Delray Beach to get swankier: 7 fine-food restaurants are opening around Atlantic Avenue

A modern Greek restaurant that flips into a European dancehall by night. “Florida-style” barbecue from a James Beard Award semifinalist. A kitschy Asian tiki speakeasy (say that three times fast). A high-class steakhouse and a retro-funky disco bar.

Under everyone’s nose, downtown Delray Beach is becoming a more urbane oasis of fine food and drink — and the latest proof is the wave of seven new restaurants and bars about to shuffle around the Atlantic Avenue drag.

Lefkes Estiatorio, the first of these swanky restaurants, soft-opened on Friday, Aug. 2, as a modern Greek kitchen and sushi-sashimi bar inside the four-story Delray Beach Market. At 5,000 square feet, the sit-down looks as sumptuous as it sounds, with terra-cotta flooring, blue and white accents, earthy champagne walls and a state-of-the-art sound system set to pump out European music every Thursday through Saturday, when it converts into a nightclub for DJs, violin and saxophone players.