deep thoughts: Boia De | Buena Vista (Miami)

Earlier this week, I got to speak to a seventh grade class at North Broward Preparatory School about food blogging. A food theme runs through their entire curriculum for the year, so while they are writing their own food blogs for English class, they are also learning about food in science class, and tending an on-campus edible garden. It was a lot of fun to pass on a few nuggets of "wisdom" from my own experiences, but what was really great was hearing from the students about their own interests, projects and questions.

Of course, one of them asked "What is your favorite restaurant?" And invariably, this is the question everyone asks every food blogger. It's also a question I always have trouble answering. Because I have lots of favorites! Even if you narrowed it by category I'd still struggle, because so many different restaurants satisfy so many different cravings and moods. (I am voracious, I eat multitudes).

Having said that, I actually do have a favorite right now. And by favorite right now, I mean, if you asked me pretty much any day the past few months, "Where do you want to eat tonight?" the answer would likely be "Well, we could go to Boia De." This is a conversation that occurs frequently in our household. And frequently ends in the same place.

So what is Boia De? Maybe we should start with a related question: "What does "boia de" mean? Somehow, I got it in my head that it's an Italian expression that means "How cool!" But that translation exists only in my imagination. According to chef/owners Luciana Giangrande and Alex Meyer, it loosely translates as "Oh my!" which is much nicer than what turns up on Google Translate, which says something about an executioner?

It's perhaps appropriate that the name "Boia De" is a bit ambiguous, because the restaurant "Boia De" is itself delightfully difficult to typecast by genre. If I were to call it anything, I might go with "Italian-American," but I mean something almost the exact opposite of the checkered-tablecloth, red-sauce and mozz stereotype that phrase typically invokes. Alex and Luci mine Italian cuisine for ideas and ingredients – pastas and polenta and 'nduja and tonnato sauce – but those rub shoulders with green goddess and ranch dressing and and miso and mango. In lesser hands, this would be a recipe for disaster. But Alex and Luci know what they're doing.

(You can see all my pictures in this Boia De flickr set - over multiple visits I've now covered about 90% of the menu, though several items like the pastas change regularly).

Start, for instance, with the baked clams: tender littlenecks tucked under a blanket of spicy, smoky 'nduja sausage and breadcrumbs, torched til they're brown and bubbly, then finished with a squeeze of fresh lemon. They make for a delightful little one-bite surf-n-turf experience.

Or maybe instead a crudo? The hamachi is rich and buttery but delightfully clean and fresh, with splashes of yuzu salsa verde, ringlets of fresno chile, and briny fried capers to cut through the fattiness of the fish. It still feels kind of Italian even though nonna might disagree. Alternatively, you could go with the tuna crudo, which gets matched up in equally unorthodox fashion with a Sicilian pesto and smoky miso eggplant.

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Cobaya Isabela with Chef Jose Ramirez-Ruiz

Sometimes it takes an outsider to see the things you don't always see in yourself.

José Ramirez-Ruiz was a New Yorker through and through. He refined his cooking skills at some of the city's top restaurants – Per Se, Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare, Isa – before going out on his own in 2012 with a pop-up in Williamsburg called "Chez José." Chez José eventually ripened into a full-blown restaurant called Semilla in late 2014. Despite its diminutive size – there was only seating for 18 around a U-shaped counter, and the staff consisted of a grand total of two cooks and two servers – Semilla earned accolades disproportionate to its stature. Pete Wells praised its vegetable-forward tasting menus in a two-star New York Times review in early 2015,^[1] Eater's Ryan Sutton issued a glowing four-star review a couple months later, naming Semilla "New York's Next Great Restaurant,"^[2] Eater's Bill Addison included it in his "21 Best New Restaurants in America," Bon Appetit included it in its top 10 "Best New Restaurants of 2015," and by that fall, Michelin awarded the restaurant a star.

