New Biscayne Corridor restaurants are defying the recession and energizing neighborhoods

Over the past couple of years, restaurant-going Miami residents and visitors alike have learned an astonishing thing: The causeways across Biscayne Bay, previously thought to be one-way at night -- east, from the Biscayne Corridor to the Beach only -- actually run both ways. This epiphany can be attributed to a couple of things that occurred almost simultaneously.

One was the unprecedented number of fine-dining restaurants that went belly-up. Some were merely expensive, but many were truly fine. And most were in South Beach: David Bouley Evolution, Fifty, Mark’s South Beach, 8½, Afterglo, and many more.

The other thing was the equally unprecedented number of casual, creative, affordable, and largely chef-owned neighborhood restaurants that opened in the Biscayne Corridor, most notably (so far) in the Design District. For a good decade after developer/art collector Craig Robins bought much of the “square mile of style” (a nickname from its heyday), the District had been hyped as being on the brink of becoming a bustling, 24/7 urban center. Sadly, though, it remained a swell place to buy a $2000 toilet seat by day but creepily empty at night. In fact, after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, chef/real estate player Jonathan Eismann of Pacific Time, who once owned the District’s only nighttime amenity -- Grass restolounge -- sold it and a full block he owned in Wynwood. Says Eismann: “I thought it was the right time -- then.”

That was then. Now the Design District contains a concentration of restaurants that has been packed nightly with people who, just a couple of years ago, wouldn’t have dreamed of driving to our side of Biscayne Bay for dinner. Evidently what art couldn’t do, artichokes could.

Interestingly, many of the new restaurants in the Design District and those scattered throughout even less gentrified areas of the Biscayne Corridor (defined broadly as the area on both sides of the Boulevard from the bay to I-95) are helmed by well-known chefs who’d built their reputations as head honchos of fancy dining spots in South Beach and other established tourist areas. Even Allen Susser, whose Chef Allen’s has been a famed fine-dining spot since 1986, last year completely changed his concept to casual modern seafood bistro.

It may seem odd to deliberately demote yourself from high-end to informal, but in truth it gives Miami something all serious food towns have: innovative neighborhood restaurants. Since the South Beach renaissance in the late 1980s, Miami has had plenty of derivative, celeb-chef restaurants where the name over the door was seldom the cook in the kitchen. What we’ve been missing are the very personal, chef-owned, indie eateries, oriented toward local ingredients and local diners, and which encourage the development of a unique culinary identity.

“When I opened Michael’s Genuine Food & Drink in the spring of 2007, there was nothing like it in Miami,” says Michael Schwartz (formerly of Nemo and Afterglo in South Beach), who is often credited as the catalyst for the Design District’s foodie fascination. “But really, in lots of the great food towns, there are places like Michael’s -- neighborhood places that emphasize fresh, regional, seasonal, and organic ingredients. Now all of us in the District are doing the same alternative thing.”

The Biscayne Corridor’s generally lower restaurant rents, even in the now relatively expensive Design District, have lured other chefs from South Beach, as well as Coral Gables and elsewhere. In turn, that has enabled them to attract diners with lowered prices. “Rents would be double or more on the Beach,” says Schwartz.

At 11:00 on a recent Friday night in the District, Schwartz’s restaurant was still full of diners, as were Fratelli Lyon, a stylish Italian café from Ken Lyons, whose French café/market Lyon Frères pioneered Lincoln Road in the early 1990s, and Brosia, whose chef Arthur Artiles was Norman Van Aken’s sous chef at Norman’s. And outside six-month-old Sra. Martinez, there was even a late-night line waiting to savor the casual/elegant tapas crafted by Michelle Bernstein, who several years ago left the ultra-upscale Azul to open the affordable Michy’s in the Biscayne Corridor neighborhood where she grew up.

“Looking at my books for the past seven weeks, we’ve had two slow Friday nights,” says Jonathan Eismann, who closed his original Pacific Time owing to prohibitive rents on Lincoln Road, and reopened last year in the Design District. “We did 121 and 147 covers [meals served]. I’m pretty happy with 147. Our highs on weekends are over 300, the highest 321.”

