Walk north on Collins Avenue past 167th Street these days and you'll see it before you smell the salt air: a hotel that spent decades as the Newport Beachside Hotel & Resort now wears a new name in low, confident type. The Sunny. Behind it, jutting 776 feet into the Atlantic, the same fishing pier that's been part of this stretch of shoreline since the building first opened in 1967 as The Newport. It reopened for real on November 1, 2025, after a full-scale transformation, and the pier came back with it.
That's the good news for anyone who already lives here. The complicated part landed eight days before this article was written, on August 16, 2026, when Sunny Isles Beach police started issuing citations under a new e-bike ordinance. Sidewalks are now off limits. Riders must be at least 16. A government-issued ID is required while riding. First offense: $250. Second: $500.
Two separate headlines, one narrow barrier island. If you've been treating your e-bike as the easy way to get from a mid-island condo up to the new pier for dinner, the math on your evening just changed.
What Actually Reopened at 16701 Collins
The Sunny isn't a teardown-and-rebuild story. HB Capital Group kept the bones of a property that's been part of the neighborhood's memory for close to sixty years and rebuilt the experience around them, including the pier that gives the whole block its identity. That matters for a barrier island city where so much of the waterfront has been replaced by towers with no public access to the water at all. The pier stayed public in spirit even as the hotel around it went private and upscale.
The dining lineup tells you what the ownership group is betting on. iVIVA!, led by chef Ray Garcia, brings a Mexican-inspired menu to the property. Lovebirds Cafe handles the daytime marketplace crowd. Out on the pier itself, The Sandbar serves a Floridian Caribbean menu built around fresh seafood and frozen cocktails, which means Sunny Isles Beach now has a restaurant that sits directly over the ocean on pilings rather than just facing it from a patio. That's a genuinely different way to eat dinner than anything else on this stretch of coast offers.
The Rule That Landed the Same Month
Here's what most coverage of the pier reopening left out: the same city that just finished rebuilding its most photogenic destination also spent the summer tightening how people are allowed to get around on two wheels.
The city commission approved the e-bike ordinance on July 21, 2026, following an earlier restriction on motorized scooters passed in the spring. The rules that took effect with citations on August 16 include:
- Riders must be at least 16 years old
- A valid government-issued photo ID is required while operating an e-bike
- E-bikes are prohibited on sidewalks throughout the city
- First offense carries a $250 fine, second offense $500
- E-bikes are defined as bikes or tricycles with working pedals and a motor under 750 watts capped at 28 mph
The police department framed this as basic safety math. An e-bike that can hit 28 miles per hour is closer to a vehicle than a toy, and the department said many of the crashes it responded to before the ordinance were preventable. Whatever you think of the policy, the practical effect for residents is straightforward. The sidewalk route many people relied on to get from home to the beach, the pier, or dinner is now legally closed to e-bikes, full stop, regardless of rider age.
Why a Barrier Island Feels This More Than Most Places
Sunny Isles Beach is not a sprawling suburb where a mobility rule change gets absorbed into a dozen alternate routes. It's a strip of land roughly two miles long between the ocean and the Intracoastal, with Collins Avenue as the main north-south spine and a handful of cross streets connecting condo towers to the beach. When your entire daily geography runs along one corridor, a rule that removes sidewalk access for one mode of transportation doesn't get diluted. It concentrates.
That's the part worth sitting with if you live here and you've gotten used to hopping on an e-bike for the short hop up to the new pier restaurants. The road itself remains open to e-bikes under the ordinance, since cities can't legally ban them from roadways entirely, but riding Collins Avenue traffic instead of the sidewalk is a different experience than the one most residents had built into their routine. Regular pedal bikes aren't affected by any of this. Walking isn't affected. It's specifically the class of transportation that a lot of people were using to close the distance between the middle of the island and its newly reopened north end that just got harder to use casually.
The Rest of the Map Filled In Too
The pier isn't the only thing that changed this year. A cluster of new restaurants opened around it, and they split cleanly along the island's two natural axes: the oceanfront corridor along Collins Avenue, and the Intracoastal side along Sunny Isles Boulevard, where the boating crowd lives.
On the Collins Avenue side, Porterhouse Music Bar & Restaurant opened at 17004 Collins Avenue with live music and a late-night kitchen that runs until 2 a.m. on weeknights and 5 a.m. on weekends. Il Mulino New York brought its fine dining Italian menu to a Sunny Isles Beach address, and Timo Restaurant & Bar, led by chef Tim Andriola, added a Mediterranean-leaning Italian menu to the same strip. Inside Acqualina Resort, Ke-uH serves Japanese fusion with ocean views from the dining room, a different kind of proximity to the water than what the pier restaurants offer.
Over on the Intracoastal side, Mykonos Kitchen & Bar opened at 400 Sunny Isles Boulevard with something none of the Collins Avenue spots can offer: private marina docking, so boaters can pull up directly to the restaurant instead of finding street parking. It's a small detail that says something larger about how this city actually functions. The ocean side is where you walk to dinner. The Intracoastal side is where you boat to it.
Lentrecote Steak-Fries & Famous Sauce Bistro, which grew out of a home recipe before becoming a restaurant, opened its first location here as well, adding a French bistro option to a dining scene that was mostly Italian and seafood a few years ago.
None of this happened by design as a single coordinated plan. It happened because a hotel finished a long-running renovation and a handful of independent operators happened to open around the same time. But the effect on a resident's week is the same either way. There are now genuinely more reasons to walk or drive to both ends of the island than there were a couple of years ago, at the exact moment one of the easiest ways to cover that distance got a lot more restricted.
What This Actually Changes If You Already Live Here
If your routine has included e-bike trips along the beachwalk or sidewalks to get to dinner, that routine needs a rework, not because the restaurants moved, but because the rules around how you reach them did. Regular bikes are unaffected. Driving and parking near the pier and the Collins Avenue cluster is still the default for most residents, and walking remains fully legal everywhere it always was.
The bigger, quieter shift is that Sunny Isles Beach now has two real dining destinations instead of one central strip, and getting between them takes a little more deliberate planning than it did in 2024. That's a small thing to adjust to. It's also the kind of local detail that doesn't show up until you've actually tried to get to dinner the way you used to and found out the route changed under you.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own place on the island, whether that's rental demand near the new dining cluster or how neighborhood change like this tends to show up in resale value over time, that's exactly the kind of conversation The Kotelsky Group has with clients across Sunny Isles Beach every week. Get a Free Home Valuation Today and find out where your property stands as this stretch of Collins Avenue keeps changing.
