When it comes to food, is there a Palm Beach flavor? These restaurants say yes
Resort chic might be what “Palm Beach” connotes with fashion, but what about with menu items when you dine out?
What does Palm Beach taste like? What can you expect with a Palm Beach Salad, a Palm Beach Pizza or a Palm Beach (sushi) Roll?
That’s more than food for thought because such items exist at the island’s restaurants.
And they’re popular, often featuring ingredients some might associate with Palm Beach — caviar, say, or shrimp.
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Whether or not they’re the gustatory equivalent of Palm Beach snapshots can be put on the backburner.
What matters is they’re delicious, so try a slice or forkful of Palm Beach soon.
The Palm Beach Roll (sushi) at Echo
230A Sunrise Ave.
You’ve heard of a California sushi roll, right? With imitation crab, avocado and cucumber, it’s one of the most popular sushi rolls in the country and is credited for sushi’s global rise starting in the 1980s.
Now amp up a California roll by topping it with baked spicy conch or shrimp (your choice). This is the top-selling Palm Beach Roll ($30) at Echo, the pan-Asian restaurant on Sunrise Avenue.
Many diners choose the baked spicy conch on top. After all, Palm Beach is an ambassador, of sorts, for conch, which is native to the nearby Florida Keys, the Bahamas and the Caribbean.
The Palm Beach Pizza at Pizza al Fresco
14 Via Mizner
Margherita and pepperoni are favorite pies at Pizza al Fresco, where the flavor and texture of the thin crust is a sought-after delight.
But when it comes to the specialty pizza here, The Palm Beach — with caviar as one of the toppings, of course — is a treat.
At $33 (large pizzas otherwise start at $18 for a Margherita), it features mozzarella, smoked salmon, red onion, capers and dollops of sour cream in addition to the caviar.
Pizza al Fresco co-owner Jose Duran told the Daily News that calling this pizza Palm Beach probably has everything to do with its “luxurious flavors and colors,” which are “quintessentially Palm Beach.”
The Palm Beach Salad at Bricktop’s
375 S. County Road
There are at least a few salads on the island given the name “Palm Beach” and the reason may not always be clear.
But at Bricktop’s, “our Palm Beach Salad has a lot of crab and shrimp — seafood is so much of what people think of when they think of Palm Beach — and we serve the dish with a champagne dressing,” Katie Tucker, a manager at the restaurant on corner of South County and Peruvian Avenue, explained to the Daily News. “What better way to celebrate Palm Beach?”
Bricktop’s Palm Beach Salad, a lunchtime entrée ($26), features stacked crab meat, poached shrimp, avocado, diced tomato, chopped egg and remoulade.
The Palm Beach Benedict at Surfside Diner
314 S. County Road
Eggs Benedict disciples have rarely met a riff on the brunch dish they didn’t like.
Afterall, as any Benedict fan knows, everything tastes better with the sauce traditionally used in the dish: Hollandaise.
You can’t have a Benedict without Hollandaise, right?
Actually, yes, and it’s a winner with patrons at Surfside Diner.
The Palm Beach Benedict features poached eggs and smoked salmon on an English muffin — all sauced with Béarnaise.
Béarnaise is often described as a Hollandaise sister, but with a tarragon kick — and that’s a good pairing for smoked salmon.
The Palm Beach Benedict at Surfside is $17.95.
The Palm Beach Salad at Le Bilboquet
235A Worth Ave., Via Encantada
A great salad means a lot of things to a lot of different people. To Dobi Trendafilova, managing partner at Le Bilboquet, at least two factors count: “Being colorful and fresh,” she said.
And when it comes to the Palm Beach Salad at the French bistro, there’s more: “Just as the town of Palm Beach is known for its upscale lifestyle, our interpretation of a Palm Beach salad features high-quality ingredients like crabmeat, shrimp, hearts of palm and avocado. It’s very popular.”
The Palm Beach Salad at Le Bilboquet features also includes pea shoots, arugula and mache, plus cherry tomatoes and a soft-boiled egg.
The salad, a choice for lunch or brunch, is $44.
The Palm Beacher Bowl at Seaway at the Four Seasons
2800 S. Ocean Blvd.
At oceanfront and al fresco Seaway at the Four Seasons Resort Palm Beach, many diners gravitate to a section on the menu called “Bowls.”
These are brunch and lunch dishes (yes, served in a bowl) that combine ingredients in a way that’s innovative or channels a traditional favorite.
One of the most popular is the Chirashi Bowl (tuna and salmon, sticky rice, avocado, cucumber, tempura flakes, sweet soy and kimchi aioli), but a rising star is the Palm Beacher Bowl for its colorful simplicity.
It combines greens, avocado, cucumber, bacon, tomato, goat cheese, soft-boiled eggs and creamy cilantro dressing.
The dish is $25.
The Palm Beach Salad at Piccolo Mondo
87 Via Mizner
If you love a little sweetness in a salad — perhaps with fruit, say, and a fruit-accented dressing — Piccolo Mondo’s Palm Beach Salad is perfect.
It features mixed baby greens, seasonal fruit, candied pecans, crumbled Gorgonzola and raspberry vinaigrette.
The salad is $10 and has a fair share of fans at this takeout hotspot in bougainvillea-filled Via Mizner (Piccolo Mondo is located behind its renowned upscale sister Renato’s restaurant).
“This salad is colorful, tropical, flavorful and healthy, which is all very much what we associate with Palm Beach,” co-owner Jose Duran told the Daily News.
The Palm Beach Club at Polpo at Eau Palm Beach
100 S. Ocean Blvd., Manalapan
From the moment it opened at Eau Palm Beach in early 2022, it was clear that Polpo, a sister to the same-named restaurant in Greenwich, Connecticut, is an Italian stalwart.
But it also features American-leaning fare. And at lunch, perhaps there’s nothing more along that vein than the club sandwich.
Or make that the Palm Beach Club ($20).
The sandwich is served with turkey, bacon, lettuce, tomato, pickled onion, avocado and aioli on multigrain bread.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Pizza, salad, sushi: Restaurants put Palm Beach spin on menu items
