WEST PALM BEACH | FLORIDA

Emelina Brings a Sixteen-Seat Cuban Tasting Menu to West Palm Beach

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By Eric Barton | Photos by James Jackman | Jan. 27, 2026

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

In South Florida, restaurant openings arrive like Los Angeles movie premieres, velvet rope lines giving way to two-story behemoths full of crystal chandeliers and tufted everything, with enough seats to hold a football championship.

Which is one reason to pay attention to Emelina. It arrives to West Palm Beach with nothing more than 16 seats, a clear indication that they intend to make the folks sitting in each one of them feel like they’ve arrived at something important.

Emelina is a partnership of APM Restaurant Group and husband-and-wife team Osmel González and Camila Salazar. APM is the group behind Michelin-starred Ogawa, plus Hiyakawa and Midorie, and Emelina is its first non-Japanese concept in South Florida.

Emelina Cuban Restaurant West Palm Beach

The dining room is built around control. Emelina has a 12-seat chef’s counter and two two-top tables, all serving a single tasting menu, with 16 guests per seating across two nightly seatings at 5 and 8. It’s intimate by design, which also means it will be hard to stumble into, even for locals who think they know how to score the best tables.

The idea behind the food is undoubtedly ambitious. Emelina is not presenting Cuban cuisine as it exists today. The restaurant frames the menu as a speculative version of Cuban food: what it might have become with freedom of movement, global influence, creativity, and abundance. Cuban food without the revolution, without the embargo. González and Salazar describe it as rooted in the flavors and memories of their upbringings, filtered through Florida seasons and the state’s coastline, with frequent changes tied to local producers.

Both chefs bring serious mileage. González was born in Havana and began at Jean-Georges’ Matador Room, then trained in Spain at Disfrutar and La Botica de Matapozuelos. He later moved to California’s SingleThread, rising from line cook to sous chef, and staged in Japan. Back in Miami, he served as chef de cuisine at Ariete before co-founding EntreNos, which earned one Michelin Star in 2024 and 2025 and a Michelin Green Star in 2025.

Salazar, a Colombian chef and hospitality operator from Medellín, studied at Instituto Superior Mariano Moreno in Bogotá and Buenos Aires, consulted on food-and-beverage concepts in Colombia, then moved to Miami to work at Matador Room. She also trained at Disfrutar and La Botica de Matapozuelos and worked at SingleThread, later serving as COO of EntreNos, where she led operations and sustainability initiatives.

Emelina is located at 424 Park Place, Unit 101, in West Palm Beach’s Flamingo Park district, inside a mixed-use community developed by Welteroth Property Group. The restaurant will also feature art by Miami-based Venezuelan artist Antonio Ugarte, curated by APM owner Álvaro Perez Miranda’s Black Ship Gallery, which is another signal that Emelina isn’t just about food but about building an entire little world around it.