Before the sun slips west of Fifth Avenue South, the rooftop at Prime Social Reserve sharpens into focus, every pink-striped umbrella caught in the last clear aperture of daylight. The palms below shimmer in amber, and the street’s usual music rises and softens, as if gathering itself for the night.
People emerge from the elevator with the wide-eyed look of travelers in a new capital. They cross the amber-lit dining room to the terrace, which reveals a fresh angle on the Naples they know. A woman in her thirties, still damp from the Gulf, drops a denim jacket onto the barstool she’s claimed every Thursday this season. At the rail, a surgeon from Grey Oaks talks shop with a broker who specializes in the procession of glassy towers rising along the waterfront. Around them, bicoastal couples and returned native sons take the center banquettes, savoring the thrill of recognizing every version of their city in a single sweep of the room.
“There have always been places to eat in Naples, and places to belong,” says David Miller, president of Cameron Mitchell Restaurants, which owns Prime Social, alongside nearby Del Mar and Ocean Prime. The golf course for one circle, the charity galas for another, the candlelit tables of Third Street or Fifth Avenue for the quiet business of showing up in the right place. “Everybody had their rooms,” he says. “What you didn’t have was one place where all those worlds ran into each other on a Tuesday night.” Prime Social proposes a different arrangement—a hinge between worlds, where social groups collapse into one another over the course of an evening.
Photography by Anna Nguyen
Photography by Anna Nguyen
Courtesy Jack Cook Photography
Photography by Anna Nguyen
The VIP rooftop occupies a space that, until recently, could not have existed. With a handful of exceptions grandfathered in, city code long forbade restaurants above the first floor, a legacy of noise complaints and a preference for keeping things contained. Chris Shucart, a partner at Prime Social and the building’s owner, spent two years unwinding that prohibition, securing a narrow amendment that left a few sites on Fifth Avenue eligible. His building at Fifth and Eighth, split by an alley between Chops and Engel & Völkers, is perhaps the only one with the infrastructure to support a rooftop.
Chris bridged the building’s gap at the third level with a new steel structure, creating 7,300 square feet of contiguous terraces and lounges. The project bears the imprint of a national hospitality group, and the five years of inspiration David spent studying club-style concepts around the country. “We approached it backward—design first, then menu,” he says.
In-house designer Randy Roberty, working with Chicago-based designer Karen Herold, designed the space to feel like a yacht moored above the street—polished, buoyant, a little otherworldly, but still tethered to the life below. The layout unfolds under a Gulf sky, with distinct zones—from the central atrium, illuminated by a skylight, to the sultry bar lounge, to the terraces, where philodendrons and pothos soften the edges of solid oak tables at the rail.
Photography by Anna Nguyen
prime social naples new dining wine cooler seating area
On a wall in a small office beneath Prime Social hangs a map of Naples pricked with colored pins representing households with a membership. Their tiny plastic heads cluster along Fifth and thin out as they stretch north toward Mediterra, the Dunes, Grey Oaks.
The pins trace what Naples has become. Many members are lawyers and money managers, serial entrepreneurs turned seasonal Floridians, urban transplants in their forties and fifties who feel more at home in a downtown pied-à-terre than a gated community. Many own homes up north, increasingly descending from Northeastern cities or California, and are accustomed to private dining floors and members’ spaces, embedded in the city’s main circuits. “Naples, until recently, didn’t really give that to them,” David says.
Before the pins existed, investors were asked to provide 10 names each for the budding list. At Del Mar and Ocean Prime, servers slipped out small cards hinting at something forming above Fifth. Interest moved neighbor to neighbor, from mahjong tables to golf foursomes. By the time the rooftop opened in late 2025, they had 220 memberships. Six months later, there are 335 households on the books, translating to about 700 names on the manifest, with a waitlist hundreds deep. On Monday mornings, access manager and concierge Raelene De Luca’s inbox fills with new inquiries from people who want to be up here, too.
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Photography by Anna Nguyen
prime social naples new dining rooftop indoor dining room
Chris Shucart spent two years securing the narrow zoning amendment that allowed for a rooftop restaurant on Fifth. To create the 7,300-square-foot perch above Chops City Grill, he spanned the alleyway with a third-story steel structure. Unlike the other new club-style spaces in town, Prime Social sits within the city’s main circuit—less a destination, more part of the flow.
