Cobaya Smokers with Chefs Andres Barrientos and James Bowers

We've been on a run of fancier Cobaya dinners lately, inside swanky South Beach hotels and other posh places, some with some very well known chefs. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but for Experiment #67 we were looking to get back to our roots a little bit: a more casual dinner with some guys you may never have heard of, at a place you might not know.

Miami Smokers is a butcher shop and sandwich shop (they call it an "urban smokehouse") in a nondescript stretch of Little Havana run by Andres Barrientos and James Bowers. You may have never been in there, but if you've been eating around Miami for a while, you may well have already sampled Miami Smokers' bacon, which they supply to several local restaurants. They also produce a few different kinds of salumi, several sausages, some other charcuterie items, and a small supply of fresh pork cuts, which come from heritage pigs they're raising at a farm in Clewiston, Florida. They turn out a really nice selection of sandwiches from their products, including a great version of a classic Cubano, which are also now available at the American Airlines Arena.

After they recently expanded their place on 27th Avenue to add more seating, we talked to them about using that extra space for a Cobaya dinner where they could spread their wings a little. Here's what they came up with – a very pork-centric menu modeled after the Cochon 555 events which celebrate heritage pigs by using every bit of them possible.

(You can see all my pictures in this Cobaya Smokers with Andres Barrientos and James Bowers flickr set).

They started everyone off with a self-service charcuterie bar, featuring several of their house-made products: a couple different kinds of cured and smoked hams, a silky coppa, a couple different dried sausages. These were accompanied by a complimentary cocktail with a frothy egg-white crown, which struck me as like a whiskey version of a pisco sour.

As everyone found their way to a seat, Andres and James made their introductions and talked to the group about what they do at Miami Smokers: the focus on making everything in-house, using local products and heritage breeds. It's a common refrain these days, but these guys really seem to be walking the walk.

To start things off, a little amuse bouche with some local flavor: bacon croquetas, warm and oozy and barely holding together, served over some house-made guava jam.

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Norman's 180 - Coral Gables

[sorry, this restaurant has closed]

I'm going to come right out and say it: I don't think I can be entirely objective about Chef Norman Van Aken's new restaurant, Norman's 180. Some of the reminiscing in my last post previewing the restaurant's opening might give some indication why. A dinner nearly twenty years ago at his South Beach restaurant A Mano was one of my first truly memorable meals. His "Feasts of Sunlight" cookbook, published in 1988, was one of the first cookbooks I recall cooking from. Very simply, Chef Van Aken's food has played a not-insignificant part in my personal culinary history.

In the interest of complete disclosure, I should also add that I've attended a (free) friends and family dinner as well as a (free) media preview event at the restaurant,^[1] and the chef and I have chatted at those events as well as chance encounters in local tapas bars. Since Norman's 180 officially opened, I've been back a few more times as a paying customer. But try as I might, I've been unable to do so without being "spotted," since Chef Van Aken seems to be working seven days a week. So take this all with as many grains of salt as you deem appropriate.

With that said: Norman's 180 is putting out some delicious, exciting food. It's not perfect. It's not as elegant an experience as the original Norman's in Coral Gables used to be. But it's fun and flavorful, and a welcome return for a South Florida legend.

I won't recite Chef Van Aken's whole biography here. Aside from being a famous chef, he's also a great storyteller, and his life stories are scattered all over his website, from his first gig as a long-haired line cook in 1971, to applying for a job with Charlie Trotter and being mistaken for a truck driver, to Louie's Backyard in Key West, to A Mano on South Beach. But South Floridians probably remember him most fondly for Norman's, his flagship restaurant on the quietest end of sleepy Almeria Avenue in Coral Gables. In its time, Norman's was one of the best restaurants Miami had ever seen, and before it closed almost exactly three years ago in May 2007, it was one of the last local bastions of true "fine dining" still around.

Things change. If you're a proud property owner in Miami, your house is worth about half of what it was worth in 2007. These are not the times for "fine dining." And so it was clearly time for Chef Van Aken to do something different. "Norman's 180" is not "Norman's," with a name that not only conveniently indicates the street address of the restaurant but also suggests a 180 degree turn from the past. Norman's 180 embodies all the current gestalt: it eschews white tablecloths for bare wood tables, it embraces the farm to table ethos, it exalts all that is porcine.

But it is also clearly a Norman Van Aken restaurant. In fact, it's a family venture, with son Justin Van Aken working side by side in the kitchen with the old man.^[2] Though he is best known for bringing classical technique to Caribbean flavors and ingredients as a prime instigator of the 1980's "Mango Gang," Chef Van Aken's food has always been globally influenced, willing to draw inspiration from Asia or Africa as readily as South America and the Caribbean if it tastes good. What twenty years ago was called "fusion cuisine" now ought really need no nametag. It's just food, and it's either tasty or not. The menu runs in several directions at once, and sometimes it gets lost amidst all the globe-trotting, but for the most part I've enjoyed the journey so far.

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Cobaya Khong

I have never been to Thailand. I've not had the chance to eat from a floating market vendor or a Bangkok street stall. But when Chef Piyarat Potha Arreeratn (a/k/a "Chef Bee") talks about preparing the food he grew up eating as a child, I feel pretty comfortable using that dangerous buzzword - authentic.

Chef Bee is the chef at Khong River House, which played host to our latest Cobaya dinner the Thursday before last. As always, our marching orders were simple: cook the dishes that get you excited, that you don't otherwise have a chance to serve at your restaurant. Chef Bee's response was as passionate and heartfelt as any we've ever experienced.  The result was a rewarding meal that provided a view of Thai cuisine we aren't often afforded by Miami's Thai restaurants.

Our dinner started with a trip up the stairs of Khong, named for the Mekong River which winds its way through China, Burma, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. In the comfortable upstairs hideaway,^[1] a long table awaited, covered with blown-up photos from Chef Bee's trips back home. The bar was also set with some drinking snacks that would set the tone for the meal:

(You can see all my pictures from the meal in this Cobaya Khong flickr set.)

Dak Dae Tod are plump salt-and-pepper fried silk worm larvae. Mang Da Tod^[2] are deep-fried water bugs, which chef Bee tossed with five-spice. Of the two, I genuinely enjoyed the former - the silkworm pupae had a pleasingly soft, almost creamy texture, and were as good a vehicle as any for the classic salt-and-pepper flavors. The water bug was more texturally challenging - the kind of papery feel of a shrimp head that's not quite been fried crispy enough to eat comfortably - but had an intriguing, almost floral flavor as you crunched down on its carcass which reminded me of elderflower. Though perhaps shocking to Western sensibilities, both are common Thai street snacks.