But Semilla was not built to last – Ramirez-Ruiz's partner Pamela Yung, who handled Semilla's highly regarded breads and desserts, left late the following year, and by March of 2017 the restaurant was closed. In the aftermath, Ramirez-Ruiz found his way down to Miami on a corporate consulting gig. Fortunately for us, he's decided to stick around for a while, and recently has devoted himself full-time to opening a new restaurant – Isabela – in Little Haiti. Earlier this month, we got him to do a dinner with our Cobaya group that provided a preview of what's to come.

(You can see all my pictures from the dinner in this Cobaya Isabela with Chef Jose Ramirez-Ruiz flickr set).

Unlike many out-of-town chefs who have rolled into Miami like emperors visiting the backwards colonies, Ramirez-Ruiz arrived with humility and curiosity:

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I am often asked: Why did I move to Miami? Truthfully? It is a complicated answer... but I will say what sold me (and @madreselvamia ) on it was the #10B growing region. A region like no other in the continental USA. A place that owes nothing to the seafood, vegetables or fruits from anywhere else. A place so unique that makes you look no further than your own backyard when trying to find inspiration. A place with so much potential that I even struggle to articulate. A place that often makes me feel like I know nothing about ingredients. A feeling that I can only compare to the way I felt 18 years ago when I first stepped into a profesional kitchen and knew nothing about food. — I will most likely never know how it feels to change careers, but I will say that moving to the 305 is probably as close as I will get to start from 0. All though very challenging, I fucking love it. — Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome. - Arthur Ashe — 📸: mango/lychee, mamey/bitter nut, papaya/lime.

A post shared by Jose Ramirez (@chezjosebk) on Aug 7, 2019 at 3:23pm PDT

The result is a unique and fresh take on Miami's subtropical "local flora and fauna," as Ramirez-Ruiz puts it. He uses ingredients we're all familiar with – mangoes and papaya and plantains and yuca – but in new and inspired ways we haven't necessary seen before.

While he works on getting Isabela off the ground, a nearby space at Little River Miami played host for our dinner. I've now been here for a few different things – Eat Here Now's Friday lunches, Scott Linquist's Chivo! goat barbacoa – and while it's pretty bare-bones at the moment, the space also has some great potential. Lots of foliage from plant and floral designer Madre Selva, which keeps a studio nearby, helped soften the rough edges.

Ramirez-Ruiz started things off with a round of snacks, all brought out to the tables at once: delicate little mussels swimming in paprika-laced oil with sautéed onions, in the style of the wonderful canned seafood conservas of Spain and Portugal; flat-out delicious green olives stuffed with shrimp paste and warmed in the wood oven; rounds of fresh cheese also roasted in the oven and doused in a lemon vinaigrette, a sort of saganaki minus the flaming tableside presentation; some Wigwam country ham from Edwards Smokehouse;^[3] and freshly baked sourdough bread, served with an army-green moringa butter. I've been told that moringa doesn't have a lot of flavor on its own, so maybe there was something else in here, but it had an intriguing, vegetal thing going on that I kept on coming back to for more.

I'd been to Ramirez-Ruiz's pop-up dinners at All Day and Jaguar Sun, and each time he'd served some variation on this dish: a creamy plantain soup, with melting comté cheese and crispy plantain "crunchies." It eats like a crazy hybrid of a Caribbean sopa de platano and a French onion soup, and this was possibly my favorite iteration.

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first thoughts: Sixty10 Organic Rotisserie Chicken | Little Haiti (Miami)

In the kitchen, unitaskers are anathema. All those avocado slicers and egg peelers and meat shredders just do the same things you can do with standard kitchen tools while taking up extra space in your drawers. As Alton Brown used to say on Good Eats, "The only unitasker allowed in my kitchen is a fire extinguisher."

