This Wednesday, the team behind downtown Miami’s always-crowded Niu Kitchen will open the doors to its latest project, Arson (104 NE Second Ave., Miami). The restaurant’s centerpiece will be the charcoal-burning grill/oven hybrid, the Josper.
As work trudges along at The Citadel, a sprawling Little Haiti food hall and boutique center being developed by Conway Commercial Real Estate, a handful of the dining options have begun to solidify. Owners of Myumi, the beloved omakase food truck long stationed at the Wynwood Yard, will take up in the 10,000-square-foot food hall, as well as a smaller outpost of Phuket Thongsodchareondee’s Cake Thai, which late last year opened its second location in Wynwood.
After 37 years, Michio Kushi’s Japanese Market and beloved Sushi Deli will close on March 20. A sign went up on the perpetually crowded place’s hostess stand and some of its shelving over the weekend.
Each Saturday morning, Tawin Thongsodchareondee rose early in his hometown of Phuket, Thailand, and loaded a tall dented pot with a pig’s backbone, mounds of pork trotters, and chicken feet. As it boiled, he made fresh rice noodles before cleaning pigs’ livers, stomachs, and kidneys. Then he’d stuff pig intestines…
In 1998, Mark Soyka was driving somewhere between Miami Shores and Aventura on Biscayne Boulevard when he spotted a familiar hooker. Until just a few months earlier, she had worked in the empty lot next door to the then-54-year-old’s eponymous restaurant at the nexus of Little Haiti, Morningside, and the…
No place in Miami serves Chinese food quite like Chinese Guy. It’s clear the moment you step inside the compact 30-seater, which is nestled in a dark corner of a far-flung West Flagler Street strip mall. On nearly every table, plates are piled high with neon-orange pumpkin wedges and sunflower-yellow…
“Charter boat!” Sig Ozols barks when he answers his cell phone. For years, the burly 50-year-old with the long blond hair of a Viking (even though he’s Latvian) has run a 48-foot sport fishing boat out of Coconut Grove’s Dinner Key Marina. He began fishing nearly three decades ago after his dad, fresh from a divorce, asked him to drive his car and some clothes to Florida from Indianapolis. He was hooked immediately, like so many from the frozen North lured by the swaying palm trees and balmy breezes. “He just asked me to check it out, and I never went back,” Ozols says.
When Melissa Sosa and Zak Stern thought about a fish salad sandwich for Stern’s Wynwood bakery, which opened with a limited menu on Wednesday, they ran into a problem.
Javier Ramirez had a better 2016 than most. Despite his native Venezuela plummeting further into chaos, the energy analyst and hedge-fund risk manager saw doors open at Brickell’s Bachour Bakery + Bistro and Wynwood’s Cake Thai Kitchen, where he has partnered with some of the city’s most exciting chefs to create polished standalone projects. Food & Wine named Brad Kilgore of Alter, another of Ramirez’s partners, one of America’s best new chefs.
West Miami-Dade dim sum spot Tropical Chinese was shut for two days the week before Christmas after state health inspectors found a flurry of violations in the restaurant’s kitchen, including “20-plus live roaches found in a box storing glass teacups in the dry storage next to dumpling prep table,” food…
Thomas Keller, among America’s most revered chefs, put to bed nearly a decade of speculation and dreams yesterday when he announced via the Miami Herald plans to open a yet-to-be-named restaurant in partnership with Surfside’s Surf Club Four Seasons in early 2018.
So many of us would like to forget this past year happened. There was the mind-numbing presidential election, plus a barrage of sucker punches in the deaths of greats Alan Rickman, David Bowie, Prince, Gene Wilder, and Harper Lee. The Miami dining scene provided a respite. The onslaught of mediocre celebrity-backed…
A wide grin spreads over Niven Patel’s black-bearded face as he emerges from his gray stucco house in Homestead and strides into the backyard he’s slowly converting into a farm. His thick-framed Ray-Ban eyeglasses disappear into a dense crop of hair that swivels side-to-side as he surveys rows and rows…
The restaurant losses of 2016 might have been some of the most staggering of any recent year. Sure, we lament the good food we can no longer enjoy at these establishments, but even worse is the city lost the work of many chefs pushing the local culinary scene forward.
William Ltaif wants his restaurant, Smart Bites to Go, off the industrial food grid. But doing so in the middle of the city isn’t so easy. About two years ago, the longtime celebrity health and fitness coach, along with partner Mari Vila, who specialized in preparing the kind of restricted meals hospital patients had to eat, decided to buy a once-decrepit building in Allapattah with plans to change how the city ate and what it meant to be a restaurant.
Every year, Miami plunks down the welcome mat for a host of new eateries. Each one is a new beginning for the chefs and restaurateurs who have high hopes of making it big in the Magic City. Some are small mom-and-pop cafés run by individuals with small budgets and big dreams. Some are grand affairs run by celebrity chefs.
“Never touch your eyes,” Melvin Smith warns as he slices a mountain of orange and red Scotch bonnet peppers on a cutting board in his sweltering South Miami-Dade kitchen. The 59-year-old co-owner of Sango Jamaican & Chinese is tall with a shaved head and the wrinkly face of an English…
About five years ago, Zak Stern took to Kickstarter in hopes of cobbling together the final bit of money he needed to open his Wynwood bakery. Shortly after, seating in the place around lunchtime was hard to find. On Thanksgiving morning, Stern opened his art-gallery-turned-bakery down the street from his original spot at 297 NW 26th St. The place is open from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day but Saturday.
More than half a year after closing to overhaul its menu and kitchen, Brickell Chinese spot Da Tang Unique reopened last month with a more approachable, partially westernized menu.
Before opening Wynwood’s wildly popular Alter, chef/owner Brad Kilgore was in a predicament. The question was whether the restaurant should serve what’s worked best throughout his career — meticulous dishes peppered with exotic ingredients — or a rougher, more rustic style of cuisine. The latter would be the kind of…
By all measures, Jeremiah Bullfrog’s P.I.G. 7 was the Miami food-truck pioneer’s greatest success. Hundreds of attendees this past Saturday afternoon flooded into Wynwood’s Toejam Backlot, which was decked out like a tiki bar flanked by a stage blasting folk tunes ahead of a set by DJ Le Spam.
It’s hard to say which part of bakery life burrowed deepest into Naomi Harris’ soul. There’s the bit about being an integral part of a community, a kind of indispensable gathering place. There’s the opportunity, particularly in the industrial-food era, to give people something unlike anything else they’ve tasted. Then, of course, there’s the bread itself.