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State of the Union (of Miami Dining)

I'd been a bit despondent of late over the closing of a couple of my more favorite Miami restaurants. It is, of course, a known fact that the restaurant business is a brutally difficult one. Restaurants - even successful ones - don't live forever, and relatively few have the staying power to last more than a few years.^[1] But that still doesn't keep me from becoming attached, especially to places that do things right.

Sustain, in Midtown Miami, was one of those places for me. It wasn't the best restaurant in Miami; it wasn't even the best of the farm-to-table, sustainable-sourcing themed restaurants in Miami (Michael's Genuine remains the category-killer of that genre).^[2] But it was a good restaurant. The menu balanced the accessible (fried chicken, burger, pizza, all done quite well) with the exotic (roasted marrow bones with pineapple jam, turnip "carpaccio"). The execution was solid and improved with just about every visit. The staff was friendly and knowledgeable, the cocktails were outstanding, the wine list assembled by Daniel Toral offered some of the best sub-$50 selections in town, the music was great. The Sunday brunch they rolled out shortly before closing was becoming a regular ritual for us. It was the kind of place I could go to the bar and grab a snack, or bring a group of family and friends, and everyone would leave happy. And yet Sustain was - well, unsustainable.^[3]

Michelle Bernstein's Sra. Martinez in the Design District was another place that kind of broke my heart a little when I heard it was closing. We were at Sra. Martinez the night after it opened in December 2008 for Mrs. F's birthday, and we were there again the night before it closed earlier this month. Both were outstanding meals, and we had many more in between. There is a long list of dishes from Sra. M that I will pine for if they don't resurface somewhere else: the crispy artichokes with lemon aioli, the eggplant drizzled with honey, the duck and foie gras butifarra sausage with gigante beans, the marrow bones with eel and apples, the egg yolk "carpaccio." But Chef Bernstein has always understood the magpie-like nature of the Miami dining market, the constant attraction to the latest shiny object, and I don't see the Sra. M closing - after a 3 1/2 year run - as a failure so much as a step towards yet another reinvention. Still, I will miss it.

Since I started writing this blog 3 1/2 years ago, I've been feeling increasingly positive about Miami's dining "scene." Though still prone to either chasing the latest trend (food trucks, Momofukian Asian mash-ups) or sticking with the tried and true (steakhouse, generic Italian), the restaurant population these days overall is much more diverse, much more open to creativity, than when I started keeping track.^[4] Yet I was still led to wonder: were these closures just the usual market forces at work, or the sign of something bigger? So my co-conspirators in the Cobaya underground dining group, Chowfather, Steve BM, and I gassed up the Cobaya Bus and took it out for a spin to assess the state of Miami dining.^[5]

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This One Goes to Eleven - Cobaya at Chow Down Grill 1.11.11

It's always an interesting experience planning these Cobaya - Gourmet Guinea Pigs dinners. The mission statement for the chefs is a simple one: cook exactly what you want, without limits, so long as it's on off-the-menu experience that diners won't find in a restaurant. That leaves much room for interpretation. The particular dishes, the menu format, pretty much everything is up to the chef. Ideally, it gives the diners a chance to experience something new and different, and gives the chefs a chance to explore ingredients, cooking methods or ideas that they might not have an opportunity to use otherwise.

Chef Joshua Marcus of Chow Down Grill (you can read my write-up of Chow Down Grill here) is one of those who "got it" immediately. When we decided to do a dinner together, he really got into the spirit, setting things up so that diners were brought in via the alleyway behind the restaurant through an unmarked door that led into the (tiny) kitchen, managing to squeeze 32 seats into his tiny space in Surfside, and bringing in a couple guitarists to play throughout the dinner. He also called out reinforcements including a sushi chef from Nobu to assist in the kitchen, and a friend who worked at BLT Steak to help with service (and also to play the "bouncer" at the back door). They put out 11 ("These Go to Eleven")^[*] courses using some ingredients that several of our diners had probably never encountered before, some of which Chef Josh and his team were working with for the first time too.

You can see the menu here at the Cobaya site and all of the pictures in this Flickr set - Cobaya 1.11.11. Here is a more detailed rundown.

Bird's Nest Soup

When we first started plotting this dinner, one of the goals was to showcase the house-made soy sauce that Josh and his sous chef Jason have been brewing for months and were finally ready to unveil. I knew that Chow Down Grill was making most of their sauces from scratch. I did not know, until this dinner, that they were also making tofu from scratch, and the house-made soy sauce was a product of having all those soy beans around and wondering what else could be done with them. The bird's-nest soup (made with a stock from squab bones, the rest of which would make an appearance later in the menu) was purposefully underseasoned so diners could use that soy sauce with it. The sauce was light and thin and pure in flavor (like an uzukuchi soy sauce) and not overwhelmed by the sweet caramelized notes of many commercial soy sauces. Bird's nest soup is more about texture than flavor (the nests, made from the stringy saliva of swiftlets, really don't taste like much), though the highlight here for me was the broth, pure and simple, rich in flavor without being in any way heavy or filling.

Monkfish Liver

Ankimo, or monkfish liver, is often called the "foie gras of the sea," and it has a depth of flavor that justifies the moniker. This was prepared in-house and came out very nicely - creamy, rich, in many ways very similar to duck or goose liver, but with something of a marine tang that belies its source. Typically in Japanese restaurants it will be served cold, often in a bath of ponzu sauce and with a pinch of yuzu kosho. Here, it was run under the broiler to warm it, and served in a pool of aji panca sauce and dots of soy, the Peruvian pepper providing some spicy heat to cut the richness. One of my favorite ingredients, and a  really nice dish.

Giant Oyster

The picture here gives little sense of scale, but these Pacific oysters were close to twice the size of most normal oysters, apparently shucked and briefly steamed, then topped with tiny florets of pickled cauliflower with a dose of habañero chile, as well as a sprinkle of golden pike roe. This was practically a knife-and-fork oyster, though I ambitiously downed it one shot. I found it had gotten a bit dried out from being warmed, and could have used maybe some light sauce or liquid to compensate, but this is a great product with just enough added to complement without detracting from it.

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5 Guys, 8 Oz., 1 Spot

Life is not all Michelin three star dining experiences. Sometimes, all you want is a good cheap meal - a burger, a sandwich, something that satisfies your hunger without draining the wallet. Over the past few weeks I've been to a few such places and thought I'd try to add it all up.