The District’s culinary boundaries seem to be spreading fast, too, judging from the crowds still devouring rillettes -- an authentic French peasant specialty of Claude Postel, who formerly operated several Montreal fine-dining venues -- at his chef-owned Buena Vista Bistro, four blocks north of the Design District.

“I don’t know anyone who goes to South Beach to eat out anymore,” says Bernstein, who lives within walking distance of her homey, namesake restaurant. “You have to spend 25 bucks on valet parking before you even go inside. It’s infuriating. I always feel like, ‘You took my appetizer away!’”

* * *

This dramatic rise in the number of Biscayne Corridor restaurants, as evidenced by this magazine’s own increasingly voluminous “Dining Guide,” still seems surprising, especially at a time when the economy overall has taken a nosedive. So a reality check would be in order -- to make sure the perception isn’t really an hallucination. Which brings us to David Talty, a Florida International University instructor specializing in restaurant management and trends, and Eddie Lim, a restaurant real estate broker who specializes in the Biscayne Corridor.

Judging from what Lim says about his restaurant sales and leases over the past five years or so, restaurant real estate has taken a far less drastic dip than the area’s residential market. “Things have slowed down a little bit,” he concedes, “but they’re still moving and will turn around very quickly, I believe.”

There has not been, he says, any fire-sale downturn in prices that correspond to residential real estate’s foreclosure sales. “And restaurant spaces will get sold,” he insists. “Café Glacier [now Le Café] sold within days. Despite the economy, people still want restaurants along the Biscayne Corridor.”

Adds David Talty: “A restaurant is fairly recession-proof. Some say that people aren’t going out to eat now, but in fact 48 cents of every dollar spent on food is spent in restaurants. People have gotten used to eating out, and switching habits from eating out to home isn’t an option.”

Still, isn’t it unlikely in these hard times that Biscayne Corridor restaurants could be significantly increasing? Not really, says Talty. “Statistically the restaurant industry in general is doing surprisingly well in this economy. So far this year, in 2009, the restaurant industry is up one and a half to two percent, despite the economy. The restaurants that are hurting most are fine-dining. A lot of restaurants in New York are repositioning regarding price, as Chef Allen’s recently did.”

One of our area’s own ventures is producing numbers that leave Talty’s national average in the dust. “Some of our locations are increasing food sales by 30 to 35 percent a month,” says Antonio Ellek, CEO and concept guy behind Pasha’s, a Miami mini chain that serves eastern Mediterranean healthy fast-food. Four of the chain’s seven locations are in Biscayne Times territory, including the original takeout-only Pasha’s in the Design District. “It was intended just as a temporary test kitchen for the Lincoln Road Pasha’s that opened in 2002,” explains Ellek. “But business there has been growing so much, especially after Michael’s and the other high-profile places started drawing attention to the whole area, that we’ll be opening a full-service Pasha’s nearby, on Biscayne, by fall. We’re currently serving over 50,000 people per month, and are planning to double that number by the end of the year.”

Sounding equally confident is Steve Lieber, director of operations for Racks Italian Bistro and Market, a recently launched authentic Italian enoteca/salumeria/hangout, from the folks behind Boca Raton’s wildly popular Coal Mine Pizza. Not only did Racks open in a tanking economy, it did so in an off-the-tourist-track location in North Miami Beach’s Intracoastal Mall, notorious as a restaurant jinx spot. “Okay, I was a little worried at first,” admits Lieber. “The mall has a reputation as dead. I couldn’t help wondering -- when places like Ruth’s Chris fail here, why?”

Lieber and owner Gary Rack concluded that mega-size, formal restaurants like Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse were just the wrong idea for the location. So they proceeded to invent a concept they feel is a sure thing. Key factors are a casual chic, intimately sized room with an expansive, uniquely South Florida outdoor deck on the waterway; a picturesque market up front featuring hanging cheeses and other artisan products; and a menu of authentic Italian dishes, including the famous coal-oven pizzas, 75 percent of them priced under $20.

There will also be deliberate coordination, rather than competition, with the Water Club, Paella Seafood Grill, and Flamma (a Brazilian steakhouse), the three other restaurants filling Racks’ side of the mall. “We were the last holdout to sign the lease because we wanted to be sure that all four places were likely to succeed. If a restaurant folds and there’s an empty space, your restaurant looks creepy. If all four restaurants succeed, you’ve got a hot restaurant row.”