When it comes to restaurants, though, I'm a big fan of unitaskers. Focus on just one thing, and you're more likely to do it well. Case in point: Sixty10 Organic Rotisserie Chicken, recently opened in Little Haiti. There are several items on the menu at Sixty10, but they are all essentially variations on one theme: chicken, rubbed with salt and spices, and cooked on a rotisserie until its skin is well-bronzed and its flesh pulls apart in soft, juicy ribbons. It may come as a whole, half or quarter chicken, along with a few different sandwich or salad iterations, but it's all about the bird. And happily, it's a really tasty bird.

(You can see all my pictures in this Sixty10 flickr set).

On a first-time lunch visit last week, I got the Sixty10 sandwich: pulled rotisserie chicken meat, a tangle of caramelized onions, coins of fingerling potatoes slippery with chicken jus, all smooshed inside a kaiser roll It was simple, straightforward, and delicious. The seasonings are subtle, not overpowering; it tastes like chicken, but actually like chicken, not just a bland blank canvas. Having said that, a smear of mustard or a daub of hot sauce would probably do it wonders.

I'll have to make a return visit to bring a whole roasted chicken home for the family, which can be had with two sides (options include those roasted potatoes, a creamy, tangy cole slaw, brussel sprouts or green beans) and two sauces (could be jalapeño jam, curry sauce, or pikliz, a nod to the Little Haiti neighborhood, among others) for $34. That's about 50% more than you'd pay for a commodity chicken family meal at Pollo Tropical and it's probably about 200% better.

There's not much to the place right now, which used to be a Haitian Creole take-out joint: a window into the kitchen where you place your order, a covered patio with some tables and benches if you want to "dine in." But there's a huge, sprawling yard out back, partly shaded by live oaks spreading their branches over from the neighboring property, and the owners have bigger long-term plans: live music (a stage is already set up), a chickee hut (plans have been filed with the city), wine and beer in a picnic-style atmosphere (there's no liquor license yet, so for now they're sometimes pouring wine for free).

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30 Great Things to Eat in Miami for Less than $11

A disproportionate amount of my time and energy writing here is devoted to higher end dining (leading some people to think I actually eat that way all the time!). Yes, there's a lot more glamour in a fancy tasting menu than in the average daily meal. But not necessarily more satisfaction.

And as Miami rapidly becomes an increasingly expensive place to live, there's a particular joy when that satisfaction comes cheap. As we enter the season of Miami Spice, when everyone goes scrambling to sample all the $39, 3-course dinners, this year I decided to do something different.

So forgive me for the click-bait title, but here are thirty great things to eat in Miami^[1] all of them under $11.^[2] A few of these come from Miami's most celebrated chefs and restaurants. Others come from places with no websites or social media managers, made by cooks whose names I will never know. Many are not terribly Instagram-friendly. What they all have in common is that they make me very happy when I eat them.

Though it was not my original purpose, and though it's obviously skewed somewhat by my own personal predilections,^[3] I suspect this list might just give a more complete picture of our city than the latest restaurant "hot list" – not just the million dollar dining rooms in the South Beach and Brickell towers, but the many Latin American and Caribbean and other flavors that give Miami its – well, flavor. I'm always gratified to see exciting things happening in the Miami dining stratosphere; but there are good things closer to the ground too. Here are some of them.

1. Pan con Croqueta ($10)

I wrote recently about All Day, and won't repeat myself here. Instead, I'll mention something that only occurred to me in retrospect: how comfortably it traverses the territory between new school coffee house and old school Cuban cafecito shop. Sure, the coffee beans are a lot better than the regulation-issue Bustelo or Pilon, and they don't need to put an avalanche of sugar into an espresso to make it taste good, but there's not as much space as you might think between a fancy Gibraltar and a humble cortadito. All Day even has a ventanita where you can order from the sidewalk. And, they've got an excellent version of a pan con croqueta, with warm, creamy ham croquetas and a runny, herb-flecked egg spread, squeezed into classic crusty pan cubano.

(More pictures in this All Day - Miami flickr set).