Five Guys Famous Burgers & Fries

Somehow I missed out on all the brouhaha over Five Guys. Indeed I was actually more familiar with In-N-Out, a similarly regarded but exclusively West Coast chain, than I was with Five Guys, which originated in the Washington DC area. But good reports started coming to my attention here and there, so when an opportunity presented itself I popped in to the Midtown Miami Five Guys location and tried it. Like In-N-Out, the menu is minimalist in approach though with a slim few more options (but no "secret menu" to my knowledge) - burgers, with cheese and/or bacon (or without); hot dogs (ditto); and fries, "Five Guys style" or Cajun. Burgers are available with a fairly traditional lineup of condiments, along with a couple not-terribly eccentric outlyers like bbq sauce, jalapeños or green peppers. Free peanuts in the shell while you wait in line is a nice touch.

Maybe I'm a fussy little nancy-boy, but I am usually underwhelmed by any burger for which you cannot specifiy your preferred degree of doneness, since I'm not a fan of well-done. But Five Guys makes up for this in a couple of ways: first, they stack two thinner well-done burgers together, giving the illusion of a nice fat burger; and second, what the burger lacks in lightly cooked juiciness, it makes up for in well-cooked greasiness. Not that that's a bad thing, necessarily. I had a cheeseburger with their routine "with everything" toppings (ex- mustard), which brought a nice combination of ketchup, mayo, fresh crisp iceberg lettuce, a slice of tomato that actually tasted like one, grilled onions and mushrooms. The onions and mushrooms were a nice (free) addition that also helped make the burger seem juicier. The patties were nicely scraggly and imperfect, reflecting a burger that has not been overhandled. The bun was toasted on the griddle next to the burgers, which were cooked and assembled to order. This was a darn good burger, especially for $5.

The fries, about $2, not so much. Though it's clear they're using fresh potatoes (indeed they've got the bags piled up right in front of the counter to show you) and provide an over-generous serving, "Five Guys style" apparently means undercooked and undersalted. And unfortunately there are no other options in the way of sides other than said fries. Maybe the Cajun spice works some wonders on these. But it'd be nice to have something to match the satisfaction level of the burger, which was quite high indeed for $5.

Five Guys Famous Burgers and Fries
3401 N. Miami Avenue, Suite 214
Miami, FL 33127
305.571.8345



8 Oz. Burger Bar

[sorry, this restaurant has closed]

In contrast to Five Guys, which takes the mass-production burger chain model and elevates it with some attention to quality, 8 Oz. Burger Bar comes from the opposite direction. 8 Oz. is the brainchild of Chef Govind Armstrong, until recently better known for Table 8, a fine dining restaurant in Los Angeles, and its progeny in South Beach. Like many chefs looking for ways to ride out this economic cycle, in May of last year he closed Table 8 L.A. and reopened it as a burger joint, 8 Oz. Burger Bar. When Table 8 L.A. closed, it was reported that it would be reopening in another location in a few months; I don't think that ever happened, though Armstrong did recently open another Table 8 in New York. In February, Chef Armstrong opened an 8 Oz. in South Beach, on Alton Road. Now another one has gone into the Z Hotel where Table 8 South Beach (just closed this week) is located.

While 8 Oz. tries to come across as somewhat proletariat, this is a burger joint for fussy nancy-boys (like myself), with burgers made from a special in-house grind of sirloin, tri-tip, short rib and chuck which is "cured in a Himalayan salt locker." Or, if that's not fussy enough for you, there's also an Estancia grass-fed beef burger, or lamb or turkey burgers too. The menu has a list of about 5 or so pre-composed burger assemblages, or you can craft your own from a selection of cheeses, sauces and other toppings. And yes, you can specify your preferred degree of doneness.

I chose a "Melrose" burger, a daintier 6 oz. portion of their "house blend" topped with arugula, garlic roasted tomatoes and red onion marmalade, medium-rare, to which I couldn't resist adding some Humboldt Fog, one of my favorite cheeses. (Note, by the way, that the menu I was given was much more limited than the one that is available online. While it offered most of the cheeses, it probably had less than half of the other sauces and toppings listed on the online menu. I also couldn't find any of the snacks or other items listed online other than the sides. And prices "on the ground" are generally a tad higher as well).

This burger was so immaculately formed that it almost appeared to be one of those mysterious Boca Burgers with the grill-marks airbrushed on. I don't know if I have ever seen a patty so perfectly round. Unfortunately, my "medium-rare" request was apparently for naught, as I could barely discern any hint of pink. And the meat, as several people have previously noted, was undersalted and consequently somewhat short on flavor, even though the "house blend" tried valiantly to overcome the stingy seasoning. That Himalayan salt locker just isn't cutting it - need to add more salt.

The "Melrose" toppings were quite nice if just a tad on the sweet side. And while Humboldt Fog on a burger may sound like a great idea (at least it did to me), the actual execution is not quite as exciting. A little wedge barely covered 1/3 of the burger, and the cheese, soft and mushy but not quite melted, didn't hit the right notes texturally (though for this pairing I recognize that I only have myself to blame).

The onion rings had a slightly sweet, not quite crisp batter which I didn't love at first, but found I couldn't stop eating these anyway. The beer selection is a real high point. Not many options on tap (indeed just Shock Top wheat ale, courtesy of Anheuser-Busch), but a plethora of bottled micro-brews made up for it. My Rogue Dry-Hopped Red Ale was a nice medium-weight beer with some hoppy bitterness that would have happily cut through even a much greasier burger.

The place has a nice casual vibe, with sports on the TVs and loud rock-n-roll on the stereo. I'm not sure if the guy next to me at the bar singing along to "Sweet Child of Mine" was getting warmed up for it, but I swiftly and happily made my exit just as Monday Karoake Night was getting started. At $8.50 for the burger, an extra $2 for the Humboldt Fog, $4 for the rings and another $8.50 for the Rogue Ale ($23 total), this turned out to be not quite the cheap meal I expected. Maybe I should have donned a trucker cap and drank PBR instead. But even the abbreviated menu still offered more interesting and varied toppings than you'll find at most conventional burger joints. Now if they could just loosen the grip on the salt shaker and let that "house blend" really shine.

8 Oz. Burger Bar
1080 Alton Road
Miami Beach, FL 33139
305.397.8246



The Spot

[sorry, this restaurant has closed]

Possibly my favorite of the three places in this list is "The Spot," a newly opened sandwich place in a location along Alton Road which I think previously housed a Colombian place, Primarepa. This is another short and sweet menu with basically a choice of fried shrimp and fish and a few other items, available either on a platter with some sides or as a po'boy. I went with a fried jerk-spiced shrimp po'boy and was not at all disappointed. A slightly crusty long roll was opened up like a book and stuffed with several plump medium-sized shrimp, crispy outside but still distinctly recognizable as shrimp, not battered and coated into oblivion. This was not real Jamaican jerk spice by any means, just sort of mildly spicy, but still nicely flavorful. The shrimp were topped off with fresh shredded lettuce, decent tomato, and the clincher for me, a creamy spicy remoulade sauce, and a goodly dose of it too. The sandwich is generously stuffed and the server advised me of his preferred technique of using a fork to push back in the contents while gently squeezing the bread together a bit to get it ready for noshing. I can't help but say it - this po'boy just really hit the spot for me.

