A new, acclaimed restaurant is coming to Boca Raton's upscale Restaurant Row and is almost complete.
The website describes Stage Kitchen & Bar as “an integrated small plates experience inspired by diverse culinary influences from around the world.” Stage meals include breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as well as “hot and cold snacks” and a variety of beverages.
It will open in a 22,500-square-foot Restaurant Row located at 5355 Town Center Road, east of Town Center Mall, at the corner of Butts Road and Town Center.
Stage's cooking style, coined New American, is a “hymn” to all the cultures he has encountered in his culinary journey, chef and co-owner Pushkar Marathe said. “There's no standard for what the food has to be like,” Marathe told the South Florida Sun Sentinel on Monday. He has “global influences and a lot of creative freedom.”
Stage opened a store in Palm Beach Gardens in 2020, and this is the second store. The Restaurant Row location will be a larger space at 5,200 square feet and will feature an open wood-burning oven. Stage was named one of USA Today's 2024 Best Restaurants, and in 2023 head chef Marathe was nominated as a semifinalist for the James Beard Foundation's “Best Chef: South.”
On Restaurant Row, Stage joins Fiolina Pasta House, Pubbelly Sushi and El Camino.
A Lebanese-style restaurant called Shabibi was also originally slated to open on Restaurant Row, but the stage will now serve as its location.
Yes Hospitality Group, the company behind Shabibi, said in a statement to the Sun Sentinel that while Malate had offered to buy Shabibi's lease, Yes Hospitality Group said in a statement that the team was working on the Pan-Asian restaurant Madame Tan's and He wrote that he had advanced the negotiations so that he could focus more on his efforts. It's also late coming to the “Main Entrance of Boca Raton Town Center Mall.”
In August, Pebb Enterprises predicted that Restaurant Row, where each restaurant operated, would be fully completed by the end of 2023. Fiorina and El Camino are up and running, while Pubbelly is scheduled to open sometime this summer, with Stage Kitchen & Bar winning. It won't open until the end of this year.
“That's the goal,” said Evan Rosenblatt, senior vice president of construction and development for PEBB Enterprises, the company overseeing the project. Once PEBB transfers the space to the tenant, it is up to the tenant to complete the restaurant addition.
PEBB chose Stage because it was a “good fit,” Rosenblatt said. Combined with his three other restaurants, Restaurant Row will be “an eclectic mix of sushi restaurants, Mexican and Italian cuisine.”
Since Shabibi had already broken ground, Stage essentially picked up where it left off, Malate said. “They had already poured the concrete,” he said. “We're changing the layout of the restaurant. …We're going to put our vision into it.”
The restaurant is named after the meaning of this little-known word stagepronounced “starge,” refers to an internship in which a chef spends time working in another chef's kitchen and learning new techniques and dishes.
