Reddened dolphin. Black beans. Warm green avocado. Pickled onions. Smoky-red, charcoaled tomatoes.
Is this a tropical painting or merely a large, fancifully decorated dinner plate? Maybe it is something else: a living culinary taste and color map?
Mexican-inspired charcoaled dolphin. Black beans from Cuba. Avocados, onions and tomatoes, freshly hand-picked, organic and home grown in sunny south Florida.
Pausing briefly as he diplomatically cruises the crowded dinner-time tables, chef Mark, creator of the intriguing dolphin plate before us, and his very popular restaurant, Mark’s Place in North Miami, explains how the brilliantly colored dish and all the rest came about.
Seems he was traveling in Mexico’s Yucatan area recently, he says slowly and a bit shyly. Not along the coast but in the interior, he adds, and suddenly the local cooking offered him yet another inspiration–a $24 gourmet dish for his restaurant.
As for the rest, the foods and cooking styles of Florida, the Caribbean and Latin America have been an inspiration for the last 12 years, says Mark Militello, who among other honors has been named “best chef in the Southeast U.S.” by the James Beard Foundation.
For years south Florida was the citadel of honest-to-goodness ersatz cuisine. Real whatever-you-wanted dining from everywhere in true copycat decor. You name it. Like the sun-bleached sea shells at the water’s edge on Miami Beach, almost everything you ate, or remembered eating, had washed up from somewhere else. Imagine Vegas with water and lots of napkins.
Not anymore. Now, chefs are mingling the cuisines, the food, the spices and flavors found locally, mixing them with those from the Caribbean, and tossing in North and South American as well as Asian influences.
Nouveau Florida. Floribbean. New World. The names vary for this kind of cooking.
I call it Nuevo Blue Sky Eats, which seems appropriate because it sounds highfalutin (for the tourists especially), tropical and also like down-home Florida, which actually still exists in some hushed places far from the burgeoning mega-malls and blistering parking lots. Like much in Florida, Nuevo Blue Sky Eats serendipitously came about.
It was nurtured by the arrival of the Cuban immigrants, and it has blossomed with the constant flow of South American visitors ever since. Together, they have brought a new ambience and a will to experiment with the typical cocina Latino.
The flood of European models, model-admirers and overall sun-worshipping Europeans has also raised the quality of Miami’s dining out palate a few notches–and brought folks willing to pay for it.
Meanwhile, innovative chefs seemed to be waiting in the wings. So, too, apparently were risk-adverse restaurant owners.
Discovering south Florida’s home-grown restaurants is almost as trendy as watching the daily parade pass by on Las Olas Boulevard in Ft. Lauderdale and far more memorable than designating your suntan lotion level.
Some Nuevo Blue Sky Eats places are elegant establishments. Some are tucked away in strip malls, old hotels or old restaurants. Some like Pacific Time at 915 Lincoln Rd. in Miami Beach are endlessly hot, so call ahead, for sure. Norman’s at 21 Almeria Ave., Coral Cables, is in the same boat: highly popular. So, too, is Chef Allen’s at 19088 N.E. 29th Ave., North Miami Beach.
Among the heap that fit the category, here are my favorites for different reasons.
Mark’s Place
Mark’s Place, one of three (the others are in Ft. Lauderdale and Coconut Grove), sits at the end of a long strip mall and within sight of the Intracoastal waterway. It has a staid, somewhat cool feeling, which seems somewhat unfortunate because the food is neither.
The crowd is upscale, and they dress that way. The waiters, who smoothly glide back and forth to the open-air kitchen, know how to play up the nuances of the cuisines. And they exist.
One highly recommended entree is pistachio-crusted grouper with watercress-fennel salad and citrus vinaigrette ($26). A similarly worthy offering one night recently was Jamaican spiced charcoaled wahoo steaks with grilled pineapple, papaya and red onions salsa on a bed of pumpkin rice ($27). If you ever order just fried shrimps again within striking distance of such an experience, you should bite your lip.
Mark’s Place, 2286 N.E. 123rd St., North Miami; 305-893-6888.
Yuca
When Yuca first opened eight years ago in a posh setting in Coral Gables, it, too, was quite an experience. It seemed so different, so chic, so stylish compared to Miami’s other Cuban restaurants.