There was a short list of sides available, including a couple typical soul food items. I went with the Cajun fries, which were nice and crisp but the spice mix was overwhelmed by paprika. They actually reminded me in that respect of one of the trio of duck fat fries that come as a gratis appetizer at Bourbon Steak. Po'boy, fries and a bottle of water set me back somewhere around $11 total. One other thing The Spot has going for it is late hours - apparently open till 2am and possibly even later on weekends.

The Spot
1570B Alton Road
Miami Beach, FL 33139
305.532.9122

The List: Updated as of January 2017

A little while ago, I got the idea to make a list of my favorite places to eat in Miami. And when I say "a little while ago," turns out it was nearly five years ago. This was pointed out to me recently when Frod Jr. was home on winter break. When he told friends at school that his old dad wrote a food blog, they thought that was kind of cool. Then they went and looked, and of course were drawn to the List, and said, "Well, that's, um, kind of dated."

It sure is. Indeed, not only was that list pretty stale, but more than a quarter of the places included have closed since it was prepared – which among other things, may tell you something about the correlation between my personal preferences and restaurant success. (In my defense, that percentage is probably relatively consistent with the general failure rate in the industry, and I didn't prepare the list with predictive value in mind). In any event, it was definitely time for an overhaul.

The process was illuminating as to how the Miami restaurant world has changed over the past five years. Of the 38 restaurants that filled out that original list (the current version has been whittled down to 28), only ten remain on the updated version. The repeats: Bazaar, Bourbon Steak, Eating House, Hiro's Yakko-San, Joe's Stone Crab, Josh's Deli, Makoto, Michael's Genuine, Naoe, and Pubbelly. Of the many new additions to the list, six are brought to us by out-of-town restaurateurs, what I've sometimes called "invasive exotic species" (Byblos, La Mar, Le Zoo, Los Fuegos, Myumi, Pao). But the bulk of the new names come, in some form or another, from locals, though that term can be amorphous in a community as transient as Miami's.^[1] And half of the new names on the list are places that have opened in the past two years. Since I'm generally not one to go chasing the latest shiny objects, that would seem to indicate that good things are happening here.

As always, this does not purport in any way to be an objective, authoritative, or encyclopedic survey of Miami dining options. It is undoubtedly shaded by my own personal predilections, and moreover, is admittedly riddled with gaps because of the ever-growing length of my restaurant "to-do" list.

So here it is. The List: Where to Eat in Miami, now updated as of January 2017.

Let me know what I've missed, and what I've gotten wrong.

^[1] While I've been in South Florida all my life, I recognize that if you've been in Miami more than two years, you're practically a local. So I think of Kyu as a locally-grown place even though chef Michael Lewis worked all over the world before coming here several years ago to open Zuma. And even though I lump Gaston Acurio's La Mar with the outsiders, its chef de cuisine, Diego Oka, surely has earned his stripes as a Miamian by this point.

Sakaya Kitchen - Midtown Miami

It is not often that I am at a loss for what to have for dinner. Yet I found myself driving home from work this evening, knowing there was not much in the fridge to cook (yes, there are some pig trotters, but that's more of a project than a quick Tuesday night meal), pondering: "What's for dinner tonight?" Fortunately an idea occurred to me before I made it home to the near-empty fridge: Sakaya Kitchen, one of several new places that have recently opened in the Midtown Shops. (While the Five Guys next door has been open for some time, the Cheese Course and Sugarcane Raw Bar have finally come online after extended waits, and Mercadito is supposedly close).

photo via Sakaya Kitchen

Sakaya's setup looks like a fast food place, with a mostly open kitchen fronted by a long counter that has room for multiple cash registers (a sign either of unbridled optimism, or of a space that was originally built out for another tenant). But there aren't many fast food places where the menu is scrawled out daily on a chalkboard, where almost all the menu's components are made in-house, or where the menu brags about all-natural meats, organic dairy, and fresh produce. You may order at a counter, but this is real food.

When I visited, there were about a dozen items on the menu, plus a few things available by the piece or as side orders. The list is a bit of a pan-Asian hodgepodge with something of a Korean focus, playing in particular on flavors and dishes that David Chang has recently made ever so popular through his Momofuku empire - pork buns, Korean stye chicken wings, noodles with ginger scallion sauce. Which just happened to be what I ordered.

The pork buns were the standout of the group, 2 puffy clamshell buns filled with tender, meaty slabs of pork belly butt that had been slow-cooked for eight hours. The richness was cut by some thin-sliced cucumber pickles stuffed into the buns, along with a generous dollop of a sweet-ish ssamjang (Korean chile sauce). If I could have had my druthers, I would have taken the sticky-sweet-spicy sauce for the pork in a more spicy, less sweet direction, but these were some fine bites.

The Korean chicken wings can be had either by the piece ($4.69 for 6, $8.99 for 12, $14.99 for 20) or as a "combo" of six wings with jasmine rice, kimchi and more of those cucumber pickles ($7.45). The wings had been given a good long bath in a marinade redolent with kochujang (Korean chile paste), the flavor of which was infused throughout. It would be unfair of me to address the crispiness of the wings, as they had to travel 10 minutes in their take-out containers before I got home. I liked the rice, which was moist and just a bit pleasantly sticky, and generously sprinkled with fresh slivers of green onion. I also really liked their kimchi, which had a nice hint of that distinctive fermented, lactic tang.

The noodles, which came with cubed tofu and green beans, were a generous portion, but could have used a much more generous dollop of ginger-scallion sauce to perk them up. The green beans themselves also hadn't been seasoned and wanted some salt. With some minor tweaking I'm sure this could be a fine dish too.

Other items that intrigued included Angus beef bulgogi lettuce wraps, kimchi egg rolls (rolled fresh in house daily), and the promise of a "dim ssam" brunch menu coming soon. There's also about a half dozen sakes available by the bottle as well as a decent selection of Japanese beers.

Sakaya has only been open about a month and I'm sure is still tweaking the recipes and the menu. (My hope is that they turn up the bright spicy flavors even more. "Fortune favors the bold.") But even now it delivers good food at a good price that you can feel good about eating. Plus, it's conveniently located between my office and my house.

Sakaya Kitchen
Buena Vista Avenue btwn 34th & 36th Streets
Miami, FL 33127
305.576.9096

Harding Dinner Series Pop-Up at Chow Down Grill Surfside

+

A couple weeks ago when I wrote about Eating House, I noted that:

There are some genuinely interesting and exciting things going on in Miami's dining scene right now.

