Ta-boo closed in May 2023 after 82 years of continuous operation at 221 Worth Avenue. This page preserves the history and legacy of one of Palm Beach's most defining restaurants. For dining at 221 Worth Ave, check current listings.
The Restaurant That Defined a City
In 1941, as the world was changing in ways that would reshape every aspect of American life, Ted Stone opened Ta-boo at 221 Worth Avenue in Palm Beach and created something that would outlast every change that followed. Eighty-two years of continuous operation. Countless seasons. Owners and managers and kitchen staff cycling through while the room itself remained constant — the intimate bar, the roll-away roof that opened to allow dining under the Florida stars, the particular energy of a room where discretion was understood and privacy was preserved even as the guest list read like a dispatch from the century's most glamorous moments.
John F. Kennedy dined here. Frank Sinatra was a regular. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor occupied tables as naturally as they occupied any room they entered. The social register of mid-century America passed through 221 Worth Avenue, and Ta-boo witnessed and hosted and served all of it without publicising the privilege — which is precisely what distinguished it from a place that merely attracted celebrities and made it a place that great figures chose because it could be trusted.
The restaurant changed hands multiple times over its eight decades. Jim Peterson took ownership from Ted Stone in 1955 and held it for twenty years. Several subsequent owners followed. Franklyn deMarco and Nancy Sharigan reopened it in 1990 after a period of closure and restored the institution to the operating condition that its history demanded. It continued operating as one of Worth Avenue's anchor tenants until May 2023, when an eviction dispute brought to an end a run of 82 years.
The Bloody Mary and The Legend
Ta-boo is widely credited as the birthplace of the Bloody Mary — the cocktail that has become so ubiquitous it is easy to forget it had to be invented somewhere. Whether the attribution is strictly accurate is the kind of question that serious cocktail historians debate; what is not in question is that the legend attached to Ta-boo with the force of genuine history, and that the restaurant wore it with the ease of a garment that had always fit perfectly. The Bloody Mary at Ta-boo was an institution within the institution — ordered by those who knew to order it, and by those who had heard enough about it to want to participate in the story.
What Ta-boo Represented
Every city of consequence has a restaurant that does more than serve food — that creates a social infrastructure around itself, that provides the backdrop for the moments that matter, that becomes so embedded in the life of a place that its loss is felt as the loss of something irreplaceable. For Palm Beach, across most of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, that restaurant was Ta-boo. The food was honest American bistro cooking that never tried to compete with the finest kitchens on the island — it was not a restaurant about gastronomy. It was a restaurant about life: about gathering, about seeing and being seen in the most benign possible sense, about the particular pleasure of a room that both connects you to history and makes you feel entirely present in the moment.
The 221 Worth Avenue address waits for its next chapter. Whatever arrives will inherit one of the great restaurant legacies in American hospitality history. It will be interesting to see who proves worthy of it.
Why Ta-boo Was Perfect for Closing a Deal
The most powerful deals are closed in rooms where power has previously been exercised — where the history of the space carries weight that the current conversation inherits. At its best, Ta-boo was precisely that room: a place where the accumulated social history of eight decades created an atmosphere in which every serious conversation seemed plausible, every handshake meaningful, every agreement reached at these tables part of a continuum stretching back through the century. The intimate bar, the discretion of the staff, the understanding that what was said here stayed here — these were the practical mechanics of a deal-closing environment. Combine them with the particular energy of Worth Avenue at its best, and you had a venue where the threshold for seriousness was set by the address and the history long before anyone sat down to talk. Future operators of 221 Worth Avenue would do well to understand what they have inherited before deciding what to replace it with.