Walk the beach path behind the old Newport Beachside Hotel most evenings and you will see the pier's mix of uses: anglers casting lines on one side, restaurant tables on the other, and visitors making their way toward the ocean. The pier's redesign is part of the story, alongside the rebrand of the hotel behind it, now open as The Sunny.
The headline is a walkway.
The Building Everyone Notices, the Fix Nobody Expects
Sunny Isles residents who pass 16701 Collins Avenue know the obvious change. The Newport Beachside Hotel & Resort, a fixture on this stretch since 1967, reopened November 1, 2025 as The Sunny under HB Capital Group, with architecture by the Coral Gables firm EoA Group. That is the visible transformation, and it is a real one: a 339 to 340 room property with six new food and beverage concepts replacing whatever was there before.
But the reason locals should care goes past the lobby. In April 2025, the Sunny Isles Beach City Commission approved a phased redesign of the Newport Fishing Pier itself, according to CitizenPortal, and the plan the developer's team walked commissioners through was not primarily about food. It was about traffic. Phase 1 opens the restaurant footprint to ocean views and moves restrooms and back-of-house space toward the entry. Phase 2 is a cantilevered pedestrian walkway built onto the south side of the pier, designed for one purpose: separating fishermen and people walking the pier from the diners seated at the restaurant tables. Later phases address shading and broader park elements.
That is the detail that changes how you should think about this project. The hotel gets new restaurants either way. What the pier gets, if the later phases hold to plan, is a walking lane designed to separate pedestrian traffic from restaurant seating.
A Pier That Keeps Almost Disappearing
The reason this matters is that the Newport Fishing Pier has spent its whole existence as contested civic space, not a stable amenity. It opened in 1936. By 1980 it was considered unsafe enough that demolition was on the table. In 1982 it was designated a historic site anyway, unsafe and all, which bought it time. In 1985 the hotel's owners struck a deal with the state to lease the pier and rebuild it for shopping, fishing, and dining, and it reopened in 1986 after more than a million dollars in repairs. Hurricane Wilma tore into it in 2005, closing it again after engineers found the storm had compromised its safety. It came down and went back up, reopening in its current 776-foot form in 2013 as the only public fishing pier left in Miami.
The pier has served both restaurant and public uses, and the 2025 approval adds a walkway to the plan.
What Actually Opens to Walkers This Season
None of this means the food disappears from the conversation. It just means the food is one layer of a bigger change, and residents walking the beach path will run into all of it at ground level over the coming months:
- Lovebirds Café, a grab-and-go coffee and breakfast counter in the lobby, open daily from 7 a.m.
- Julene, described by the hotel as a neighborhood restaurant built around familiar American cooking.
- ¡Viva!, a Mexican-American concept from chef Ray Garcia.
- The Newport Room, an adults-only bar and lounge.
- Sandbar at Newport Pier, the upgraded version of the old Beach Bar at the pier's base, now positioned as the property's elevated pier dining concept, with a poolside tiki bar rounding out the beachfront side.
A CitizenPortal report said the developer's team had identified an operator for an elevated Florida fish shack concept for the pier restaurant, suggesting Sandbar's current lineup is a step, not the final version. Worth watching if you eat there regularly.
The Ride That Already Found the New Route
The clearest sign that the pier is being used as public space again, ahead of the walkway even being built, is a small recurring event: a Saturday social bike ride, held the second Saturday of the month through March 2027, that rolls past the property along the coastal miles this stretch of Collins Avenue is known for. It is not a race and it is not a promotional stunt. It is a no-drop group ride, meaning the pace holds for the group rather than splintering, and it is already routed through here on a fixed schedule. If the city and the hotel deliver the cantilevered walkway on the timeline described to commissioners, walkers who use the pier every evening will have a lane separate from restaurant seating on the way to the water.
What to Watch From Here
The city's approval covers the walkway application, not a finished structure, and multi-phase pier projects on this coast have a documented history of running long, this one included. There is no published completion date for Phase 2 as of this writing. What is confirmed is that the commission signed off on the concept, the developer's team described it as an extension of the pier's role as a public amenity rather than a hotel add-on, and the current dining lineup at Sandbar is explicitly a placeholder for a more developed concept still to come.
If you walk this pier regularly, the thing to track is not another restaurant opening. It is whether the south-side walkway actually gets built, and whether it delivers what the developer's team promised commissioners: a route where people heading out to fish or watch the sunset can use the planned pedestrian walkway, separate from the restaurant seating.
That is a small thing to ask of a pier that has been rebuilt after near-demolition, a hurricane, and forty years of shared use. It is also, if the plan holds, the first time in a while that the answer might be yes.
If you are weighing a move to this stretch of Collins Avenue, or already live here and are curious what a beachfront property is actually worth once you account for changes like this one, Carlo Dipasquale can walk you through it. Schedule a private consultation.