The momentum continues. News recently came out that the original Chow Down Grill location in Surfside - since supplemented with a second location in South Beach - is being converted into a Jewish-style deli during the day, and a pop-up dinner venue in the evenings. The first guest chef to take over the site will be Jeremiah Bullfrog, who, aside from running the gastroPod truck, has also been responsible for a couple of our Cobaya "underground" dinners and contributed behind the scenes to several more.

If you're interested - and you should be - go here for more information here about the Harding Dinner Series, which starts on March 30 and runs, for right now, through April 5, including dates, prices, and the number to call for reservations.

For a glimpse of some of Jeremiah's earlier Cobaya and other dinners, check these posts: CobayaJeremiah (flickr set), Cobaya Experiment #2, 2.5 (flickr set), and Notorious P.I.G. (flickr set). I'm going to miss having Chow Down so close to home for me, but I'm looking forward to what's coming - both the deli and the pop-up.

calendar highlights: Taco & Tequila Showdown 11.8.15; P.I.G 11.15.15

You may already know that in addition to the infrequent restaurant reviews, Food For Thought also features "The Calendar" – a list of upcoming dining events that may be of interest to food-minded people. Here are a couple highlights coming up soon on the calendar:

Taco & Tequila Showdown at the Vagabond on Monday November 8 (6pm-9pm). Presented by MIAbites and The Liquid Projects, the event will pair 12 chefs creating signature tacos with 12 bartenders creating signature tequila cocktails. If you don't get into the Cobaya dinner that night, this might be a good Plan B: about half the chef participants are Cobaya alumni. Tickets ($65) available at Eventbrite.

P.I.G. 6 in Wynwood on Sunday, November 15 (3pm-7pm). This shindig in celebration of the pig, orchestrated by Chef Jeremiah Bullfrog of the gastroPod, is always one of my favorites every year. Participants this year include Kyle Foster of Denver's Colt & Gray (and before that, my beloved Talula), Craig Deihl of Charleston's Cypress, plus locals Giorgio Rapicavoli of Eating House, Steve Santana of Taquiza, Todd Erickson of Haven and HuaHua's, Roel Alcudia (formerly Cypress Room), Brian Mullins of Ms. Cheezious, Aaron Brooks of Edge, Brad Kilgore of Alter, James Strine of Café Boulud, and Mike Pirolo of Macchialina and Bazi. Tickets ($50) available through Tock.

By the way: these types of events always get put on the FFT calendar but are usually not the subject of a post – I've tried to use blog posts only for actual content. But if you, dear reader, find these type of posts useful (or conversely, annoying), please speak up. Thanks.

Turns of Phrase - May 26, 2013

Following up on something I started doing last week - some of my favorite passages from the past week's food writing:

"But some tricks, like the disappearance of a marble up someone's nose, can be more curious than delightful."

- Tejal Rao (recently resigned food critic at the Village Voice, following in the wake of Robert Seitsema who was let go last week), on the culinary sleight of hand at Alder.

"Just as you’re pondering how to say “opportunist” in Italian, the food arrives, and it’s great."

- Jeff Ruby on Café Spiaggia in Chicago Magazine.

"It isn’t pretty, this murky brown salad. Take a look at those splinters of green papaya, gnarly rings of fried shallots and clots of air-dried beef. It could be a box of matches spilled in dishwater—certainly too homely for the pages of any respectable food magazine. But we’re evolved eaters here in New York City, too sophisticated to deny ugly things their fair shake. Taste it and understand the moral of a thousand children’s parables about inner beauty: This funky, crunchy bombshell of compulsive flavor might be the most interesting salad in Kings County."

- Jordana Rothman on Nightingale 9 in Time Out New York

"The waiter bends low, in his burgundy tuxedo. “Let’s talk about the process,” he says. He refers to the fruits of the kitchen as though they are his. (“All my veal tonight.”) The delays he does not own: “We are working on the drinks.”"

- Nick Paumgarten on Carbone in the New Yorker

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Josh's Delicatessen & Appetizing - Surfside

When Edible South Florida magazine decided to do an issue dedicated to "classics," I was honored to be asked to participate. As a lifelong South Florida resident with many fond memories of places long gone, generally any opportunity to reminisce is enough to get me started. The piece I contributed is on Jewish delis, and I’ll try not to repeat it here too much - go find yourself a copy or read it online - other than to lay out the basic premise: that if the closing of the late, great Rascal House signified the death of the Jewish deli in South Florida, then Josh's Delicatessen & Appetizing, which opened earlier this year in Surfside, may be its reincarnation.

The "Josh" in Josh's Deli is chef/owner Joshua Marcus, who opened Chow Down Grill in this same spot a couple years ago. I was a fan of Chow Down, which brought a modern spin to Chinese-American classics with fresh, high-quality ingredients and house-made everything. But it (and its South Beach sibling, which opened about a year later) were on the front end of what seems to be an inexhaustible supply of contemporary casual Asian eateries in Miami - first Sakaya Kitchen, Pubbelly and Gigi, more recently, Bloom, Shokudo, PaoTown, Kung Fu Kitchen, Lantao Kitchen ...

Amid the glut, Josh decided to try something nobody else was doing: a Jewish-style deli. In April, Chow Down's Surfside location became Josh's Deli.

(You can see all my pictures in this Josh’s Deli flickr set, or click on any picture to enlarge.)

Though maybe the only thing that Chinese food and delicatessen food have in common is Jews' fondness for both, Josh’s approach to them has been similar. In particular, virtually everything at Josh’s Deli is made from scratch.^[1] He cures his own corned beef and smokes his own pastrami. He prepares his own fish – salmon three different ways (cured, smoked and pastrami-spiced), smoked tilapia for whitefish salad.^[2] The bagels are specially made for him by a local baker.^[3] He pickles his own pickles. He even makes his own mustard.

This kind of cooking is a labor of love that many deli owners abandoned years ago in favor of the convenience of pre-prepared, pre-packaged products. It’s a lot more work than cutting open a plastic wrapper, but it’s worth it.

His cured salmon, sliced to order, is beautifully silky, achieving that uneasy feat of tasting like fish without being fishy. We brought home some of each variety to break the fast on Yom Kippur, and while family members all had strong opinions on which they preferred and there was no consensus, everyone had a favorite (for me it’s definitely the pastrami-cured salmon). His whitefish salad, which I initially quibbled with as too chunky, has grown on me, with just enough chopped onion, celery and hard-boiled egg to provide some contrast to the flaky smoked fish without overwhelming it.

