Palm Beach Gardens Now Has Two Michelin-Recognized Restaurants. Neither One Is Downtown.

Palm Beach Gardens picked up a distinction this year that most of the county hasn't fully clocked: two Michelin Guide-recognized restaurants, both born from the same two-person partnership, both still open, both still local. Stage Kitchen & Bar earned recognition in 2025 and again in 2026. Ela Curry & Cocktails followed with its own Michelin nod in 2026. That's back-to-back recognition for one small restaurant group operating out of a town better known for golf courses than tasting menus.

Here's the part that changes how you think about where to eat in this town: neither restaurant sits in Downtown Palm Beach Gardens. Both are tucked into retail corridors along PGA Boulevard and Donald Ross Road, about ten minutes apart by car, in plazas you'd drive past without a second look if you didn't already know what was inside.

Two Restaurants, Ten Minutes Apart

Stage Kitchen & Bar occupies a suite at 2000 PGA Boulevard, inside a shopping center that also houses dry cleaners and a nail salon. Ela Curry & Cocktails sits about four miles north at 4650 Donald Ross Road, in The Shops of Donald Ross Village. Neither address reads like a culinary destination on paper. Both have become one anyway.

Stage opened first, in 2020, from chef Pushkar Marathe and his partner Andy Dugard, a New American small-plates concept that built a following before most of Palm Beach County had heard the name. USA Today named it one of its Restaurants of 2024. Two years later, in 2022, the same pair opened Ela Curry Kitchen in that Donald Ross Village space, a traditional Indian concept built around thali-style sharing plates. It was named Best Restaurant in Palm Beach County that same year, then evolved into its current form, Ela Curry & Cocktails, with an expanded dining room and an outdoor bar the team calls Peacock Tiki.

The common thread between these separate locations is the partnership behind both restaurants.

The Team Behind Both Recognitions

Marathe's path to Palm Beach Gardens runs through Nagpur, India, culinary training in Switzerland at age 20, and kitchen stints across the Caribbean, the Cayman Islands, and the Middle East before he landed in South Florida. Dugard came up through hospitality on the front of house side, most recently as general manager at Clay Conley's Buccan and Imoto in Palm Beach, before the two partnered on Stage in 2019.

When Ela opened, Marathe told Palm Beach Illustrated that he wanted the experience to feel like his own upbringing, so that eating there would mean

"the food will be like going to India"

for people who'd never left Palm Beach County. That's the throughline across both restaurants: Stage translates global technique into an approachable American menu, and Ela goes the other direction, pulling diners into something more specific and less filtered.

From Two Restaurants to a Local Restaurant Group

What started as two concepts has grown into a small footprint that now extends past Palm Beach Gardens entirely.

The Mango Mercado detail is the one easy to miss. When Ela moved into its expanded, cocktail-forward space, the original Ela Curry Kitchen storefront didn't sit empty. Marathe and Dugard turned it into a market concept for grab-and-go meals, which means the same small footprint on Donald Ross Road has now hosted two different restaurant identities in four years. The Boca Raton expansion in March 2025 marked the first time the group took the Stage name outside Palm Beach Gardens, into Midtown Boca's Restaurant Row corridor, a signal that the momentum built here is now exportable.

Dining Beyond Downtown

Downtown Palm Beach Gardens and the neighboring Gardens Mall corridor get most of the marketing attention in this town, and for good reason: that's where the movie theater sits, where the open-air shopping runs, where visitors are steered. The two restaurants are a mile or more from that corridor, in plazas built for convenience retail rather than destination dining.

That's worth sitting with if you've lived here a while and assumed the interesting food was clustered in one obvious place. It isn't. It's split between a shopping center on PGA Boulevard and a village-style strip on Donald Ross Road, connected only by the fact that one chef and one operating partner built both from scratch.

The Reason to Book This Fall

The timing matters right now because the Palm Beach Food & Wine Festival returns December 10 through 13, 2026, with more than 20 events spread across Palm Beach County, and Ela Curry & Cocktails is hosting one of them: an event called Maneet's Bollywood Experience, right there on Donald Ross Road. Festival events at participating restaurants tend to book up well ahead of the actual dates, especially at a location that's already carrying Michelin recognition.

If you've been meaning to try Ela, or you haven't been back to Stage since it picked up its second consecutive Michelin nod, the next three months give you a specific reason to go rather than a vague one. A regular Tuesday dinner at Stage still gets you into the same kitchen that earned the recognition. A December seat at Ela gets you a themed night built around it.

Palm Beach Gardens has two Michelin-recognized restaurants outside downtown, both in retail plazas. The story began with one chef, one partner, and six years of consistent execution in two plazas that most people drive past without a second look. Their locations offer another perspective on where this town's energy sits, and it's worth knowing if you already call Palm Beach Gardens home.

If you're weighing a move to be closer to this corridor of PGA Boulevard, or you're already here and thinking about what your property is worth in a market that keeps adding reasons to stay, Tommy Holmes can walk you through what's actually happening in Palm Beach Gardens real estate, neighborhood by neighborhood. Schedule a private consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.