* * *

Despite the recent upsurge, in most of the Biscayne Corridor, the arrival of chef-driven independent restaurants has been an evolution, not a revolution. Eddie Lim’s first Boulevard restaurant deal was Casa Toscana, a cozy Italian eatery opened in the Upper Eastside by Tuscan-born chef/owner Sandra Stefani early in 2004. “Sandra took a risk,” says Lim. Though a few notable chef-owned spots, such as Dewey and Dale LoSasso’s North One 10, had attracted notice, there had been, says Lim, “little interest in restaurant properties generally along Biscayne Boulevard.”

Stefani says she wasn’t worried about being a pioneer. “In the first place, I didn’t open as a real restaurant. I was mostly a wine and gourmet shop that had prepared food of mine to go. With the density of people living in this neighborhood who have a certain income level and sophistication, I knew I was going to make it because there was a need. There was Dogma with the hot dogs and me with the wine.”

What concerns her most these days isn’t the recession but the competition. “To have so many more new restaurants is not bad,” she says. “With more choices, people see this area as more inviting. What is bad is that you now have a restaurant row, from 67th to 77th Street, with the same density of people living here as when I opened. If we had Kubik [a condo project at 57th Street now in limbo following protests over its height], it would be fine to have so many restaurants.”

The area got a huge boost in 2006, says Lim, when Michelle Bernstein moved in. “That raised a lot of confidence in the area,” he notes. “Many more restaurant people definitely became interested in the Boulevard. Everyone was trying to get into the Upper Eastside because they thought it was booming. They thought, ‘If a famous chef like Michelle thinks she can make it here, it must be hot.’”

Bernstein remembers it a little differently: “Everyone thought I was nuts to open in a developing area. I still have old regular customers from Azul come in and say it’s a mistake. Well, it’s my mistake. I want to be involved in my own neighborhood.”

Part of her commitment to improving the area is direct, like a recent commitment to a program called Common Threads. “I teach kids to cook. Johnson & Wales gave me a classroom, and we bus in kids from William Jennings Bryan Elementary School in North Miami every Monday.”

But much of Bernstein’s continued excitement about the Biscayne Corridor derives from the indirect beneficial effect she believes her restaurant and others nearby are having on the neighborhood. “Something about the area around Michy’s is starting to remind me of a city in miniature,” she says. “When you’re perceived as an exciting dining destination, it encourages a variety of other exciting new businesses. I can walk up Biscayne Boulevard from my home and find almost anything I need.”

Bernstein believes the Boulevard is slowly getting more pedestrian-friendly, too, as hot restaurants replace the hot pants. “My mother, when I was growing up in this neighborhood, would have never let me walk on Biscayne Boulevard because of all the hookers,” she recalls. “Now I see people walking dogs, even baby carriages on the Boulevard! That’s a sure sign people feel more comfortable.”

Some, however, see obstacles to the MiMo Historic District (from 50th to 77th Street) developing into a busy, walkable restaurant neighborhood. Down at his 55th Street Station complex, owner Mark Soyka, whom most credit with sparking the Upper Eastside’s revitalization by opening his namesake restaurant in 1998, confesses, “To be honest, I don’t consider the MiMo Historic District like the Design District. There will be little pockets of restaurants, but I never saw the reality of thousands of people walking up and down the sidewalks of Biscayne Boulevard.”

Or walking across Biscayne Boulevard. “It’s a vehicular thoroughfare that starts in Key West and goes to Canada,” Soyka observes. “Cars zoom up and down. You’ll probably stand there 20 minutes until the cars go away.”

MiMo Biscayne Association president Fran Rollason agrees, but thinks there’s a solution: more traffic lights. “For people to want to hang around before or after eating, and walk around to see what other businesses the neighborhood have to offer, they have to be able to get from one side of the street to the other safely and conveniently. No one’s going to walk four long blocks to the nearest light and then four blocks back to get to even a very interesting-looking place on the other side of the street.”