Its name really seemed to stand for young, upwardly mobile Cubans, rather than what its namesake (yucca, as it actually is spelled) is: a starchy root vegetable boiled or baked and served with garlic and onion seasoning.
Since the beginning, the goal for the restaurant, says Cuban-born owner Efrain Vega, 45, was to take Cuban cooking and integrate it with California and French influences. The hope was also to bring more “balance” to Cuban cooking and less filling, less starchy dishes.
Thus was born a vibrant strand of Nuevo Blue Sky Eats. Take yucca stuffed with a picadilo (beef stew) of wild mushrooms on a bed of sauteed spinach with beef and carrot vinaigrette ($19). A version of the traditional Zarzuela here ($31) is fresh fish, lobster, shrimp and fresh mussels in a rich black bean broth, resting on strips of sweet plantain pasta.
An intriguing way to begin is a $9 soup called “two soups on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” It is a chilled gazpacho and a “yucassoise” along with a “supporting cast of garnishes.”
More than a year and a half ago, Yuca departed Coral Gables for Miami Beach’s tourist-ladden South Beach, which was a very gracious gift to those unfamiliar with its innovative Cuban cooking.
Before, it had the feel of a white-washed trendy bistro. Now, it has more of the touch of a bustling, upscale restaurant with large windows that look out onto Lincoln Road, South Beach’s latest outpost for gourmet dining. Popularity sometimes overwhelms the place, however, bringing crowds, a rushed feeling and a bubbling din.
On Friday and Saturday nights, the din seems justifiable, since Albita, a Cuban singer, who emigrated several years ago, appears in a second floor room built essentially for her and her band. It is a prelude therefore to Albita’s powerful, riveting show. If you swivel enough in your seat, you can practically work off the grilled, marinated pork tenderloin over congri with green apple and mango chimichurri.
Yuca, 501 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach; 305-532-YUCA.
Pan Coast Restaurant
You say you are tired, however, of the crowds on the beach and bumping into the sweating humanity on the sun-drenched streets. My favorite Nuevo Blue Sky Eats solution for this is the Pan Coast Restaurant at the Indian Creek Hotel in Miami Beach, a wonderfully restored 60-year-old Art Deco hotel facing a quiet waterway in an out-of-the way part of Miami Beach.
Things couldn’t get any quieter here. For two years running, Miami’s New Times weekly newspaper has rated it the best local place for an intimate conversation. There are only 40 seats, although this may increase in the future. The restaurant sprawls from a palm-filled, high-ceiling lobby and onto a lush green verandah near a swimming pool. Pray for a warm, starry-eyed night and sit outside if possible.
The place feels like a theme park of the 1930s and ’40s. Vintage steamer trucks fill the lobby. Large photos of old movie stars cover the walls. The background music is at least 50 years old. The National Geographics are from the 1930s. A waiter tries to keep up with things, but he somehow falls behind, apologizes and offers an extra glass of wine free as an apology. The result: we linger until closing.
“I’d like to do two seatings, but nobody leaves,” softly protests Mary K. Rohan, 30, the restaurant’s chef, a native Miamian, who casually wanders out into the lobby at the end of the night. She trained at the Cordon Bleu cooking school in London, and worked at two very hip places on South Beach, the Century Hotel and A Fish Called Avalon.
Her menu is a mixture of Asia and the Caribbean and whatever else she wants to add. A fascinating soup, for example, is Caribbean borscht: beets with cilantro and sour cream ($6).
A truly innovative and tasty dish is malanga crusted mahi mahi ($18) with tropical fruit relish, citrus lime sauce, cayenne cinnamon plantain sticks and orange couscous. The same can be said of guava soy chicken ($16) with tempura vegetables and roasted garlic sesame mash.
The execution of the dishes coming out of her tiny kitchen do not always match the perfection achieved by her Nuevo Blue Sky Eats colleagues. But most of them couldn’t match the ambience or cross-culinary dabbling found in this place identified by a palm-shrouded sign out front that simply says “restaurant open.”
It is mighty hard to copy such things.
Pan Coast Restaurant, Indian Creek Hotel, 2727 Indian Creek Drive, Miami Beach; 305-531-2727.
