If you walk the pier at the end of Sunny Isles Beach Boulevard the way you always have, you have probably noticed the sign is different. The hotel that anchored this stretch of Collins Avenue for decades is still there. The pier still runs out over the Atlantic. But the name over the door now reads The Sunny, and the restaurant where you used to grab a drink at sunset has a different name too.
Here is what actually happened, and why it matters less than the rebrand makes it look.
The property changed its name, not its owners
The building at 16701 Collins Avenue spent most of its life as the Newport Beachside Hotel & Resort, a name generations of Sunny Isles Beach residents used as a landmark even if they never booked a room there. In late 2025, the property completed a full redesign under HB Capital Group and reopened as The Sunny on November 1. The hotel's own materials are specific on one point that matters to anyone who lives nearby: it is still family-owned. The name changed. The people who own the building did not.
That distinction is easy to miss if all you saw was scaffolding for a year and then a new logo. The property traces back to 1967, when it opened as The Newport, and the current transformation is being described by the hotel itself as the next chapter of that same history rather than a teardown and rebuild. The local architecture firm EoA Group led the redesign, which explains why the footprint along the beach still feels familiar even though the interior does not.
For residents, the practical takeaway is that this was not a case of a beloved local business getting priced out and replaced by something unrecognizable. It was the same family updating what they already had.
What's different if you're getting a drink
The part that will actually change your routine is the food and beverage lineup, and it changed completely.
| Then | Now |
|---|---|
| Beach Bar at Newport Pier | Sandbar at Newport Pier |
| Newport Beachside restaurant offerings | VIVA!, led by chef Ray Garcia |
| No dedicated adults-only lounge | The Newport Room |
The old pier restaurant, Beach Bar at Newport Pier, has closed. In its place is Sandbar at Newport Pier, which the property markets as the only true pier restaurant in Miami, a claim that holds up because the Newport Fishing Pier is the last public fishing pier left in Miami-Dade County. Sandbar serves the kind of casual plates you'd expect at a beach bar, fish tacos, tuna poke, a watermelon and tomato salad, with 20 percent gratuity built into the check the way most South Florida beach restaurants now handle it.
VIVA!, the property's flagship dining concept from chef Ray Garcia, is the more considered dinner option if you want an actual reservation rather than a stool at the bar. The Newport Room is new too, an adults-only lounge built around the property's history that gives regulars a quieter option than the pool deck if you're not looking for a family crowd.
None of this required you to drive somewhere new. It's the same three or four minutes from the beach that it always was. The building just started serving different food under different names.
The pier itself is the one thing that hasn't moved
It's worth separating the hotel's rebrand from the pier structure itself, because they are not the same asset and residents sometimes conflate the two.
The Newport Fishing Pier stretches 776 feet over the Atlantic and has been standing in some form since 1936, when it was first built to draw visitors to what was then an undeveloped stretch of coast. Hurricane Wilma damaged it structurally in 2005, and the pier was rebuilt with hurricane-rated construction before reopening to the public in 2013. It remains the only public fishing pier left in Miami-Dade County, and it remains free to walk. Sunny Isles Beach residents still don't need a fishing license to cast a line off the end, a detail that matters if you've lived here long enough to have forgotten it's not the norm everywhere else.
The Sunny's redesign touched the buildings around the pier. It did not touch the pier's public status, its length, or its fee structure. If your routine is a walk to the end and back before the sun gets too high, nothing about that changed.
The rest of the corridor, for context
A few blocks south, Samson Oceanfront Park is still doing exactly what it has always done: 2.1 acres of oceanfront land, named for Gilbert Samson, with a playground, a covered pavilion, and direct beach access that costs nothing to use. The park is also home to a public art installation by Tony Mendoza, a winner of the city's Sunny Spaces Art Contest, which is a small detail but one that gives the park a permanent identity beyond just being a stretch of sand with parking.
The Sunny picked up its own art collection during the redesign, including works by Mariko Mori, Manuel Mérida, and Jorge Blanco, plus two large orange tree sculptures in the lobby that nod to the state's citrus history. It's a different kind of public art than Samson Park's, installed for guests rather than residents, but the two sit close enough together that a walk from one to the other now passes two distinct art collections that didn't exist in this corridor a few years ago.
If your usual loop includes both the pier and the park, you're covering more curated ground than you were before, even if neither stop required you to change your route.
The dining bench underneath all of this hasn't turned over
The bigger picture here is that Sunny Isles Beach's actual restaurant scene, the places locals return to on a normal Tuesday, has stayed remarkably stable while the hotel corridor got its makeover. Il Mulino New York, inside the Acqualina Resort & Residences, is still serving the same handmade pastas it always has. Timo Restaurant & Bar continues as the neighborhood's go-to for Italian-Mediterranean fare from a chef with local roots. BALEENkitchen at Solé Miami is still running its global tasting menu with ocean views.
What's shifted is the newer, more casual layer sitting underneath those established names. Restaurants like Zuru Ramen Bar have opened recently as part of a wave of smaller, faster-casual concepts filling in gaps between the established fine dining anchors. That's a normal pattern for a neighborhood this dense with hotels and residential towers: the flagship restaurants stay put for years, while the casual tier turns over more often as new operators test smaller footprints.
The lesson from watching The Sunny's rebrand alongside this quieter turnover is that Sunny Isles Beach absorbs change in layers. The big anchors, the pier, the major hotel groups, the flagship restaurants, tend to evolve rather than vanish. The smaller, faster-moving businesses come and go more freely. If you've lived here through a few cycles of this, you already knew that. If you're newer to the area, it's a useful way to read what's actually happening every time a familiar sign changes.
Sunny Isles Beach keeps the parts of itself that residents actually use. It just keeps refinishing the surface every few years.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property values along the pier corridor, or you're simply curious what a place like The Sunny's redesign signals about how this stretch of Collins Avenue is being reinvested in, Miami Invest Group can walk you through it. Elena Beck and the team track these changes block by block because they shape how residents live here long after the ribbon-cutting is over.