All Day
1035 N. Miami Avenue, Miami, Florida
305-599-EGGS

2. Croqueta Sandwich ($5.90)

If All Day offers a new-school version of a pan con croqueta, the prototype can be found at Al's Coffee Shop, hidden away inside a Coral Gables office building. Despite the obscure location, it's usually full of police officers and municipal workers, who know where to find a good deal. The croqueta sandwich here starts at $4.65; you can add eggs for an extra $1.25. Bonus points: on Tuesdays, those excellent croquetas are only 25¢ apiece all day.

Al's Coffee Shop
2121 Ponce de Leon Boulevard, Coral Gables, Florida
305.461.5919

3. Curry Goat ($10; $7 on Thursday)

For as long as I've been in Miami – which is a long time – B&M Market has been open along a dodgy stretch of NE 79th Street. Run by a sweet, friendly Guyanese couple, this Caribbean market with a kitchen and small seating area in back turns out fresh rotis, staples like braised oxtails, jerk chicken, cow foot stew, and my favorite – the tender, deeply-flavored curry goat. A small portion, with rice and peas and a fresh salad, is plenty, and will set you back $10 – or go on Thursday when it's the daily lunch special, and it's only $7.

(More pictures in this B&M Market - Miami flickr set).

B&M Market
219 NE 79th Street, Miami, Florida
305.757.2889

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best thing i ate last week: philly cheesesteak at Philly Grub

When I was in high school a long, long time ago, I worked one summer at a place called All American Heroes in the Aventura Mall food court. (It happened to be in the same space that was occupied by the gastroPod for a brief time last year). It offered the usual assortment of cold cut subs you'd find at any Subway wanna-be, but the real specialty of the house was the Philly cheesesteak. By the end of that summer, I fancied myself a legitimate cheesesteak-slinger, and had gotten pretty adept at that double-spatula chopping action on the flat-top.

You'd think that after having cooked countless hundreds of them, I'd also be absolutely sick of cheesesteaks. But that moment never came. At the end of my shift I'd still happily make myself one – usually with provolone, sometimes mushrooms (I was fancy even then) – and enjoyed it every single time.

So I was intrigued when I saw signage going up for a place called "Philly Grub" on a, well, pioneering stretch of NW 54th Street in Little Haiti that's often part of my daily commute. It opened a few months ago, but its hours (11am-6pm Mon-Sat, 11am-5pm Sun) never coincided with mine. I finally made it in this weekend, and was reminded of what I loved about that summer: the cheesesteaks.

(You can see a few more pictures in this Philly Grub flickr set).

There's not much to the place: a counter to take your order, a couple tables, a ledge around the wall with some stools. And there's not much to the menu either: your basic Philly cheesesteak, with a few options (Whiz, provolone or American; onions, peppers, mushrooms, lettuce, tomato and pizza sauce if you wish), along with a chicken cheesesteak, a vegetable Philly, plus sausage, meatball, and Italian cold-cut hoagies. But you'll appreciate the bare bones approach when you see that all the sandwiches are $7.76. Sides – Penn-Dutch style potato salad, a pretzel, or chips – will set you back an extra $1.76, or you can splurge on the pierogies with grilled onions and sour cream for $2.76. For Philadelphia nostalgists, there's also Italian water ices and TastyKakes for dessert.

It is a finely crafted sandwich that you'll get for your $7.76. The beef is tender, well-seasoned and cooked through – still juicy, not entirely dried out, but not sopping its way through the bread before you can finish. For tradition's sake, I abandoned the fancy pretensions of my youth and got crazy with the Cheez Whiz; there's a reason for those traditions sometimes. It comes on a real-deal Amoroso roll, with just the right balance of crusty and tender, like Peter Falk in Princess Bride.

That cheesesteak wasn't just the best thing I ate last week; it was almost as good as the ones I used to make.

You can read some more about Philly Grub and its owners in this piece in the Miami Herald.

Philly Grub
99 NW 54th Street, Miami, Florida
786.857.6906