Our new monthly feature travels to Delray Beach, where we sample the best in dining, entertainment and things to do (with occasional stops for refreshment).

By Thomas Swick

“Let’s step into my office,” Bruce Gimmy said, walking out of The Trouser Shop and heading to two plastic chairs on the sidewalk. He was wearing striped shorts – red, black, green, white, yellow, pink – and a tape measure around the neck of his polo shirt.

“When I bought the store this was a four-lane road,” he said, referring to Atlantic Avenue inches from our elbows. “There were wires up above.”

That was in 1985. Today, two of the lanes are used for parking, which slows the traffic and allows passengers to take in, among other things, the hats hanging from Gimmy’s awning. It also makes for quieter sidewalk chats. And now the only things crossing the blue Florida skies are the branches of oak trees.

The mastermind behind the transformation, everyone will tell you, was Chris Brown, director of the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency through most of the 90s.

I had walked Atlantic Avenue numerous times, and had always been intrigued by The Trouser Shop, which squeezes next to a newsstand – both businesses standing like throwbacks, defiant survivors in the middle of a reenergized and increasingly aromatic street. Delray Beach has become a popular place for dining out – literally, as the tables of restaurants, cafes, bars and yogurt shops run the length of Atlantic Avenue. There are over 100 places to eat on the boulevard – cheesesteaks, cupcakes, meatballs, lobster rolls – and on NE Second Avenue in Pineapple Grove. But sprinkled among them, providing continuity and perhaps the key to the city’s extraordinary success, are homey mainstays of Old Delray.

Saying goodbye to Gimmy, I headed east and walked under the maroon-and-yellow awnings of The Colony Hotel. The dimly-lit lobby was painted turquoise and coral, shades that managed to dazzle and subdue simultaneously. Wicker chairs dotted the open spaces, and two Highwaymen paintings hung near the reception desk. When I asked to see a room, a cheerful young woman took me to the second floor in the hotel’s original 1926 elevator. In the bathroom she showed me the shampoo dispenser. The octogenarian lodging was eco-friendly.

Across the street, authentic-looking Neapolitan pizzas were emerging from a wood-burning oven. The name of the pizzeria was Scuola Vecchia (Old School).

I turned around (I was meeting a friend at Dada on Swinton Avenue) and walked up to Huber pharmacy which, at 100, was as old as the city (though it had not spent its century at this location). I crossed the street, then the railroad tracks, passing more restaurants until I came to Old School Square, a sort of village green with the added attraction of a cultural arts center. Reaching Swinton I caught a whiff of fries, and a frisson from the Fifties, as Doc’s All American burger joint appeared on my left.

Dada was the anti-Doc’s, with artwork on the walls and tables in the front garden and couches on the spacious porch, where I sat with Michiko. The Japanese have had a small but long presence in Delray, starting with the Yamato Colony of farmers who arrived in the early 1900s. (Yamato is the ancient name for Japan, and the signs for Yamato Road must tickle Japanese scholars who drive I-95.) It was the last member of this community who left his land (and, as it turned out, his name) for what is today the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens. Michiko’s father, Hoichi Kurisu, designed and built the gardens, and she came down in the late 90s to record, on film and in photographs, his monumental achievement. She also created the art installation that adorns the south side of the Atlantic Avenue bridge.

Michiko filled me in on more delights of Old Delray: Hand’s Stationers (“since 1934”), Delray Camera Shop (and its beloved Lab, Rufus), the Mercer Wenzel department store, the former policeman who does an Elvis show every Thursday night at Johnnie Brown’s (the popular place by the railroad tracks named for Addison Mizner’s pet monkey).

And she enlightened me about some of the newer attractions: the Arts Garage in Pineapple Grove (hosting a variety of cultural events), Kevro’s Art Bar on the South Side, the Swinton Community Garden (which she is the coordinator of). Delray appeared to have that rare ability to look to the future without losing touch with the past.

Michiko also marveled at the proliferation of nail salons in strip malls around town. “There’s no excuse,” she said smiling, “to have a bad manicure or messy toes in Delray.”

Michiko headed off to a meeting and I returned to the Avenue. I entered a gallery where the owner, backed by large, colorful, abstract canvases, told of moving from New York to overcome drug and alcohol addiction. (Delray has become an important recovery destination.)

Farther down, vintage dresses adorned the window of A Blast from the Past and, on the next block, The Blue Anchor serenely occupied its corner. The oak-and-stained-glass exterior once wrapped a pub in London’s Chancery Lane; enter, and you walk through the same doorway, according to the historical note on the back of the menu, that Winston Churchill used when he was a young, Fleet Street journalist.

Lee Harrison, another Englishman, and former journalist, is now the publican. When he was let go from the National Enquirer in the mid-90s, he decided to open the pub. It seemed a natural career move. “I’d been in pubs all my life as a reporter,” he explained.

His place, he said, “is the longest surviving restaurant on Atlantic. We opened six weeks before 32 East.”

Over the years, Harrison has built up a loyal following of locals, thirsty journalists, and returning tourists. “I still get a kick out of it,” he said, sitting in a booth near the bar. “The humor in here is lovely. There isn’t a day when I don’t have a good belly laugh.”

The fish ‘n’ chips smelled enticing, but Michiko had told me about a place she liked in Pineapple Grove, so I headed back to NE Second Avenue. To work up my appetite I walked past the restaurant and continued down the street dotted with eateries and wine bars and even a bookstore, Murder on the Beach. Added to the city’s impressive list of events – Festival of the Arts, Garlic Fest, Delray Affair, Chris Evert-Raymond James Pro-Celebrity Tennis Classic at the Delray Beach Tennis Center – is the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, held every January in the Old School Square Cultural Arts Center.

Max’s Harvest was a small place with an open kitchen and a high ceiling and vintage black-and-white photographs of county farmers. The decorations went well with the philosophy of “farm to fork” I sat outside next to a Key lime tree and ate Deviled Heritage Hen Farm Eggs (with truffle sea salt) followed by tender octopus in a marvelous salsa mixed with white beans.

Finished, I went across the street to Brulé, an intimate bistro where the waitress was so friendly, explaining the dishes as they came out of the kitchen, that I ended up buying a chocolate chip cookie.

I returned a few days later, with my wife, to have dinner at 32 East. Opened in 1996, it was the harbinger of the city’s restaurant scene, and 15 years later, it is still setting the standard. We began with sublime fish tacos and figs wrapped in oven-roasted prosciutto, followed by filet mignon and mangrove snapper in a lemongrass-soy broth with soba noodles and pickled daikon. George Morikami would have approved.

After dinner, we took a stroll down the Avenue alive with people. Saturday night in Delray Beach. Sidewalk tables were filled with diners, and crowds spilled out from Johnnie Brown’s terrace. The Trouser Shop was closed, but a man sat on the porch of The Colony Hotel playing Spanish guitar to an appreciate audience. Reaching The Blue Anchor, we entered like Churchill and ordered a nightcap.