Growing up in Kansas, Brad Kilgore knew two immutable things about cooking. The first was that any good meal had to include meat and potatoes. The second was that beef stroganoff must be made with egg noodles and the magic flavor enhancer known as Lipton onion soup mix.
Neither ingredient appears in the imperial steak stroganoff ($30) at his two-month-old Design District restaurant, Ember (151 NE 41st St, Miami, 786-334-6494, embermiami.com). Cooks rub a hunk of prime tri-tip with a pepper-heavy house spice blend and sear it over a mound of angry red-orange coals. House gemelli arrives al dente, tossed with a rich mushroom cream and topped with a dollop of sour cream whipped into oblivion with ancho chilies, shallots, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and a creamy slightly sweet, onion soubise.
For years, Kilgore, now 33 and sporting a man bun, a chinstrap beard, a Rolex, and Adidas Yeezy Boosts, has built a reputation — beginning at his Wynwood restaurant Alter in 2015 — on creating visually stunning dishes conjured with ingredients and inspiration from every nook of the globe. Bay scallop crudos have been adorned with green tomato aguachile, black lime, maracuya, and radish, while a hunk of seared barramundi looked toward Southeast Asia with hints of coconut pandan, shiso green curry, and nuoc cham.
Yet while he was tweezering impossibly thin ink crisps onto plates of octopus with ají panca and pineapple, he was thinking about much simpler things: mashed potatoes, lasagna, and, of course, beef stroganoff. It's a concept he had wished to open since he arrived in Miami a decade ago.
"I wanted to elevate the memories of what I ate as a child to create a neighborhood restaurant," Kilgore says. "There's definitely a lot going on in the background of these plates, but I didn't want that to show when they landed."
While he was tweezering impossibly thin ink crisps, all along he was thinking about much simpler things,
tweet this
Ember is indeed in a neighborhood — of wealth. You must pass towering Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana boutiques to reach the restaurant's front door. But once you're ensconced in a semicircular banquette surrounded by bold wood beams stretched and bent into iconic art deco forms, Ember soon becomes the most inviting part of his fledgling restaurant empire, which includes Alter's stark concrete walls and hard chairs, and the nearby Kaido's 1,200 gold knives hanging above its 12-seat bar.
Yet fully appreciating all that Ember offers, however, might require being somewhat of a home cook.
It's only after you've composed a lasagna using store-bought pasta sheets, or tried to roll them out yourself and found them either too thick to cook properly or too thin to handle without tearing, that you can truly appreciate Kilgore's fire-roasted lasagna ($29). It's composed of 30 layers of perfect pasta, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and herb-flecked ricotta beautifully crisped in a Josper oven and rested atop a luxurious pool of Gruyère fondue. Ground beef is swapped for wood-grilled maitake mushrooms. Kilgore has long boasted a deft hand with fungi, and here they're cooked into a rich red sauce inspired by Bolognese and flecked with just a bit of puttanesca thanks to the introduction of olives, capers, and chilies. The final product yields elegant bites devoid of lasagna's perfunctory heaviness and leaves no longing for the standard meat preparation.
The cocktail program, run by bar manager Nima Kasmaii, takes a similar tack. Iconic drinks such as the daiquiri — not the frozen version but the classic one made with simple syrup, lime juice, and good rum — are refashioned in a way that honors the original and adds something that's both unusual and sensible. Ember's daiquiri ($14) is fashioned with cinnamon and carrot, and the sweet, spicy notes slide right up alongside the classic rum and lime. Meanwhile, Kasmaii's interpretation of the margarita, spiked with melon, sage, banana peppers, and bitters, sounds at first outlandish but reveals itself as a vehicle for a fantastic ride that careens through sweetness, spice, acid, and depth to ultimate balance.
Back in the kitchen, many of the dishes — from a menu divided into starters, entrées that include à la carte cuts of meat, "over the embers," and sides — are heavily influenced by chef de cuisine Nick Graves. He grew up in South Carolina, was mentored by the celebrated Southern chef Sean Brock, and worked in New Orleans before returning home and later relocating to Miami.
There are beignets ($14) that have the same pinched, puffy appearance as those cloaked under craggy mounds of powdered sugar from New Orleans' Café du Monde but are something very different. They're filled with a creamy, assertive pimiento cheese, fortified with wild ramps and smoked cheddar, that somehow all stays inside the dough even when it's plunked into a fryer. A trio of them arrives dusted with onion ash nestledagainst a generous spoonful of velvety fermented harissa that lends just the right amount of acid, spice, and smoke to punch through the warm dough and cheese.
On the other hand, Graves' roasted cornbread custard ($18) has become a fast signature of pure, unbridled joy and heft. Braised short ribs are finished in a red wine reduction and plunked atop a cast-iron dish filled with a not-too-sweet bread that's half-cooked in the center, yielding spoonfuls of delight that could be a starter, side dish, or dessert. A server will politely ask if you'd like the bone marrow-infused butter on the side or slicked on top. The answer should be obvious, and the fat that melts down into the cornbread can only be likened to a shot of adrenaline pushed straight into the heart.
The smoked fried chicken ($27) rounds out Graves' trio of dishes via measures of juiciness and depth (thanks to the slow, indirect heat) that are hard to match. And though the half bird is perfectly executed, it's the caviar butter, in which salty green specks float in a snappy verdant tomato beurre blanc alongside shredded pickles, which boast a vinegary spice similar to Haitian pikliz, that push it to anot dher level.
Kilgore offers a similar nod to Miami with an expected offering of tender snails with an alluring bit of peaty earthiness, cooked with a spicy knob of house-made chorizo whose smokiness is the perfect match for the loamy gastropod. The best way to enjoy them is to compose a bite of the paper-thin sourdough crisps smeared with the garlicky white bean purée crowned with the snail and sausage.
Few dishes, however, evoke the same emotion as dessert.
"Think about when you most wanted to eat a Rice Krispy," Kilgore says. "It's when they're hot and still unbelievably sticky out of the oven, and even though you know you're going to burn yourself, you still go in for a bite."
This manifests in the rice crispy à la mode ($10), which uses puffed rice and grains rather than the stuff out of the blue box. The difference is obvious, like comparing a slice of Wonder Bread to that of a well-made sourdough loaf. Better yet, each sweet, sticky heap arrives warm, ringed with thick dulce de leche, and crowned with a perfect sphere of dulce de leche ice cream.
Graves and Kilgore should continue to explore and refine more often-overlooked, forgotten, and sometimes-shunned dishes to give them a renewed bit of life. In the meantime, you can debate what to do with the little pool of butter at the center of Ember's mashed potatoes ($8). Either use it as a dip for a spoonful of the whipped tubers spiked with an unholy amount of smoky Gouda, or mix the butter throughout the generously heaped bowl and enjoy. There is no right answer. All you can do is sit back, eat, and feel right at home and in another dimension all at the same time.