Unfortunately, she says, “We’ve met with FDOT [the Florida Department of Transportation] about having crosswalks on every block, and they say they have no money for more crosswalks. This was after a five-year-old boy got killed last year trying to cross Biscayne. Do you know what FDOT told us? That he should never have been in the street.”

The MiMo Association hasn’t given up. “Even properly timing the lights would help,” Rollason sighs. “But you know, everything needs a study. We talked with FDOT in January and February, and they set up another meeting for June.”

She does feel, though, that restaurants have benefited the Boulevard: “We now have 22 restaurants in the MiMo District’s 27 blocks, and they have attracted many new people here.” Restaurant owners also seem to be more involved in neighborhood development than other businesses, she reports. “About one-half of the MiMo Association’s 80 to 90 members are restaurants.”

* * *

One of those members is Kris Wessel. And if you’re looking for dramatic, living proof of how restaurants can spur the improvement of a neighborhood, you need look no further than the chef/owner of Red Light.

The name is a wry reference to the organic/sustainable/regional ingredient-driven new restaurant’s location in the heart of Biscayne Boulevard’s former red light district -- which is now, a year after Wessel opened, more a yellow light district. The unfinished but very cool transformation includes the adjacent Motel Blu, which houses the restaurant. “When I signed the lease three years ago, the motel’s tenants were largely hookers and drug dealers,” recounts Wessel, a longtime neighborhood resident. “Now the new owner has renovated 50 of the 65 rooms. There’s an immaculate pool my daughters love to swim in. There’s wireless. And the guests are conventioneers and other middle-America-type people from Idaho, Iowa, even Canada and Europe. They read about the great rates for a motel just a mile and a half from the beach, that even has a kinda cutting-edge restaurant, and they have no idea how dilapidated it used to be.”

The dilapidation included the Little River, which runs along Red Light’s north side. “See that oak?” Wessel asks, pointing to a massive tree on the bank opposite his restaurant. “There used to be a row of them that were so bent over that their tops were in the water, almost entirely stopping the flow of the river. So there was this still water full of garbage. I can’t even tell you how many shopping carts I pulled out of the water.”

Wessel took responsibility for getting the river cleaned up, becoming, as he describes it, “the biggest bitch in the MiMo Association. It took me about ten months of bitching to every city and state authority I could find to get the obstructing trees cut. But finally one day I heard chain saws.”

Today the river view from Red Light’s interior picture windows and long outdoor deck looks alluringly Deep South/tropical idyllic. Certainly the local diners relaxing over Wessel’s luscious BBQ shrimp (sautéed New Orleans-style) seem to think so. And the local wildlife seem happy with their renovated home, too. Many manatees, including a large herd, cruised by Red Light during the course of a two-hour interview.

“CBS came by a few weeks ago and did a documentary segment about the manatees, and the river, and the restaurant,” Wessel says proudly. “They called me a ‘super-star eco-chef.’”

It’s an apt moniker for New Orleans-raised Wessel, an FIU Hospitality School grad who garnered raves at fine-dining spots Liaison, an inventive New Orleans eatery in South Beach, and Elia, a Mediterranean restaurant in Bal Harbour. You might think that, with his reputation, financing for his new Biscayne Corridor restaurant wouldn’t be hard to find. But you’d have to rethink. “Back when I was looking for investors, the restaurant space -- well, see that window? Crackheads used to crawl through it to sleep. Investors I approached, all of them, looked at the location and my space, and they laughed,” Wessel grimaces.

“I kept saying to all them: ‘You can’t tell me that a restaurant with an outdoor deck on a river with 800-pound mammals swimming past isn’t someplace people are going to go to!’ But they couldn’t see it. Motel Blu’s former owners finally partnered with me for about 70 grand, but even they were skeptical.”

With no major money to restore and renovate the space, Wessel took an alternative approach: “When I see something missing, I try to do it myself.” The DIY renovation took two years. Wessel did it largely with his own two hands and a little help from friends, including Biscayne Corridor artist and resident Jeff Vaughn, who, says Wessel, “did the really hip design for food credit.”

It was hard work. “The last tenants, a Chinese restaurant, had a fire when they left,” Wessel recalls. “The whole place was a mess. The ceiling had gaping holes. The plumbing was old cast-iron pipes that all had to be replaced. At one point I had to put a 30-foot ladder in the water to paint this red side of the building by the river. My plans for developing my main thing, which is my food concept, are still behind at least six months because I was doing everything myself.”