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Photography by Anna Nguyen
prime social naples new dining chris shucart
Prime Social is, legally, not a private club. Federal tax law reserves that term for member-owned nonprofit entities. This, instead, is a VIP program wrapped around a restaurant. In practice, life here feels distinctly club-like. Members walk over or coast up in a golf cart, claim a table for dinner, then drift back out for drinks on the avenue. Others reverse the order: a drink at the bar, dinner elsewhere, then back upstairs for one more glass and the pleasure of running into people they had not expected to see. Connections that might once have taken a season of orchestrated lunches begin to take hold over an evening or two.
Positioned at the center of the city, the rooftop operates differently from the new wave of club-like rooms emerging across Naples—places like Butcher Private, The Maddox and the forthcoming Sterling’s, destinations you drive to and remain within for the evening. Here, you stop in rather than plan for it, which changes who you run into and how often. When managing partner Rick Giannasi walks someone to a table, it can take 10 minutes to cross the room, as introductions and small confidences gather along the way. “A lot of them just met here,” he says. “They’ve lived five blocks apart for years and never crossed paths until now.”
The rooftop is closed to non-members, but porous by design. David and Chris created an unaccompanied-guest system, where a member can send a friend without an escort, preserving the insider energy while allowing new faces to rotate through and circles to stack.
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Courtesy Jack Cook Photography
prime social naples new dining rooftop view area
The design—conceived to evoke a yacht moored above the street, with teak, lush greenery and striped canopy—came before the menu. The social calendar keeps guests cycling through week for wine dinners, , mahjong matinees and Derby watch parties.
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Photography by Anna Nguyen
prime social naples new dining bottle case booth area
“There have always been places to eat in Naples, and places to belong,” says David Miller, president of Cameron Mitchell Restaurants. “Country clubs, beach clubs, charity galas—what you didn’t have was one place where all those worlds ran into each other on a Tuesday night.”
As dinner service begins, a server in a banded vest approaches a trio of women with a narrow bamboo board of nuggets dusted in edible gold. A bottle of hot mustard and a small pot of pickled peppers complete the dish. Chef Alejandra Bringas’ spin on the chicken nugget is a fine-dining joke, but also a sincere homage to the things people crave when they let their guard down. The women wedge the bamboo board between their martinis, the mustard bottle passing from hand to hand, the heat loosening their laughter.
Before coming to Prime Social, Alejandra had already proven she could run a high-volume Naples darling as executive chef at Del Mar since 2023. Now she is raising the stakes. “At Del Mar, I was always thinking about the busiest Saturday and how to make everything consistent,” she says. “Up here, I’m thinking about what it feels like on your 20th visit. What’s the dish you miss when you go back up north?”
Photography by Anna Nguyen
prime social naples new dining raspberry dessert plated
The menu is modern American with French and Asian inflections, familiar enough to anchor regulars but adventurous enough to keep them curious. Specials act as a testing ground, with feedback moving quickly from table to kitchen. Members also request updates or additions, which often end up on a secret menu—a crisp fried chicken sandwich, a burger, simpler salads—discovered through word of mouth. At the back of the bar lounge, members claim wine lockers to store their bottles of Napa Valley Reserve and allocation-only Burgundies.
The rooftop’s temperature is largely set by Rick, long known as the star maître d’ at Ocean Prime, which he helped open in 2016. Members talk about him like an unofficial mayor whose job is less to run a dining room than to tend a village. He and his team track the small things: who likes the corner banquette at sunset, who takes a martini with reposado instead of gin, who has been courting a prospective client. A loaded event calendar compounds the room’s social draw. Intimate wine dinners, bourbon tastings, sip-and-shop afternoons, mahjong matinees and March Madness watch parties give members reasons to return beyond a meal.
Photography by Anna Nguyen
Photography by Anna Nguyen
Photography by Anna Nguyen
Photography by Anna Nguyen
Tucked along the far-wall banquette in the bar lounge, a young woman in a crisp white dress leans over a plate of Japanese milk rolls, listening to an older man at an adjoining table describe the city as it was when he arrived: dirt parking lots where now there are galleries, a single good restaurant on Third Street. She glances up, catching her reflection in the wine lounge glass, doubled against the deep greens of the foliage and the last light of the day. People like him once came to town with their own urgencies, their own vision for the waterfront. Now it is her generation’s turn to define the terms.
Down below, Fifth Avenue continues its usual performance, with valets calling, heels on brick, a burst of laughter from the corner. Up here, on this improbable deck of a yacht that never leaves the dock, the city is trying on a new version of itself—lacquered in small rituals and the old truth that what people are really hungry for is not the food itself but the easy company that, tonight, seems to come with every tender bite.