For years, the closest thing to a hot drink on South Dixie Highway meant walking two blocks to Memorial Presbyterian Church, where a woman named Amanda Sciarrino ran an espresso cart out of the courtyard on Tuesdays through Fridays. The church itself dates to 1924 and was rebuilt by hand after the 1928 hurricane tore through it, a few blocks from where the Norton Museum of Art now sits. The cart started smaller still: a single home espresso machine, run by Amanda and her husband Anthony out of their own kitchen before it ever touched a courtyard.
That chapter is ending. Jelly Bean Coffee is leasing a permanent storefront at 3700 South Dixie Highway, unit 4, planting itself squarely inside Antique Row. No firm opening date has been set, but the Sciarrinos are aiming for before the end of 2026. The move says less about coffee and more about how this particular stretch of West Palm Beach decides who gets to stay.
A Stretch Built on Longevity
Antique Row runs along South Dixie Highway between Belvedere Road and Southern Boulevard, a walkable mile holding more than 40 shops and galleries. It has never been a place that moves fast, and the businesses that define it prove the point by how long they have simply refused to leave.
Kofski Antiques traces back to 1939, when Laura Kofski first opened its doors. Chris and Melanie Hill bought the business in 1985 and have kept it running since, meaning the shop has now outlived nearly a century of design trends without changing its name. A few doors down, The Elephant's Foot has occupied its spot since 1963, filling a 6,500-square-foot showroom with Asian, English, and French antique furniture alongside consignment pieces pulled from Palm Beach estates. Rhythm Café, next door to The Elephant's Foot, has served its own take on American cooking for 35 years running.
The galleries follow the same pattern at a slightly younger age. Jamnea Finlayson opened JF Gallery in 2003 and still shows abstract and minimalist work from artists like Christina Major and Cecil Touchon. Mary Woerner Fine Arts represents living artists working anywhere from realism to abstraction, with a lean toward figurative pieces. Mecox Gardens mixes vintage and contemporary furnishings with a coastal edge, the kind of shop where a carved wood pedestal and a palm leaf chandelier can share a floor without looking out of place. Lola Chiq, a women-owned boutique, has been dressing the block since 2011.
None of these businesses are new. That is the point. On a strip where the newest name still on the row this decade is over twenty years old, a coffee cart spending years testing the neighborhood before signing a lease is not caution, it is the district's actual entry requirement.
The Calendar the Block Runs On
Antique Row does not wait for new tenants to catch up. It runs on a fixed annual rhythm that every business, old or new, has to fit itself into.
The centerpiece is Evening on Antique Row, produced with the Historical Society of Palm Beach County. This year's edition, held April 11, 2026, marked the event's 31st year and shut South Dixie Highway to traffic between Monroe Drive and Southern Boulevard for a single night, opening more than 40 merchants to foot traffic well past normal closing hours. The district's own event listing also flags a Holiday Stroll on December 6, roughly ten weeks from now, and a February pop-up called A Market on the Row that has become part of the same yearly cycle.
None of this is casual programming. Street parking along Dixie Highway fills quickly once an event starts, and locals who know the block tend to park a block over and walk in rather than circle for a spot out front. Palm Tran buses reach the general vicinity, though the row itself is built for walking, not transit.
The timing matters this fall specifically because Jelly Bean's storefront is trying to open into this same calendar. A coffee shop debuting sometime before year's end will do so either just before or just after the Holiday Stroll, meaning its first real test of foot traffic could be the busiest single night the block sees all winter.
A Wider Wave, One Small Storefront
Jelly Bean's move is not happening in isolation. It is part of a broader run of food and beverage growth across West Palm Beach, most visibly the $1 billion, 160,000-square-foot NORA District redevelopment on North Railroad Avenue, which soft-opened last September with additions like Sunday Motor Co. That project represents new construction on a largely industrial stretch a mile inland. Antique Row's version of the same growth looks nothing like it. There is no new building here, no soft-open press cycle. There is a woman who ran a cart out of a church courtyard for years, slowly building a following one espresso at a time, until a storefront became worth the risk.
The plans for the space reflect that same unhurried approach. Amanda and Anthony Sciarrino have described drawing on European and Asian cafe traditions for the new space, and they intend to use it for community events rather than pure walk-up service. The food menu is expanding past coffee and matcha to include empanadas, quiche, toast, and sourdough-based croissants, made in partnership with local bakers rather than built entirely in-house. It reads less like a coffee shop opening and more like a small neighborhood institution being assembled on purpose, piece by piece, the same way Kofski or The Elephant's Foot once were.
What a New Storefront Has to Prove
The lesson from this stretch of Dixie Highway is not that change is slow here. Change happens constantly, a gallery opens, a boutique changes hands, a cart becomes a lease. The lesson is that change on Antique Row has to prove itself against a standard set by shops that have already survived four, five, six decades in the same spot. A business does not get to skip that proof by moving fast. It earns a place by matching the patience the block already runs on.
That is worth remembering for anyone walking the row this fall. The Holiday Stroll on December 6 will bring out the same mix it always does, shoppers moving between Kofski's antiques and JF Gallery's abstract canvases, stopping for dinner at Rhythm Café along the way. Somewhere in that same stretch, quietly, a coffee shop that spent years as a courtyard cart will be finishing its first season with a front door of its own, still deciding what the neighborhood will let it become.
If you're the kind of person who notices when a coffee cart finally gets a real address, you probably already understand what draws people to spaces built with the same patience, whether it's a century-old antiques shop on Dixie Highway or a gallery-lined showroom on Flagler Drive. Haven Palm Beach keeps an eye on both.
