best thing i ate last week: soft scrambled eggs at Vagabond

It doesn't sound like much the way it's listed on the menu: "soft scrambled eggs, fines herbes, pecorino, evoo." It looks like even less: a shallow plate of runny eggs that might have been scooped up from some budget hotel's breakfast buffet.

Don't be fooled. This, from the brunch menu at Alex Chang's Vagabond, is luxurious stuff. The eggs are warmed through but still virtually liquid, barely forming any curds. The texture is like silk, the flavor rich and pure. A few more grace notes: a tangle of fresh herbs, a dusting of salty pecorino cheese, a drizzle of good olive oil to sort of round everything out.

I just loved this. It was the best thing I ate all week. And it's only $7. (Pro tip: Vagabond's home made English muffins make a good vehicle for scooping).

Cobaya Seagrape with Chefs Jason Schaan and Tony Velazquez

It's hard for me to believe that it was more than four years ago that one of my favorite chefs, Michelle Bernstein, agreed to do a Cobaya dinner with us. Not that the folks who had done the eleven dinners before her were slouches, but here was one of Miami's most celebrated chefs: a James Beard award winner running one of the top restaurants in town. This, for us, was the big leagues.

Even now, with more than forty more "experiments" under our collective belts (which may be set to a wider notch these days), that dinner in the atrium of the Melin Building still stands out as one of the most memorable – not just for the food (which was excellent) but for Michelle's eagerness to do it and the grace with which it was executed.

But for Experiment #56, though we were in Seagrape, the restaurant in the Thompson Hotel that Bernstein opened last year, it would not be her dinner. Rather, the spotlight was on Jason Schaan, the hotel executive sous chef, and Tony Velazquez, the restaurant's chef de cuisine. Schaan goes way back with Michelle: he worked the line when she was at Azul and made his way up to CDC at Michy's (and was also in the kitchen for that Cobaya dinner back in 201). Velazquez is a recent addition to the team, but another Cobaya veteran, having worked at 1500° when they did Experiment #27.

The menu Schaan and Velazquez put together was a fitting match to the mid-century modern style of the venue, balancing classical elegance with some contemporary flourishes.

(You can see all my pictures in this Cobaya Seagrape flickr set; unfortunately the lighting situation was far from ideal and my pictures are pretty awful).

Once we were all settled into a private dining area next to the main dining room, a trio of canapes started things off. A puffy gougère, draped with a sheet of translucent lardo, concealed a molten core of gooey, mushroom-y L'Explorateur cheese. Tender ribbons of Maine lobster were draped over toast slathered with salted butter, given fresh crunch by shaved radishes and briny pop by a dollop of trout caviar. Rich Masami wagyu beef belly tartare, perked up with some chorizo, was mounded onto a round of brioche, drizzled with bearnaise sabayon, and topped with a fried quail egg.

I love a good vitello tonnato, the classic Italian dish that combines cold, thinly sliced veal with a caper-flecked mayo gone piscine with the addition of canned tuna. I know, it seems like it would be awful, but for reasons I can't quite explain, it all works. So I was intrigued to see Jason and Tony do a variation with brussels sprouts, with that funky, fishy quality amplified by a shaving of bottarga over the top.

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best thing i ate last week: pasta "vongole" at Cobaya Seagrape

A bit behind schedule here, as it's already Friday, but better late than never. Last Tuesday we held our 56th Cobaya dinner, this time with chefs Jason Schaan and Tony Velazquez at Michelle Bernstein's Seagrape in the Thompson Hotel on Miami Beach. A full update will be coming shortly, but here let me just talk about my favorite dish of the night: their pasta vongole. This was no garden variety linguine and clam sauce. Here was hand rolled garganelli nestled among a couple different kinds of clams (manila clams and venus clams), batons of salsify and roasted mushrooms, a tangle of sea beans, with a generous knob of silky, oceanic uni butter mounted on top as it was served. It was a great mix of surf and earth, and the best thing I ate last week.

gastroDobo - 10.10.15 with Chefs Roel Alcudia and Jeremiah Bullfrog

In lieu of the "Best Thing I Ate Last Week" – because I didn't really eat anything all that great last week – let me take a moment to pitch something I look forward to eating. Chef Roel Alcudia, until very recently chef de cuisine at The Cypress Room, is teaming up with Jeremiah Bullfrog of the gastroPod, to do a pop-up dinner in Wynwood on Saturday October 10. Roel will be getting back to his roots with some Filipino style dishes – a preview menu hits on lots of classics: balut, lumpia, kinilaw, chicken adobo and more (hey guys, where's the sisig?).

Service will be a la carte style and you can ensure your spot by booking here (your $25 deposit will go towards your tab).

best thing i ate last week: grilled carrots with aged gouda and buckwheat at Eating House

Somehow, I had let a year go by since my last visit to Eating House, Giorgio Rapicavoli's pop-up gone permanent on the northern edge of Coral Gables. That was dumb of me. This past weekend I grabbed a solo spot at the bar after both wife and daughter had abandoned me for the evening, and sampled as much as I could of the current menu. Some staples remain: the tomatoes with coconut ice and Vietnamese flavors, the chicken and "foi-ffles," the over-the-top pasta carbonara. But everything else around the edges is new – and very good.

Vegetable-focused dishes in particular are a strong suit, and of these, my favorite was a plate of grilled carrots, blanketed in soft curls of a powerfully rich five-year aged gouda cheese (it gets crystals like a good aged parmigiano-reggiano), dappled with crunchy buckwheat kernels, all resting atop a pillow of a creamy carrot-top pesto. I especially liked that the carrots were not annihilated, but maintained a not-quite-raw but still firm core – so you get both clean, vegetal snap and dark, sweet roasty caramel flavors. It was the best thing I ate last week.