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Gigi - Midtown Miami

Fish is the new steak, and Asian is the new burger. Consider: the past couple years brought us the openings of a multitude of high-end steakhouses - Meat Market, BLT Steak, Gotham Steak, Red the Steakhouse, STK, the reopened Forge. Yet the construction of shrines to carnivorism seems to have slowed (the recently opened 1500° notwithstanding), and instead Douglas Rodriguez opens De Rodriguez Ocean, Blue Door has become Blue Door Fish, even untrendy Luna Cafe on Biscayne Boulevard is becoming Sea Bar.

On the other end of the restaurant market, burgers were everywhere for a time (as if they were using the trimmings from all those new steakhouses)- 8 Oz. Burger Bar, Burger & Beer Joint, Heavy Burger, Flip Burger Bar,^[1] Shake Shack ... But burgers are yesterday's news. Modern, casual Asian is now the order of the day, as Sakaya Kitchen, Chow Down Grill, American Noodle Bar, and Gigi will all attest.

Sakaya (Richard Hales), Chow Down (Joshua Marcus) and American Noodle (Michael Bloise) each started with a chef's own vision, and were very much personal projects. Gigi came about things from the opposite direction: Gigi was a concept in search of a chef to execute it. Amir Ben-Zion, who also runs Bond Street and Miss Yip on South Beach, Sra. Martinez in the Design District, and the Bardot nightclub right down the street from Gigi in Midtown Miami, placed a Craigslist ad looking for a chef about six months before the restaurant's opening. The ad was not lacking for hype:

"Its cutting edge, high performance, Asian inspired and freshly prepared cuisine is affordable, innovative comfort food for the modern educated discerning palate."

It was also transparent about its inspiration:

"Located on the same block as Bardot, gigi is the first Miami outpost of the renaissance in affordable high-end food led by Momofuko [sic] in NYC’s Chinatown and lower East Side."^[2]

Gigi lucked out: whether in response to the ad or otherwise, Ben-Zion managed to snag Chef Jeff McInnis to run the kitchen at Gigi. Chef McInnis, who is probably known as much for his appearance on Top Chef Season 5 as for his work as chef of the Ritz-Carlton South Beach's DiLido Beach Club, has put together a menu that delivers good, fun, flavorful food that carries out the mission statement well.

While Miami's other new casual contemporary Asian outposts have a distinctly D.I.Y. aesthetic, Gigi more clearly bears a designer's touch. On the corner of Miami Avenue and 35th Street, its exterior is wrapped in floor-to-ceiling glass, its interior in lots of blond wood and metal. A long, open galley kitchen stretches about twenty yards down most of the space, with counter seating and backless stools providing a distinctly Chang-ian look and feel.

photo via gigi Facebook page

The menu likewise shows a strong Chang-ian influence. There are buns to be had, filled with a choice of roasted pork, chicken or shiitake mushrooms; there is ramen, likewise served with roasted pork. But much of the rest of the fairly abbreviated menu appears to look closer to home for inspiration, with many items featuring more-or-less Asian spins on locally sourced ingredients. It's divided into sections that have no clearly defined correspondence to starters or mains: "basics" include not only those buns, but also a short rib "meat loaf," a pound of "southern boy" BBQ ribs, or a BLT made with pork belly and pickles; "raw" includes both salads and raw fish dishes; "snack" includes a variety of smaller bites, both vegetable and animal; "noodle bowl" offers the aforementioned ramen, as well as a few other noodle variations; and "rice bowl" seems to feature the most substantial, entrée-like items. Though the sub-heading to the Gigi sign says "noodles * bbq * beer," there are in fact only a few noodles dishes and even fewer BBQ items (like, um, one).

Those buns are a good place to start a meal. The roasted pork version was probably my favorite, though Little Miss F was partial to the pulled chicken variety. On a more recent visit, the latter had morphed into a tandoori chicken, which was a tad dry despite being garnished with a drizzle of yogurt nicely enhanced by some cucumber and mint. Even the pork, though, did not have quite the same explosive depth of flavor as the Sakaya Kitchen pork buns, which remain my local benchmark. The fluffy and lightly toasted bao, however, which I believe are made in-house, may be a notch better.

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Cobaya 1500° with Chef Paula DaSilva

"What would be your last meal?" Given their line of work, it's a question chefs are often asked - often enough, in fact, that someone's devoted an entire book to fifty famous chefs' answers to that very question. To the surprise of many people on the other side of the kitchen door, who might expect chefs to favor elaborate, extravagant, fancy food, the answers are often very simple dishes. For José Andrés, it's tortilla española and fresh seafood; for Gordon Ramsay, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding; for Sean Brock, chicken and dumplings (and, of course, a gigantic glass of Pappy); for Tony Maws, it's either a hot dog or a pastrami sandwich. When you spend your days arranging complicated, fussy plates, it turns out to be, for many chefs anwyay, one of the last things you want to eat when you get off work.^[1]

When we do Cobaya dinners, we don't dictate any theme, giving the chefs freedom to realize on their own vision. We push them to give voice to their creative impulses, and encourage them to offer an off-the-menu experience, but beyond that, we want to see their ideas, not our own. So when Chef Paula DaSilva, of 1500° in the Eden Roc Hotel on Miami Beach, chose to do a "Last Meal" theme for her Cobaya dinner, she and her sous chefs, Adrienne Grenier and Tony Velazquez, put together some of their own "last meal" requests, compiled into a format of several rounds of multiple dishes, all served family style.

Many were, like those chosen by many other chefs when asked that question, simple classical dishes. But "simple" is not the same thing as "easy." The truth is, simple is hard: if you're going to do a minimalist, classic dish and make it something special, you have to have the best ingredients, the best technique, the best execution. There is no hiding place. So the task that Chef DaSilva chose for herself and her team was not by any means an easy one.

(You can see all my pictures in this Cobaya 1500° flickr set, or click on any picture to enlarge).

The location of our dinner, on a fourth floor terrace in the back of the hotel overlooking the ocean, was stunning, as was the table stretched out along the balcony, set with festive arrangements of bright sunflowers. A sparking sangria cocktail was served along with several passed hors d'oeuvres as the guinea pigs arrived.

The appetizers included creamy custards served in the eggshell with a sheet of crispy bacon; silky house-made ricotta cheese slathered on grilled bread, topped with a tangy-sweet mandarinquat marmalade; crispy bacalao fritters with a garlic and parsley aioli; pork belly and kimchee sandwiched inside crispy taco shells; and a small burger intended as homage to the legendary In-N-Out Burger (though not done Animal Style as best I could tell).

We were then directed to the table, which had already been set with a platter of charcuterie along with thick slabs of grilled bread rubbed with tomatoes, the classic Catalan pan con tomate.

