Sixteen seats. A U-shaped counter. And a Michelin star earned in under four months. In West Palm Beach, Florida, the restaurant Emelina just pulled off something no Cuban restaurant had managed before.
On May 28, at the 2026 Michelin Guide Florida ceremony, chefs Osmel González and Camila Salazar, married in life and in the kitchen, watched their restaurant join the ranks of the state’s starred tables. Opened in February in the Flamingo Park neighborhood, Emelina is now one of Florida’s fastest restaurants to earn the distinction.
The name honors González’s grandmother. The menu, though, doesn’t lean on nostalgia. González and Salazar ask a tougher question: what might Cuban cuisine have become without decades of economic and political isolation? Their answer draws on Florida farm ingredients and techniques picked up at SingleThread in California, Disfrutar in Barcelona, and La Botica in Spain, the three kitchens where the couple trained.
This isn’t their first star. In 2024 and again in 2025, González and Salazar earned one for EntreNos, their Miami pop-up. The new project, backed by Alvaro Perez Miranda’s APM Restaurant Group alongside Welteroth Property Group, confirms it wasn’t a fluke.
Walnut millwork, walls treated with the Japanese shou sugi ban technique, artwork by Antonio Ugarte lining the counter: the room matches the ambition on the plate. The Infatuation Miami already gave it its top rating of the year, and Bon Appétit named it among 2026’s most anticipated openings.
Sixteen seats won’t feed a crowd. But Emelina just showed that at this scale, you can still rewrite a national cuisine’s story.