn't completed until April of this year.
| Preview era (Oct 2024–Fall 2025) | Now | |
|---|---|---|
| Location | Former Bokēn / Stir Bar & Terrace space | Former Polpo dining room |
| Seating | About 65 | 140 |
| Sushi bar | Not yet built | 10 seats, finished April 2026 |
| Status | Temporary preview | Permanent restaurant |
So a resident who dined there for the opening buzz, then didn't go back until this summer, walked into a room roughly twice the size of the one they remembered, with a sushi counter that wasn't there before and an Italian restaurant that simply isn't anymore. Nothing about that sequence was hidden. It just happened in stages spread across a year and a half, in a town where there's no marquee to announce a grand reopening.
What's Actually On The Table Now
The menu is the one you'd expect from any Nobu location, built around Matsuhisa's signature Japanese-Peruvian pairings, but it's worth knowing what you're actually ordering into if you haven't been since the move. Yellowtail sashimi with jalapeño runs $37. Miso-marinated black cod, the dish most people who've been to any Nobu will recognize on sight, is $54. A seven-ounce salmon prepared yakimono-style with teriyaki or wasabi pepper is $44, and a six-ounce Prime beef tenderloin runs $69. Chef Matt Raso runs the kitchen day to day, working from the same playbook that's made the black cod a fixture at more than 55 Nobu locations worldwide.
One detail worth knowing if you're comparing notes with friends on the island: this is currently the only official Nobu restaurant in Palm Beach County. There's a Nobu-inspired menu at Palm House, the boutique hotel on Royal Palm Way that reopened in 2024 after sitting closed for 17 years, but it's an homage, not a branch. If you want the actual restaurant group's food, South Ocean Boulevard is the address.
If You Don't Feel Like Valet Parking At Eau
Not every dinner needs to be an occasion, and Manalapan's dining options aren't limited to the resort even if it sometimes feels that way. A short list worth keeping in your phone:
- John G's sits on South Ocean Boulevard directly across from Eau, and it's been serving breakfast and lunch for more than 50 years, cinnamon French toast included. It closes at 3 p.m., so this one's for mornings, not dinner.
- Art Basil is a modern Italian kitchen and working fine art gallery, also inside Manalapan's town limits, a rarity in a place that's almost entirely residential.
- Old Key Lime House is a few minutes north on the Intracoastal in Lantana, the kind of place where you lose track of time watching boats go by.
- Thaikyo covers the Thai food gap if you want something that isn't seafood, steak, or sushi for a change.
None of these require the kind of planning a Nobu reservation does, and on a Tuesday that's sometimes exactly the point.
The Other Thing That Quietly Finished This Year
Eau's dining room wasn't the only construction project residents have been watching without much fanfare. The guardhouse at the Point of Manalapan, the entrance most people think of as the actual gate to town, is more than 60 years old and has been showing it. The Town Commission spent the first months of 2026 working through design options, sending the proposal to the Architectural Commission for review in March.
What came back was smaller than what was first on the table. An early design could have run as much as $340,000. The version that actually moved forward was scaled down to match the footprint of the existing structure, bringing the cost to the $100,000 the town had already budgeted for the project. Construction was expected to start around July.
The guardhouse design was finally locked in the same spring the sushi bar opened. Neither milestone got a ribbon cutting.
That's the pattern worth sitting with if you live here. Manalapan doesn't have a local paper running a weekly roundup of what's new, and there's no downtown strip where change announces itself. A restaurant moves rooms over a season. A gate gets redesigned over a few Town Commission meetings. If you're not tracking either one closely, you find out the way most residents do, by walking in one day and noticing the room isn't quite what you remembered.
If you're weighing a move to this stretch of A1A, or you already live here and are curious what a property near the Point is actually worth given everything that's changed this year, Matt Campbell knows this block the way residents do, one season at a time. Schedule a free market consultation with Matt whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