All the work paid off when Wessel opened last spring with renovations not fully completed: “We were open for dinner only, three days a week, and the menu was just eight items. But people poured in immediately.”

By this past September, Red Light was open daily for dinner. It’s now open for lunch several weekdays, too. And the menu, which changes weekly, is greatly expanded, often featuring not just regional produce and seafood (the latter Wessel’s specialty), but ingredients like local goat, bought from a nearby supermarket. Wessel likes to support his neighbors.

Locals have been Red Light’s base so far, he says. “I did not have a single tourist in my first nine months.” But the CBS news clip seems to have helped spread the word to visitors staying in South Beach, too. “The past week,” he says, “I saw all these taxi cabs and town cars drive up, so I know they’re from hotels.”

The one somewhat jarring note amid the neighborhood ambiance is that Red Light has valet parking, necessary because of the motel’s small lot. But it’s only five bucks. And here’s an insider secret: You can self-park at the auto-parts store across the street without fear of being towed. “Don’t worry,” Wessel laughs. “I keep them supplied with cheeseburgers.”

* * *

You know how it always seems to go in undeveloped neighborhoods with potential. First the starving artists and others attracted by the low rents move in and create a unique scene. Then, once the buzz makes the area commercially viable, real estate prices rise, the starving artists are forced out, and before you know it the place has been homogenized by (in the immortal words of Frank Zappa) “a vast army of Plastic People.”

The Design District is already grown-up and high-rent, but Pacific Times’s Eismann is optimistic that the neighborhood, one of two Biscayne Corridor areas where a significant percentage of the limited real estate is controlled by one arts-loving visionary, will be protected from “big box” boredom. “That’ll never happen here,” he says. “What’s happening in the Design District is something unique for Miami. Look at the new retail stores. It’s not the Gap. You’ve got quality, individualistic stuff like Tomas Maier. Hats off to Craig Robins. He wouldn’t sell out to the generics.”

Just to southwest of the Design District, in Wynwood, historically a neighborhood of warehouses and working-class homes, artists began transforming rundown commercial spaces into studios and galleries more than ten years ago. Despite that, the area remained largely seedy and unappealing until it got its own visionary real estate developer -- Tony Goldman.

Goldman, who has acquired about 100 Wynwood properties, more than 20 within a newly created “Wynwood Café District,” plans to supplement the art spaces with restaurants, bars, and other entertainment amenities. He thinks Wynwood has the potential to be more successful as a draw than its uptown competition. “Wynwood is the emerging urban community here,” Goldman asserts. “It’s got grit and the arts. It’s got mystique. The Design District doesn’t set people up for surprise. It’s too neat. And it never generated street activity -- a necessity.”

Over the past three decades, Goldman has gained a reputation -- in New York City’s SoHo district and later in South Beach -- for painlessly redeveloping deteriorating neighborhoods that have what architects call “good bones.” He applies a formula that he says enhances a neighborhood’s character instead of obliterating it.

“We call it ‘gentlefying,’” says Goldman. “We don’t say ‘gentrifying.’ You need to understand what makes the neighborhood unique, and convince neighbors and local officials you’re going to preserve the neighborhood’s character. You need to understand the target market you’re trying to draw to the neighborhood. You need to decide what you see being there in ten years. Being in the vision business, you see the picture you’ve taken of the future.”

When the New York-based Goldman first saw Ocean Drive, during Miami Beach’s mid-1980s days as a drug capital and “God’s Waiting Room” for seniors, his vision was of something unique: “A real tropical community that brought a distinctive SoHo culture to SoBe.”

For Wynwood the picture is of “something that’s a cross between SoHo, a more downscale Tribeca, and an even grittier, cutting-edge Williamsburg in Brooklyn.” Definitely included in the picture is a starving artist eating pizza.

That would be at the Wynwood Café District’s first new restaurant, Joey’s Italian Café. Run by Goldman’s son Joey and Joey’s wife Thea, the casually artsy indoor/outdoor hangout serves bona fide Italian food at recession-level price. Pastas start at $5, salads at $3, pizzas at $7.

