Comments (2) Best Hotel Restaurant - 2010

Eos at Viceroy Miami

Chef Michael Psilakis has put together the lightest, brightest, most brilliant hotel menu in town. Chef de cuisine Jason Hall executes the cooking impeccably: Lobster-and-sea-urchin risotto brings a bowl of yogurt, caviar, fried herbs, and a barely poached egg, and then the lobster and risotto get mixed in. Smoked octopus is shockingly good with diced pineapple, sopressata sticks, and paper-thin ringlets of fennel. Greek "paella" is jammed with clams, mussels, Merguez sausage, and jumbo head-on prawns in a saffron-spiced sauce spiked with Espelette pepper. Restaurateur Donatella Arpaia has trained the waitstaff to be one of Miami's finest, the room is gorgeous, and the outdoor terrace of the 15th-floor restaurant affords breathtaking views. Yet Eos charges noticeably less for its superior dining experience than every other top-tier hotel in town: Most plates, including that paella, run $10 to $16, and a dessert of two tropical fruit cannoli shells made from dried pineapple and filled with papaya, mango, passion fruit foam, and baby basil sprouts on coconut-vanilla tapioca goes for $6. Then comes the complimentary plate of petite sweet treats. Psilakis has already won a James Beard Award, and Eos was a Beard semifinalist for Best New Restaurant this year. Did we mention $5 valet parking?