The charcuterie was a mix of house-made and thoughtfully procured, the standouts for me being those that came from in-house, a thinly sliced smoked duck breast and a hearty sausage. Prosciutto, mortadella and salami completed the selections, which were accompanied by some pickled vegetables and cured olives. Each round of our dinner was paired with a cocktail, here a Bloody Mary in a crumbled bacon-rimmed glass.

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A Key West Weekend

Maybe it's the three hour drive that sloughs away petty worries and aggravations, as south Miami suburbia gives way to Homestead farms and nurseries, which in turn give way to islands and open water. Maybe it's the people, the motley historical confluence of traders, fishermen, treasure seekers, drug dealers, Cubans, Bahamians, gays, hippies, writers, musicians and miscreants of all sorts that make it feel so different.  Maybe it's just that feeling of being completely enveloped by ocean, the Atlantic on one side and the Gulf of Mexico only fifteen blocks away on the other. Even for a native Miamian like myself, Key West really feels like something of an escape.

Key West is an easy trip from Miami; still, it's also one I find strangely easy to overlook in favor of other more exotic, more distant destinations. But with nearly 5,000 miles of air travel coming up (we headed down there the weekend before taking off for Hawaii for two weeks) and a couple days free, it was the perfect getaway for a couple days of rest and relaxation. Here are a few brief snapshots from our Key West weekend.

(You can see all the pictures in this Key West flickr set.)

Home base was the Southernmost House, a late 19th century Queen Anne Victorian literally on the very southern tip of Duval Street. The property has a great history: Thomas Edison designed the electrical system,  it served as a speakeasy during Prohibition, and its visitors in later years, when it was the "Café Cayo Hueso," included the usual cast of Key West characters: Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote.

Today it has comfortable, updated rooms and a pool that practically spills right into the ocean. It's also on the quieter, more remote end of Duval Street, away from the hubbub of the center of town and the yahoos who sometimes populate it.

Our late arrival Friday evening had us hunting for dinner somewhere close by, which brought us to nine one five. This is a restaurant that was oft-recommended, and while it looks much like many other places in Key West with its Victorian trim and wrap-around porch, it was somewhat more ambitious than your average coconut-shrimp intensive tourist trap. (Note: a conspiracy of bad lighting and dead camera battery meant pretty much no food pictures for the weekend). Appetizers outnumbered entrées on the menu by nearly two to one, and our order was similarly inclined, sharing a few starters and one main course between the two of us.

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San Francisco Dim Sum - Yank Sing, Great Eastern

Our trips to Northern California always seem to start the same way. The non-stop flight from Miami gets us into San Francisco around noon, and after six hours in the air we are ready to stretch our legs and fill our bellies. While the order of those priorities sometimes varies, the former always involves a walk across town (typically starting from the hotel in SOMA or near Union Square, winding our way through Chinatown, then North Beach, and finally out to the Fisherman's Wharf to fulfill our obligations as tourists); and the latter invariably involves dim sum.

This time around, we elected to start with the belly-filling dim sum portion of the agenda, particularly since our hotel was only a few blocks away from Yank Sing. The commonly held wisdom among SF locals these days seems to be that the best dim sum is found in the farther reaches of the Bay Area: the Richmond District in San Francisco, and even further afield in Millbae and San Mateo. But for in-city eats, Yank Sing still has a well-earned reputation that we've confirmed on several prior visits; plus, it was geographically desirable.

The original Stevenson Street location is somewhat hidden in plain sight one block south of Market Street, and with its floor-to-ceiling glass windows and white tablecloths, it is one of the more polished-looking dim sum venues I've visited. Service is push-cart style, and tea is brought in stylish glass infusion pots. We selected a fairly customary lineup of items: xiao long bao (pork soup dumplings), har gow (shrimp dumplings), shiu mai (pork & shrimp dumplings), baked char siu bao (bbq pork buns), potstickers, turnip cake, fried shrimp, spring rolls, and custard tarts. We also added on four pieces of Peking duck, a nice item to be able to get as dim sum, with big slivers of crispy skin with a little meat attached, to be stuffed into little steamed buns along with some hoisin sauce and shredded scallion.

The xiao long bao are something of a house specialty and are indeed a fine example. The dumplings have a smooth, thin, just slightly elastic shell, within which lurks a filling of minced pork bathing in a mouth-filling gulp of rich broth (they are made by including cold, gelatinized broth in the filling, which warms back to a soup when the dumplings are steamed). Yank Sing's recommended eating method is to gently place the dumpling in a soup spoon (without breaking the wrapper), and ladle over some ginger-infused vinegar - from there you're on your own. I bite off a bit from the top of the dumpling, slurp a bit of broth, then eat the rest in one gushing mouthful.

XLB have made occasional appearances in Miami (briefly at Jumbo, in the North Miami Beach location now housing Hong Kong Noodles; at Mr. Chu's, a dim sum place on South Beach which has now moved to Coral Gables as Chu's Taiwanese Kitchen, though I don't believe they have dim sum service any longer; I have heard the newly opened Philippe on South Beach will be offering them, though I haven't yet been to confirm) but they are pretty hard to find here. That's too bad, as when done well I think they are one of the crowning achievements of dim sum cookery. Frod Jr. and Little Miss F certainly thought so, too. We ended up having to order two rounds (6 dumplings apiece) and I still only got two XLB total.

The rest of the dim sum was all good, high quality, and pleasing, though there was nothing that really floored me. Despite advertising that they offer over 100 selections, the choices available during our visit seemed much less broad, and focused primarily on traditional, middle-of-the-road items. I saw no chicken feet, no tripe, nor anything else particularly exotic. In Yank Sing's defense, I think the Rincon Center location may have a broader selection, and on a return visit on the back end of our trip (return visits are highly irregular on the same trip for us, but the kids insisted on another XLB experience) we did try a few more unusual items, including a bright yellow steamed dumpling (colored with egg yolk?) stuffed with minced vegetables, and a tofu item topped with an assertively-flavored dice of onion, ginger and chiles.

The carts are many and are regularly moving throughout the restaurant, and special items also get circulated frequently (the Peking duck, lettuce cups, big pieces of baked sea bass). Servers are generally very friendly, including one who diligently hunted down some fresh XLB for us on our second visit when we didn't see any circulating. The high volume helps keep everything fresh and hot, which is always a plus.

I was somewhat floored by the bill after our first visit, which came out to well over $100 for about 11 items - easily the most I have ever paid for dim sum for 4 people. On our return visit I got a look at a pricelist and at least began to understand how it got so high. Even the cheapest items go for around $4-5 an item, and many, like the xiao long bao, are around $10 or even higher. The Peking duck goes for a whopping $5 a piece. Whether or not the dim sum is worth this kind of premium (easily 2x what I'm accustomed to seeing at many other places) is certainly open to debate.