“Joey’s is really Joey and Thea’s concept,” says the elder Goldman, “but it follows the formula of gentlefying. When you do something neighborhood-driven, the price points are where they should be for the restaurant to succeed.”

After acquiring properties, opening restaurants is always an initial part of his “gentlefication,” says Goldman, whose current plans call for three additional eateries among his Wynwood properties. “The idea is to draw new people to a developing neighborhood, and nothing draws like a restaurant. People will go to a new area for food when they will not go for a frock or a painting.”

“Restaurants are igniters,” Thea adds. “A lot of people don’t understand art, but they do understand a plate of pasta.”

So far the formula seems to be working. Joey’s has been attracting about 150 people per day, says Thea, some from a surprising distance. “People drive down regularly from Palm Beach. I wouldn’t have expected that.”

But she’s most excited about the restaurant’s local draw. “It’s not just artists and gallerists who come,” she says. “We get the Koreans from NW 5th Avenue. And there’s a substantial Puerto Rican population; they may ask for a cortadito, but they’re making do with our espresso. Which is thrilling, because the whole idea of Joey’s was to service the community, to have a meeting place for people who live and work in this community.”

In fact Tony Goldman’s formula demonstrates that a restaurant’s beneficial economic effect can go beyond the restaurant itself. In both SoBe and SoHo, he formed neighborhood associations to “gentlefy” surrounding blocks. And so it goes at Joey’s, which in January hosted the first meeting of the new Wynwood Arts District Association. “What we’re working on now is cleaning the streets, lighting the streets, and securing the streets,” Thea explains. “Right now, in partnership with Constance Margulies and her Lotus House shelter for women, we’re raising money so we can hire the homeless women to clean the streets.”

“It’s a bootstrapping approach,” says her father-in-law. “Instead of hiring a street-cleaning company, we engage with the neighborhood by hiring street people. They need jobs. Neighborhoods need clean streets to be appealing to pedestrians. We’re working on getting the streets lit, too. If a neighborhood has light and clean streets, you’re well on your way. Next we’re planning to have the street people carry walkie-talkies and keep an eye on the neighborhood, sort of serve as security. We may do some roving cars, too.”

All this may take ten years to fully develop, but Goldman isn’t worried that, in the meantime, the area’s somewhat forbidding ambiance will prove detrimental to Joey’s business. “A visiting New Yorker won’t be concerned about the neighborhood,” he laughs. “And for people who live here, it gives dinner a little touch of adventure.” Just a touch, though. There’s free valet parking at night.

“We’ve succeeded for over 30 years with our formula, and I’ve never failed,” Goldman says confidently. “You just need patience, vision, and balls -- and you have to be willing to hang in for as long as it takes. We’re neighborhood-builders. We don’t give up on anything.”

* * *

So how will our Biscayne Corridor restaurant boom fare in the long run? FIU’s David Talty is cautious, noting that in the past he’s been a restaurateur himself. “If you’re going to start a new restaurant, statistics show the mortality rate is 80 percent,” he says. “You have to realize that the target market you’re going after when opening a restaurant isn’t hundreds of people. It’s thousands.”

And not just any thousands. “For restaurants that are not quick-service chains, you need for success a high density of residents with a relatively high disposable income, living between one and five miles from the restaurant. Personally,” he adds, “I wouldn’t open a restaurant in the Biscayne Corridor.”

Where instead? “Kendall or the Gables. Those areas have a heck of a lot higher potential customer base,” he says. “And the Biscayne Corridor being a hot restaurant locale is a relatively new phenomenon. There’s speculation that the Design District is already approaching the oversaturation point. It’ll be interesting to see how many restaurants in the Design District survive. I say wait two years and see.”

“Talty is right in a very conservative model of a restaurant, but he’s shooting from a point of real safety,” counters Jonathan Eismann, who opened the first Pacific Time (which lasted 14 years), as well as the second, in emerging but far from fully developed areas. “If you want a restaurant that’s forward-thinking, the conservative model isn’t looking at the big picture. In 12 to 18 months, the Design District will be Miami’s most important dining destination. Just wait. You’ll see it coming.”

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