Runners-up: the blistered shishito peppers showered with cured egg yolk and dry olive at Eating House; the flaky malawach bread (a Yemenite specialty) served with spicy hariff, grated tomatoes, feta cheese and hard boiled egg for brunch at 27 Restaurant (especially good when accompanied by a Miso Honey Cold Brew).

best thing i ate last week: schmaltz herring toast at Zak the Baker

It was the first thing I ate at Zak the Baker when the Wynwood café opened last May: a toasted slab of his fantastically crusty, naturally leavened multigrain bread, topped with slick, fatty brined schmaltz herring and pickled onions. On that first visit, it was paired with a 10 a.m. vodka shot which Zak rightfully insisted was an essential accompaniment.

This past Sunday morning, there was mercifully no hard liquor, but there was that same delicious fish, that same delicious bread, those same tart onions, though a pickle-infused aioli substituted for the creamy creme fraiche of that first visit. Still mighty good. And the best thing I ate last week. Pro tip: ZTB gets crazy busy with Sunday brunchers, but still keeps baker's hours, and opens at 7 a.m. If you can rouse yourself early, you may be able to squeeze in before the crowds.

Runner up: a classic from chef Michelle Bernstein's repertoire, on the menu at her Miami Beach restaurant, Seagrape: a delicately fried squash blossom stuffed with shrimp mousseline, served over a bed of creamy corn grits and dappled with a rich seafood nage.

a message from the future

A couple weeks ago Eater Miami asked me, "What do you think the future of dining looks like?" Some of my comments ran yesterday along with responses from several other locals as part of a series of "Future Week" stories across the Eater network. It may not surprise you that I actually had a bit more to say on the subject. Here's an expanded version of my thoughts on the future of dining, particularly in South Florida.

1. Tipping may become a thing of the past.

There is already movement in this direction, and the political push for minimum wage increases plus the shortage of line cooks will create increasing pressure to even out front-of-house and back-of-house compensation. (Sooner or later the light bulb will go off that there's a connection between the low wages for kitchen employees and their scarcity). Putting service staff on salary without a tip credit will be a big shift, but possibly a necessary one.

On my last visits to the Bay Area, several places were either adding a "service charge" or doing "service included" bills (Comal and Ippuku in Berkeley, Camino in Oakland). There have been some interesting success stories, including a couple places that give long-term employees a small share of ownership. Just this week, Tom Colicchio announced he is going to a no-tip, price-inclusive-of-service program during lunch service at Craft. There have also been places that tried, and ultimately balked, at using all-inclusive, no-tip pricing (Aster in San Francisco comes to mind).

In Miami, anyway, we're already accustomed to seeing "gratuity added" (or not seeing it clearly marked on the bill, but still having it done!). It would make little difference to the diner if instead, it was "service included" that gets shared with BOH and FOH, but it would require a change in how the restaurants operate.

One arguable financial upside to making this shift for restaurateurs: it will mitigate the risk of wage violation lawsuits that often arise from asserted non-compliance with tip credit requirements. Perhaps not coincidentally, Colicchio's restaurants have twice been sued for wage violations – once back in 2008 (a case that was settled), and more recently this year in connection with 'wichCraft (he pointedly denies the latest allegations). These lawsuits can be high-stakes stuff: in 2008, Jean-Georges Vongerichten  paid $1.75 million to settle wage claims; in 2009 Nobu paid $2.5 million for similar claims; in 2012, Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich's restaurants paid $5 million in a settlement.

2. Expensive restaurants will become even more expensive.

See 1. Increasing wages will put even more pressure on thin margins; eventually the cost of dinner will have to go up.

3. Lower end restaurants will look for ways to reduce staff.

See 1, 2. If the cost of labor is going up, and you have limited ability to raise prices, then you'll have to figure out how to get by with less employees. I expect there will be more "fast casual" type places, and that it will be increasingly difficult to successfully operate a moderately priced sit-down restaurant. Miami chef Alberto Cabrera recently made this shift, turning his Coral Gables restaurant Bread & Butter from a sit-down place into Little Bread, with counter service sandwiches and bowls, and I think it will prove to be a good move for him. Big picture, though, this bums me out, and I hope I'm wrong. Some of my favorite restaurants are the mid-range places where you can find interesting, ambitious food without it being a hundred dollar meal to pay for a million dollar build-out. I worry these will become an endangered species.

4. More independent restaurants in less trendy neighborhoods.

Everything can't be in Wynwood, South Beach or Brickell. And there are huge parts of Miami-Dade County with lots of population density, lower rents, and little restaurant competition other than chains, like Doral and Kendall. Closer to Miami's urban core, you're already seeing it happen in Edgewater (Mignonette) and the Upper East Side (Vagabond, Cena by Michy, Blue Collar, etc.), and I think the push northward up Biscayne Boulevard will continue. And maybe just a bit west too: Little Haiti?

5. 50% of the big-name chef restaurants that are opening in Miami won't be around after two years.

Some of them may be great. They all won't be. And it may prove tough to fill so many big dining rooms, even if you''re a "celebrity chef." Just ask Fabio Vivani. Or Tony Mantuano. Or Geoffrey Zakarian. Or – hot off the presses – Masaharu Morimoto, who announced just yesterday that he is closing his restaurant in the Shelborne on South Beach after exactly a year. Or ....