Cobaya Rancho Patel with Chef Niven Patel

I knew when we agreed to do a Cobaya dinner way down in Homestead that, one way or another, it would be memorable. Actually, we had a pretty high degree of confidence that it would be memorable for the right reasons. Our chef for the evening, Niven Patel, is a Michael's Genuine alum, and is in the process of opening his own place – Ghee^[1] – which will combine the flavors of his Indian heritage with the farm-to-table ethos of MGFD. About a year ago, I got a preview of what Patel had in mind when he did a pop-up dinner at Genuine sibling Harry's Pizzeria. It was excellent. So when he said he wanted to host a dinner at his home and backyard farm, we found a way to make it happen. Our confidence was not misplaced.

(You can see all my pictures in this Cobaya Rancho Patel flickr set).

Our early 6pm start time meant there was still some late afternoon sun shining on the backyard garden, which Patel has planted with items that will eventually be used to supply the restaurant: papaya, taro leaf, chile peppers, herbs, greens, turmeric, root vegetables. A welcome cocktail courtesy of Edukos^[2] featuring "Ghee Wiz sake," basil infused mango juice, and spice-infused syrup, helped everyone slip into the right mindset.

As folks made their way in, Niven's crew started circulating with an assortment of snacks. There were freshly fried pakoras of sweet onion and taro leaf from the backyard garden. A paste of sweet Florida shrimp, sesame seeds and scallion topped a particularly tasty rendition of shrimp toast. And a special treat: khandvi, or as our menu called them, "chickpea roll-ups." This was something I'd never tried before, and for good reason: Niven says you're unlikely to ever see these unless your mother or grandmother is making them, as getting the batter – a mixture of chickpea flour and yogurt or buttermilk – and texture right is a bit of alchemy that could keep molecular gastronomists busy for a while. I was glad someone knew how to do it: these light, fluffy crepes, reminiscent of Japanese tamagoyaki, and seasoned with toasted black mustard seeds, julienned cilantro and curry leaf, were absolutely delicious.

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first thoughts: Bazaar Mar | Brickell (Miami)

It occurred to me that I've been to an awful lot of José Andrés' restaurants: minibar many years ago, back when it was a jerry-rigged six-seat counter in the middle of Café Atlantico, not a Michelin two-star restaurant; Jaleo in D.C., é and China Poblano in Las Vegas, Bazaar here in Miami Beach. This revelation was prompted when our waiter at Bazaar Mar, his latest in the SLS Brickell hotel, asked that routine question, "Have you eaten here before?" and then followed up by asking if we've eaten at any of José's other restaurants.^[1]

One of the challenges of expanding a restaurant empire – especially when you're adding another outlet in the same territory – is coming up with different concepts so you're not just cannibalizing your own business. But Andrés never seems to be lacking for ideas, with more than a dozen different restaurants under his ThinkFoodGroup umbrella. So I was somewhat surprised that when Andrés announced his second Miami restaurant, it was "Bazaar Mar," when he already has The Bazaar ten miles away in South Beach.

But with my "Brickell Aversion," surely I of all people ought to recognize that Brickell and South Beach can be entirely separate worlds these days. And while there is some overlap between the two places, there's actually enough distinguishing them that you could eat at Bazaar one night and Bazaar Mar the next and have entirely different meals.

(You can see all my pictures in this Bazaar Mar - Miami flickr set).

As the name indicates, Bazaar Mar has a seafood focus, and if the name didn't clue you in, the decor will. The entire space is covered in bright white tiles painted with blue nautical motifs of sailors and mermaids and sea monsters. A few gigantic horned fish heads – I'm guessing these are designed by Mikel Urmeneta, who also did the bulls' heads in Bazaar – are mounted around the dining room. The somewhat odd layout effectively has two dining rooms – one wide-open space in front, another more cloistered space in back, each of which has a raw bar counter and a view of the open kitchen at the pivot point between them. A tank loaded with live seafood runs in front of the kitchen. To the right of the entrance, a cozy bar is done up in the same nautical motifs but with a dramatic black and gold color scheme. It's a nice place to pre-game for your meal with an "Ultimate Gin and Tonic" or a liquid nitrogen frozen caipirinha slushie.

The menu can be fairly daunting, with somewhere around sixty items all told. Most of these are small plates, though, some of them just one- or two-biters, so you easily get four or five dishes per person and sample a wide cross-section. Here's how we navigated our first visit:

To start, a little tribute to Andrés' most influential mentor, Ferran Adrià – Adrià's signature spherified olives, the little gushers marinated in olive oil spiked with citrus zest and piparra peppers.

Once, I somehow got invited to some sort of fashion event at The Bazaar on South Beach. It was not exactly a crowd that was focused on the food. So while they milled about admiring each other's clothes and sniffing the air, I perched myself next to a counter where a guy was carving slices from a leg of jamón ibérico and dolloping them with osetra caviar to make what's known as a "José Taco." I must have eaten a dozen of those things. For Bazaar Mar, José has created a variation on the theme, with slices of lightly cured hamachi brushed with ibérico ham fat, topped with osetra caviar, minced ginger and sesame seeds, all cradled on a sheet of crispy seaweed.

These smoked salmon macarons, with dilled cream cheese and a couple pearls of salmon roe on top, an amuse bouche from the kitchen, were perfectly executed and delicious. There were every bit as good when our server brought us a couple more toward the end of our meal. I expect they're going to find their way onto the menu and stay there.

Atop that whimsical octopus pedestal pictured at the top is a "California Funnel Cake" – a little fried cake of seaweed-infused batter topped with crabmeat, avocado, cucumber and tobiko, like a reconfigured California roll. A word of caution: this is much smaller than it appears in pictures, and at $13, may seem like a lot to pay for two bites.^[2]

Our server encouraged us to try the ceviche with a fresh catch of yellow jack, an upgrade over the cobia on the menu, and it was good advice. The meaty fish was arranged in ribbons around a frozen "rose" of leche de tigre, surrounded by nasturtium leaves and lightly pickled radishes, and topped with a dusting of crumbled corn nuts. The beautiful presentation was made to be destroyed: mash the frozen sauce so it can merge with the lightly marinated fish, dig around and find the sweet potato cubes underneath, and you have all the flavors of a classic ceviche back together again.

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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.