And while I'm not one of those people who seem to believe (particularly when it comes to "ethnic" food) that the dirtier the place, the better the food (I'm not sure what distinguishes House of Nanking other than its grimy windows) - there is something that seems to me just a little too sanitized about Yank Sing. It's not so much the clean restaurant and the white tablecloths - it's the absence of any offal or even for that matter any meat on the bone that seems sort of odd. The food is good, and the xiao long bao are exceptional; but I miss some of the variety that often makes a dim sum meal so pleasing.

Yank Sing
49 Stevenson Street
San Francisco, CA 94105
415.541.4949



The following day, we ended up again retracing steps from one of our prior visits to San Francisco, and went to Great Eastern for lunch. Great Eastern is a big, bustling place in the heart of Chinatown, with two floors filled with tables, and the back of the restaurant occupied by several tanks holding live seafood - dungeness crabs, spot prawns, ling cod, geoduck clams, and other delicacies. They offer checklist-style dim sum service at lunchtime, and also a lengthy menu that runs the gamut - a cornucopia of seafood items, unsurprisingly, but also Chinese BBQ, cold platter items, all sorts of soups, clay pot dishes, and plenty else to boot (goose chitterlings, goose web, sea cucumber, etc.).

We had a cold platter with thinly sliced beef shank, duck tongues, and jellyfish. The beef shank was nice, with a slightly gelatinous texture, and a rich flavor not completely overwhelmed by soy and five-spice. The jellyfish I'm also growing quite fond of, its long, slightly bouncy strands reminding me both in appearance and texture of a thick cellophane noodle, dressed with sesame oil and a touch of vinegar. The duck tongues, however, have yet to demonstrate their allure to me - somewhat firm, not too flavorful, and with a bit of cartilage running up the middle that was a tad too hard to comfortably chew up. After a few tries I figured out how to scrape the meat off the strip of cartilage, but it still hardly seemed worth the effort. These seem like they'd be better in a warm preparation, or perhaps confited.

The dim sum we ordered was generally pretty pedestrian and unexciting (the kids scorned the xiao long bao here as decidedly inferior to those at Yank Sing, though they still finished them); a "house special" dim sum item of "pasta" roll with spicy XO sauce was at least something I'd never seen before. The somewhat thick rice pasta sheets I've often seen wrapped, crepe-like, around roast pork or other fillings were here rolled and then sliced crosswise (like cinnamon buns) and dressed with a chunky chile-garlic sauce and also some shredded meat.

The real standout at Great Eastern - as I could have predicted - was the seafood. Our table was right next to those tanks, and from the moment we sat down I couldn't take my eyes off the spot prawns dancing above our heads. Our server said the minimum order was 1 pound (for $35) which he recommended we get steamed. Done. This order brought at least 8 beautiful prawns, split in half cross-wise and dressed with a colorful and flavorful confetti of garlic, ginger, chiles and cilantro. They were beautifully fresh and sweet.

I've only begun to scratch the surface of San Francisco's dim sum and Chinese options, but it is these kinds of experiences that always make me skeptical of any claim that a particular place is the "best" dim sum in town (or any other food genre for that matter). Yank Sing may have the best xiao long bao in town but I'm dubious they could run the table for every other variety of dim sum too. The fresh seafood at Great Eastern was excellent but the rest of the stuff was fairly pedestrian. I suspect that with enough exploration, you could find plenty of "bests" for different individual items. Maybe next visit we should squeeze in a field trip to Millbrae.

Great Eastern
649 Jackson Street
San Francisco, CA 94133
415.986.2500

BlueZoo - Orlando, Florida

Orlando is not exactly perceived as a dining destination. But we ate exceptionally well during our quick visit before the New Year. After finally making our first trip to The Ravenous Pig, we went the following night to BlueZoo in the Swan and Dolphin Resort. BlueZoo is nominally a Todd English restaurant, but given that there are more of those than you can count on all your fingers and toes, I'm not quite sure what that really means. What I do know is that Chris Windus is the Executive Chef at BlueZoo, and he put out a meal for us that was genuinely exceptional.

I met Chef Windus about a year and a half ago when he cooked with Chefs Kurtis Jantz and Chad Galiano for one of their much-missed "Paradigm" dinners. In fact, I got to spend the night in the kitchen with the chefs, an experience I wrote about in this epic three-part series. After that meal - more specifically, after tasting Chef Windus' ravioli with a liquid corn filling - I declared "One bite and I know where I’m eating next time I’m in Orlando." It took a while, but I finally made good on that vow.^[1]

BlueZoo is a posh, swanky place which struck me as more Vegas than Disney (though it's sometimes hard to tell them apart). There's a long bar/raw bar along one side as you walk into the restaurant, with lots of blue mosaic tiles and a metallic school of fish swimming along the back wall. The centerpiece is their "dancing fish" grilling contraption, with spinning skewers circling over an open flame (and for display purposes, a poor fish being mercilessly torched throughout the night, like some piscine auto-da-fé). The main room is dramatically wide open with high ceilings, gigantic pillars and dangling glass sculptures throughout. It's designed by Jeffrey Beers, who is also responsible for the recent refurbishment of the grandiose Fontainebleau in Miami Beach.

The menu has a strong seafood focus - fully three-fourths of the items, both among appetizers and entrées, are aquatic - and yet Chef Windus has an abiding, if incongruous, obsession with charcuterie. After starting us with a beautiful simple amuse bouche of a silky, fatty hamachi crudo, topped with a leaf of perky, tangy red ribbon sorrel, he sent out a sampling of some of his latest cured creations: mangalitsa coppa (I've borrowed the picture below from Chris' twitpics); duck rillettes, wrapped with a strip of mangalitsa lardo (just in case it wasn't rich enough); and a house-made "hot dog," sliced in rounds and topped with some pungent mustard. They were all fantastic, some of the finest cured meat products I've sampled anywhere.

mangalitsa coppa - picture via bluechefs

We tried a few other starters. The "Broken Rockefeller"^[2] was a deconstructed take on the classic Oysters Rockefeller: the oysters lightly battered and fried, and nestled back in their shells; the spinach, a vibrant green purée spiked with garlic and bacon, dotted around the plate; smaller dots of a gelled mornay sauce; and a sprinkling of tapioca maltodextrin-ed bacon powder (the picture below is a prototype version from Chef Chris' blog, bluechefs). Unlike many deconstructed dishes, which seem to do so just for the sake of doing so without attention to flavor, components here were actually enhanced in their own way (the delicately fried oysters and the smooth spinach purée in particular) while still combining with the same effect. I also thought it was a great touch to plate the dish with one traditional Oyster Rockefeller, like a reference point for comparing the original version to its contemporary recreation.

oysters rockefeller - picture via bluechefs

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