Best Places to Eat, Drink & Hang Out on Singer Island, Florida

The island's social center isn't in the tower corridor. It's at the southern tip, in Palm Beach Shores, and understanding that is the key to eating and drinking well here.

The high-rise stretch has resort restaurants and a beach. Palm Beach Shores has a marina, a walkable few blocks, and the closest thing this island has to a town.

Palm Beach Shores as the island's town

Worth framing properly, because it changes how you use the island.

The southern town is small enough to walk end to end, and it holds the marina, several restaurants, and a scale that lets you leave the car. For residents of the condo corridor, "going out" often means driving fifteen minutes south rather than fifteen minutes over a bridge — and it's usually the better call.

The character is old Florida rather than resort Florida: unpretentious, weathered, and built around boats rather than around tourism.

The Sailfish Marina

The institution, and the reason Palm Beach Shores functions as the island's gathering place.

You eat outside on the water with the charter fleet tied up alongside and traffic moving through the inlet. The food is straightforward seafood done properly rather than ambitiously, and the setting does the heavy lifting — which on a good evening is exactly right.

The ritual worth knowing: fish gather under the dock lights and get fed. It's free, faintly absurd, genuinely enjoyable, and best at sunset.

It's also the most reliable place on the island to run into people you know, which in a community without a conventional town square counts for a great deal.

The rest of Palm Beach Shores

Beyond the marina, the town supports a modest number of casual places — breakfast spots, a bar or two, unfussy rooms that run on regulars rather than on passing trade.

These are where you become a familiar face, and they're the reason people who live in the south end feel more like they live in a town than people in the towers do. Ask locally; the good ones don't advertise.

The resort and oceanfront restaurants

Along the beach in the condominium stretch, several hotels and larger buildings run restaurants open to the public, from poolside casual to more serious dining rooms.

The honest assessment: you're paying for the location, and the location is genuinely worth something — eating with the Atlantic right there is not nothing. The cooking ranges from good to unremarkable and prices reflect the setting rather than the kitchen.

Excellent for a sunset drink, for visitors, and for nights you don't want to travel. Rarely where residents go for the food itself.

Over the bridge

Where residents genuinely eat when they want range.

West Palm Beach is fifteen minutes away with a real city's food scene — the downtown, the districts around it, and everything from serious dining rooms to neighborhood places.

Palm Beach is comparably close, with a more formal scene.

Palm Beach Gardens, north over the second crossing, has the area's main concentration of restaurants and shopping.

Riviera Beach's mainland marina district sits directly across the water and has seen substantial public investment, adding waterfront dining and event space.

The practical consequence: enormous choice, all of it requiring a car and a bridge. Residents decide earlier in the day rather than wandering out to see what appeals.

Provisioning

This shapes daily life more than restaurants do.

Grocery shopping on the island is limited, so most residents do a proper shop on the mainland and keep the island for essentials. People develop a weekly rhythm combined with other errands rather than shopping daily.

For anyone with a decent kitchen and an ocean view, cooking at home is a genuinely attractive alternative, and a good deal of island life organises around that.

The sunset problem, and its solution

An island facing east has an obvious gap: the good evening light happens behind you.

The fix is knowing which places look west. The marina at the southern end, anything on the Intracoastal side, and the mainland waterfront directly across all deliver sunset over the water with boats coming home.

Residents work this out eventually. It's worth knowing in your first week rather than your second year.

Practicalities

• Season, roughly November through April, fills the waterfront places. Reservations are worth having.
• Summer is quiet, with some places on reduced hours.
• Bridge timing matters more than distance — a crossing opening at the wrong moment turns fifteen minutes into thirty.
• Parking at the marina fills on good evenings.
• Turnover is real in resort-adjacent dining; check somewhere is trading before planning around it.

Eating on the water

A category of its own here, and one of the genuine pleasures of the island.

With an inlet, a charter fleet and a marina at the south end, there's reliable access to fish that came off a boat the same day — both at the counters and, if you fish yourself, straight from the cooler. Residents who cook tend to build their week around what came in rather than around a menu.

For anyone with a boat, the other version is better still: running out, anchoring somewhere sheltered, and eating aboard. A fair amount of the island's best eating happens nowhere near a restaurant.

Where it actually comes together

If you live in the towers, your social life runs largely through your building — pool decks, lobbies, and the informal networks inside a place where a few hundred people share an address.

If you live in Palm Beach Shores, it runs through the town: the marina, the handful of local places, and the fact that you can walk to them.

That difference is one of the more genuine distinctions between the two ways of living on this island, and it's covered further in our housing guide. Neither is better. But anyone choosing between a tower and a house here should understand that they're choosing between two different social arrangements, not just two building types.