Lake Worth Beach Just Spent $260,000 to Get You to Look at Your Own Downtown

There is a wall on Lake Avenue that's about to become a problem for city planners, in the good sense. It faces west, on the side of the Zoo Gym building at 824 Lake Ave, and it's slated to carry a building-sized mural of a woman on a moped hauling oversized cooking ingredients through downtown. City staff had to sign off on it specifically because Lake Worth Beach code treats murals as art, not advertising, and this one needed language proving it wasn't secretly a billboard for a specific restaurant. The mural is one piece of a campaign the city's Community Redevelopment Agency calls Find Your Flavor, Find It Downtown, and the CRA signed a one-year, $260,000 contract with the Miami Beach agency Jacober Creative to build it.

Here's the part that should stop a resident mid-scroll. Read the agency's own description of who the campaign is for, and tourists aren't the headline. The stated goal is to spread the word both near, meaning locals who need a reason to go out on a weeknight, and far, meaning visitors from the rest of South Florida. Jacober's creative director described the whole thing as an invitation to see downtown with fresh eyes. That's an odd thing for a city to spend a quarter million dollars on, unless the CRA has concluded that the people most out of touch with downtown Lake Worth Beach are the people who already live three blocks from it.

The Campaign Wasn't Built for Visitors

Find Your Flavor launched in May 2026 as the first phase of a broader push, with a second campaign still to come later this year. Beyond the mural, the plan includes street pole banners along Lucerne Avenue, postcards, a run of digital and social promotion, individual videos for participating restaurants, and a wrapped circuit car that provides free local transit while doubling as a moving ad. The whole thing routes back to FindYourFlavorLWB.com, a categorized directory of everywhere to eat, drink, and gather between Lake and Lucerne Avenues.

CRA board members who reviewed the rollout kept circling back to the same idea in their comments: that this was as much a reminder for residents as a pitch to outsiders. One board member framed it as a nudge for locals and visitors alike to remember there's more to look forward to here than they might assume, tied to beautification work happening downtown and citywide. That's a telling thing to hear from people whose job is measuring return on a marketing spend. The return they're describing isn't new foot traffic from Boca or West Palm. It's foot traffic from four blocks away.

What Actually Changed While Nobody Was Watching

The clearest proof that the CRA has a point sits at 512 Lucerne Ave. Oceano Kitchen spent 2023 through early 2025 going through a relocation most residents never fully tracked. Chefs Jeremy and Cindy Bearman had built a loyal following at the original Oceano in Lantana, earning a James Beard Award semifinalist nomination for Best Chef: South in 2023, the same year their landlord served a surprise vacate order that forced a scramble. They'd already been eyeing a spot in Lake Worth Beach, so they rushed to open there that November, ran through the following season, then shut down again for an extensive renovation before finally reopening in January 2025. The restaurant that exists today takes credit cards and Resy reservations, which is new. The original Lantana location was cash only. If you haven't been back since before the renovation, you're not dining at the same restaurant, even though the sign says the same name.

Something similar is happening a mile away on the pier. Benny's on the Beach has anchored the historic Lake Worth Beach Pier since 1986, long enough to be a fixture rather than a discovery. What's easy to miss is that Benny's now has a second address. Oceanwalk by Benny's on the Beach opened at the Lake Worth Beach Casino and Beach Complex, a separate building from the original pier restaurant, with its own raw bar and steak-and-seafood menu built around the same brand. If you assume Benny's is just the one place you've always known, you've already missed half of what the name now covers.

The Anniversary Nobody Noticed

Pomona, the restaurant on Lake Avenue, quietly passed its first year in business with a party on July 26. Its owner, Alex Dupuis, has been in the middle of the CRA's rollout, filming promotional content and fielding outreach from Jacober's team. Even she has said the initiative is turning up concepts and businesses around town that she didn't know existed, despite running a restaurant on the same four-block strip the campaign is built around. That detail matters more than it sounds. If the owner of a one-year-old business on Lake Avenue is learning about her own neighbors through a marketing contract, the odds that a resident who works in West Palm Beach and eats downtown twice a month has kept up are not good.

What's Actually on the List

The CRA's directory sorts downtown's options into a handful of categories, and the specific names inside them are the part worth writing down:

• Latin and Caribbean: Café Tecún and Victoria's Pisco Lounge
• Global flavors: Kanto Asian Street Food and the Dominican Spot
• Bars and gathering spots: Igot's Martiki Bar and Rudy's Pub
• Lunch favorites: Lilo's Streetfood & Bar and Dave's Last Resort
• Coffee and bakery: Carew's Coffeehouse and Vincent's French Bakery, the same bakery now expanding beyond its original Lake Worth Beach storefront into other Palm Beach County locations

That last one is worth sitting with. A downtown bakery expanding outward is the kind of quiet momentum a marketing campaign can advertise but can't manufacture. The city didn't create Vincent's success. It's just making sure you know it happened.

A Reason to Actually Go Downtown This Fall

The CRA's campaign landed a few months before the city released its full 2026–2027 event calendar on September 16, which means the timing overlaps in a useful way. A few dates worth putting on the calendar if you're already planning to eat downtown:

The Truck-or-Treat kicks off the city's newly announced season of family events, and it lands on a Friday, which makes it an easy excuse to grab dinner on Lake or Lucerne beforehand rather than rushing home first.

What This Means If You Live Here

None of this requires a mural to justify. You don't need the CRA's permission to walk four blocks and order dinner. But it's worth knowing why the city thinks you do. Whether it's the 1986 institution on the pier now running a second concept down the road, the restaurant that spent two years quietly rebuilding itself into something you haven't tried yet, or the one-year-old spot whose own owner is still discovering her neighbors, downtown Lake Worth Beach turns over faster than most residents can track from memory alone. The city noticed that gap and is spending a quarter million dollars closing it. You might as well let it work for you before you spend the money finding out the hard way, one closed storefront at a time.

If you're weighing what any of this means for property values on Lake or Lucerne, or you're curious how downtown's momentum compares to what's happening in nearby Lake Worth Beach neighborhoods, Evan Sophir tracks these shifts as part of the daily work of representing buyers and sellers across Palm Beach County. Reach out for a market conversation grounded in what's actually changing on the ground, not just what shows up in a listing description.