Words ADAM ERACE, photography COURTESY OF THE RESTAURANTS
A veteran food writer dishes on Miami's sophisticated food scene.
It’s not the truffles that make the grilled cheese at Paya in Miami. Yes, you smell them on the petite sandwich’s journey through this South Beach dining room—a tropi-glam confection of coral upholstery, potted palms, champagne drapes, and rattan chandeliers—and yes, you taste their luxurious musk in the golden-fried triangles of sourdough and brie.
But the sneaky star of this dish is the sauce on which the sandwich is arranged, a sweet, tart, sticky preserve of Florida mango.
Niven Patel grows them. He’s the chef-owner of six-month-old Paya with partner Mohamed “Mo” Alkassar. But when he’s at his home, a Homestead bungalow nicknamed Rancho Patel, he’d prefer to think of himself as a farmer. Passionfruit vines, bushes of pungent curry leaves, custard apple, lychee and mango trees cover the property. Things grow in southern extremes of South Florida that won’t grow anywhere else in the country, and they’re part of why Miami chefs are so excited to cook here—and why visitors are so damn lucky to eat here.
If you think Miami dining is just a carousel of stone crabs, Cubanos, and bottle service, please meet Sunny’s in Little River. The steakhouse is not a steakhouse the way you think of a steakhouse, but a steakhouse as shaped by the imagination and rhythm of Miami. Mango criolla brightens the razor clams, plantain jam plays the sweet to the salty of the thick-cut bacon side dish, and your dry-aged rib-eye or Wagyu porterhouse can be ordered with béarnaise and blue cheese or salsa verde and pineapple hot sauce. Follow the yoga-bodied carnivores at the horseshoe-shaped Art Deco bar and order your martini in a double portion. Another essential cocktail destination is the Champagne Bar at the Four Seasons Surf Club.
Skirted armchairs, twisting palms, and brass-and-malachite-green bar set a stage for creative drinks like the Mango & Olive Martini and the Apricot, a mix of mezcal, rum, apricot-pecan milk, and Champagne.
At Shiso in Wynwood, the eponymous herb mints the mojitos, greens the pesto covering stracciatella, and functions as wrappers for the smoked short rib feast. Chef Raheem Sealey knows his way around a rib, here and at Drinking Pig, his excellent barbecue in Coconut Grove. Over the last decade, the once splendidly decaying Grove has reoriented Miami’s center of dining gravity. The neighborhood is walkable and botanical, lousy with flowers and architectural treats like the building housing Los Félix, with its half-moon windows and arched tower of glass blocks.
The Meso-American menu here revolves around corn, name-checking the heirloom varieties and provenances. They’re nixtamalized in house (dried and then soaked and cooked in an alkaline solution, usually limewater, to break down the outer surface to improve digestibility and boost nutritional value) into masa, then shaped into arepas (stuffed with grilled crab), tetelas (filled with Japanese sweet potato and caviar), and tortillas (topped with al pastor pork and lacto-fermented berries). Adjacent to the Grove, Coral Gables has emerged as another food tentpole. Pastry virtuoso Jesus Brazon recently opened his third outpost of Caracas Bakery on the Miracle Mile.
It’s a miracle if you only eat one of his guava-cheese danish, an only-in-Miami hybrid of sacred Latin flavors and impeccable French pastry.
Back on the beach at Paya, there are plenty of other delicious things on Patel’s menu: soulful chicken curry, tangy tamarind lamb chops, hamachi crudo with fruity aji dulce chiles and stained-glass panels of thin-shaved plum. But the way that luminous mango cuts through the fat and umami of the grilled cheese like a piano wire...that’s original and unforgettable. Like Miami itself.
