Delray Beach orders more fiftieth and sixtieth anniversaries than most cities its size order fifths. That is not a slogan, it is the demography of the western half of the city: Kings Point, Villages of Oriole, Huntington Pointe, Huntington Lakes, Pines of Delray, High Point of Delray and the club communities out along Military Trail and Lyons Road — Gleneagles, The Hamlet, Delaire, Addison Reserve, Mizner Country Club — are full of couples who married in Brooklyn, Montreal, Newark or Chicago in the 1960s and are marking the anniversary here. That changes the practical brief in three ways. First, the sender is usually an adult child or grandchild in another state, so the address has to be right the first time: community name, building letter, unit number, and a phone number the gatehouse can dial. Second, both people live in the same apartment, so a surprise delivery cannot be intercepted at the door by the other spouse — it just has to land while one of them is at the pool or the clubhouse. Third, the milestone is often a party rather than a dinner: the clubhouses inside these communities host anniversary lunches with a room and a set hour, and an arrangement for a table needs to be low enough for people to see one another across it.
The dinner is a different question, and the honest answer surprises people: do not send the flowers to the restaurant. Downtown Delray's anniversary rooms are mostly small — Elisabetta's Ristorante at 32 E Atlantic, Tramonti at 119 E Atlantic, City Oyster and Sushi Bar at 213 E Atlantic, Cut 432 further east on the same avenue, Lionfish at 307 E Atlantic, Dada in the old house at 52 N Swinton, Rose's Daughter in Pineapple Grove, Deck 84 on the Intracoastal at the foot of Atlantic, and out west Apeiro at Delray Marketplace on Lyons Road. A vase on a two-top for three hours is furniture in the way, a hostess stand is not a cooler, and nobody wants to carry an arrangement through a crowded dining room and then into a valet line on Atlantic Avenue in February. Send the flowers to the house that afternoon so they are there when the couple gets dressed, and let the restaurant handle dessert. If the celebration is a beachfront lunch at Caffe Luna Rosa or Boston's on the Beach on South Ocean Boulevard, or the Atlantic Grille at the Seagate, the same logic holds — and those addresses are across a drawbridge besides.