At 12:03 a.m., as the DJ hits his stride and the disco ball refracts red glimmers across leopard-print footstools and burgundy banquettes, a plate of just-baked chocolate chip cookies emerges. They’re presented with a flourish by Mit Amin and gratefully received by the finely frocked revelers who find themselves here in the wee hours. It’s a grandmotherly gesture in a room otherwise pulsing with bass, sultriness, and a healthy dose of hedonism.
Mary Lou’s, the velvet-roped cocktail lounge and club tucked inside the former Berto’s Bait & Tackle at the corner of Southern Boulevard and South Olive Avenue in West Palm Beach, is an of-the-times ode to golden-era Palm Beach. It also happens to be the area’s most talked-about after-hours address since its opening in January 2025. According to its founders, it was never meant to be just another nightclub.
“We’re in the business of making memories,” says CEO Alex Melillo, whose late grandmother was the namesake Mary Lou. “The greatest form of art is joy—being able to make people smile, enjoy, and lose themselves in the moment.”
Melillo, Joe Cervasio, and Topher Grubb are the partners and visionaries behind Mary Lou’s and its parent company, Mama Hospitality. Their backgrounds in nightlife, luxury hospitality, and large-scale event production overlap as if fated, and maybe it all was.
Cervasio and Melillo grew up together on Long Island, best friends since second grade. Melillo’s grandmother lived in Palm Beach, so he spent holidays here and visited often. Melillo knew Grubb through New York’s hospitality scene. Grubb’s younger sister, Dottie, eventually married Cervasio in 2017, and the couple are now raising their 3-year-old daughter together in Grubb’s hometown of Wellington.
From shared roots, their paths continued to cross in their adult lives. Cervasio cut his teeth at the glamorous Rainbow Room before moving through Mandarin Oriental and the Cipriani Group. Melillo owned Chalk Point Kitchen in New York City and built a nationally recognized event production and fabrication company and creative agency that produced many of the nation’s major art shows. Grubb became known for his discerning taste and VIP relationships in New York nightlife.
For Melillo, Palm Beach was “always inevitable.” His grandmother, businesswoman Mary Lou Curtis—an iconoclast, decorated fashion designer, and Worth Avenue boutique owner—serves as the concept’s muse. According to Melillo, she understood style on the highest level: as an attitude, not just an outfit. “She really understood how to make people feel special and create experiences and was known for throwing great events and parties in New York and Florida,” he says. “Mary Lou’s, for me, was kind of a love letter to my grandmother.”
Curtis enchanted the likes of Jackie O, Elizabeth Taylor, and Betty White with her wares. Her playful temper—and commitment to “always have a sense of ridiculousness,” describes Melillo—now defines the brand.
On the exterior, Mary Lou’s is unassuming. It is in this octagonal building that locals used to grab everything from live bait to Dom Pérignon. Today, the only thing that indicates the wonderland of revelry inside is the line of black SUVs pulling in on any given weekend night. Once granted access, you’ll enter through a nondescript, sticker-covered door and find yourself transported through a portal of sorts: a narrow hallway lined with remnants of Berto’s history that gives way to a dim, plush fever dream of animal print, frescoes, fine art photography, and an intimate but bumping dance floor.
“When I first saw the building, I immediately said, ‘This is it,’” Melillo says. “It meant so much to us that so many people grew up going there. You could feel the soul in the beams and the walls.”
Demolition was floated as an option, but the team wouldn’t hear of it. “You have such a migration of the world’s biggest and best developers flocking to South Florida, specifically this slice of West Palm Beach,” notes Dottie Grubb Cervasio, who leads marketing efforts for Mary Lou’s. “There are incredibly impressive projects going on—this building could’ve very easily been swept up in a demo and turned into a parking lot. [But] you have to be a local to understand the history and cultural impact this building had.”
Adds Cervasio: “You’ll never get a building like this ever again; they just don’t build them like this anymore. We all collectively said there’s no way. No shot.”
They preserved what they could, including artifacts left behind, and layered in fabulously absurdist opulence, resulting in a nostalgic yet irreverent room that “feels like it’s been here 100 years even though it’s new,” as Melillo puts it.
“Palm Beach needed something that had full authenticity and originality,” Cervasio notes. “[We have] this desire to over-deliver in every facet of the guest experience, from the second they’re about to turn into our parking lot to the second they get their car back from valet.”
The attention to detail extends beyond the typical. By evening, Mary Lou’s operates as a supper club serving indulgent fare like an A5 Wagyu Big Mac. Chef residencies—from Sushi by Bo omakase pop-ups to a brief takeover by New York’s Arthur & Sons—have elevated the culinary component, while programming like mah-jongg nights and tuna-cutting ceremonies draw crowds on off days. If you can get in, late nights here are anything but ordinary, with unusual performers (contortionists, gown-clad sexy someones on stilts, an acrobat strutting across the bar draped in a python) on the regular. Expecting the unexpected is the MO.
“Palm Beach [has] a lot of people who are very well traveled, and their expectations are high as far as hospitality is concerned—fashion, culture, everything,” says Grubb. “The hard part was for them to accept that this is the real thing, but … after a year, the response is still amazing. The people were ready for it, and they really helped it to become what it is.”
A standout moment was the grand opening on January 23, 2025—a surrealist re-creation of the Rothschild Ball that immediately entered the annals of fabled Palm Beach party history. “It wasn’t just another Thursday night in West Palm Beach,” Grubb recalls. “Everybody showed up, dressed for the theme, and went above and beyond.”
As it goes with the right thing in the right place at the right time, Mary Lou’s is already bigger than its flagship. Last summer, the team revived Montauk’s Swallow East and La Fin with similar sentimental energy. In January, they reintroduced the storied Wall lounge at W South Beach—a nightlife institution shuttered since 2020—as Mary Lou’s Miami. The move continues a pattern of resurrecting culturally significant rooms for a new generation.
“It’s very important that we stick to the nostalgic play,” says Cervasio. “These are all venues that have had generations go to them and have shut down for whatever reason, and we’re bringing them back to life with a Mary Lou’s energy.”
Other expansion plans are underway. They’ve signed leases for multiple new concepts coming to West Palm Beach this fall and anticipate additional outposts in Las Vegas, Dallas, Los Angeles, and other fitting markets in the near future. But even as Mama Hospitality grows and formalizes—and the team works on operations, programming, and brand-building with special groups worldwide—the ethos remains the same.
“We weren’t in a rush,” Melillo says of launching in West Palm Beach. “Until the right space came to us, it wasn’t something we were going to do.”
Their restraint may be the secret. Mary Lou’s wasn’t parachuted in by outside developers. It feels, somehow, native—born of horse farms and Worth Avenue boutiques, New York art fairs and old-school service standards, childhood friendships and family ties. Zany and fresh while simultaneously historic and organically “in place,” it’s all the things that make Palm Beach the irresistibly alluring destination that it is.
Go dance beneath the old bait shop beams and you’ll see: the room hums with something familiar, but the likes of which Palm Beach hasn’t seen before, at least not in public. “We’re excited to … keep bringing these types of concepts to places that we feel deserve them but don’t have them and a multidimensional sense of hospitality that doesn’t dictate what you need to be doing but provides a backdrop for you to do whatever you feel,” says Melillo.
In a town wrongly rumored to be sleepy, Mary Lou’s is proof that Palm Beach life after dark was never dormant but merely waiting for the right room to bring it to light
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