MIAGuide
The Best Restaurants On 163rd Street
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings
163rd Street might just be the most deliciously interesting street in Miami. The stretch of road from the Golden Glades Interchange to Collins Avenue has some of the best Chinese food in the city—but it's also home to Korean, Thai, Haitian, Honduran, Peruvian, Uzbek, and some great Asian markets too. You can get your food passport stamped a dozen times in the span of three miles. It's all refreshingly affordable too.
THE SPOTS
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings
Panya Thai is our favorite Thai restaurant in Miami by far. Every dish here—from the jumping squid to the boat noodle soup—is stellar. Service is also friendly and fast. The menu is big, diverse, and each dish is so good you won’t mind that you’re eating it in a windowless dining room that probably has some 24/7 news network playing on mute. If you’re at all in the mood for Thai, Panya is well worth traveling across town for.
On any given night at King Palace, you’re bound to find large round tables of people gathered around a lazy susan full of Chinese-style barbecue, which can be hard to find in Miami. This is definitely the place to get great char siu and Peking duck, along with crispy pork belly and soy sauce chicken. However, if you’re looking for more than just an endless supply of roast meats, the drunken chicken or jellyfish salad (both served cold) is an ideal way to start the meal. The stir-fried scallops with lily bulbs and sliced lotus root with Cantonese sausage, bacon, and ham are also two excellent things to order alongside your barbecue feast.
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings
Korean food might be one of the most underrepresented cuisines in Miami-Dade County. In fact, we can only think of one place doing classic Korean dishes justice, and it’s Korean Kitchen. The 163rd spot makes a proper bibimbap served in a hot stone bowl, some of our favorite wings in Miami, outstanding kimchi, budae jjigae, and massive bingsoo perfect for a hot day. There are lots more dishes you won’t find done this well anywhere else in town on the menu. And both the little dining room and outdoor patio are ideal spots to get very full with a few friends and a couple bottles of soju.
photo credit: TASTY PLANET
This casual Korean fried chicken spot used to be a great excuse to drive to Davie. It still is, but if you’d rather not commute to Broward, good news: there’s one in North Miami Beach too. In addition to french fries, the takeout-friendly menu is pretty much all fried chicken. Pick from tenders, drumsticks, wings, gizzards, or a whole chicken, chopped and served family-style. Then you've got to pick a sauce and whether you’d like it smothered in sliced onions, scallions, bburinkle cheese powder, or none of the above. If you can handle heat, get the red hot—a dark red sauce that burns, but also makes it worth your trouble with flavor too. Add a side of the snow sauce too, which is a delicious creamy white sauce that helps cool things down.
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings
This little takeout spot inside the iFresh Asian market does, in fact, have some seafood boil options. But you're coming here for their Chinese barbecue. The Peking duck is excellent, as is the soy sauce chicken and roast pork. Feel free to point to any other shiny meat you see hanging behind the glass—it's probably very good too. There are a couple picnic tables in the quiet space in case you want to eat there. And Mi Tea, a great tea shop, is just down the hall for all your beverage needs.
We’re cheating just a smidge on this one. This casual Honduran restaurant isn’t located exactly on 163rd Street, but on a street that runs parallel to it. Jennifer’s makes a proper baleada with really good refried black beans and globs of mantequilla. But what we really love here is their pollo frito ceibeño, a fried chicken leg quarter smothered in a tomato sauce and showered with shreds of a sharp cheese. It’s served with freshly fried green banana chips and a colorful cabbage salad with a pile of cilantro.
Kabobji makes some of the best Lebanese food in Miami. Entrees mostly focus on grilled meats and seafood, including a tender shish tawouk (chicken kabob) and thin slices of flavorful shawarma. The mezze here, however, is where you should focus. You can make a whole meal out of the dips and appetizers, but on top of classics like hummus and baba ganoush (both of which are excellent), there are also cabbage rolls stuffed with beef and Egyptian rice, labneh, and a variety of Middle Eastern sausages like makanek and sujuk. Make sure to order the jallab too, a date syrup drink made with rose water and sprinkled with pine nuts.
Dumpling King is one of those places where you can get a whole bunch of very solid dumplings for less than $10. You won’t have to worry about still being hungry afterward—the pan-fried dumplings are huge and stuffed generously with chicken, pork, beef, or vegetables. We like the soup dumplings a lot too, which are also the size of small water balloons and filled with lava-hot deliciousness. It’s casual and works for easy weeknight takeout or a dine-in dumpling feast.
This Peruvian restaurant serves excellent traditional Limeño dishes like lomo saltado and papas a la huancaína, but it’s the more innovative dishes that are the real draw here. Quinoa-crusted shrimp with tart Amazonian camu camu syrup is something you’ll rarely find outside of Peru. There is even a dish of corvina in a Peruvian ají chutney that really works. The menu also features many pasta and risotto dishes.
This is one of the best places in Miami to get a mapo tofu that makes your whole face tingle. The dan dan noodles are another specialty that CY does really well: bouncy noodles in a spicy sauce with ground meat and pickled mustard greens. The dining room is a little fancier than some of the other Chinese restaurants on this guide, so keep it in mind for a sit-down meal.
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings
Ohla's tea options are not only delicious, but highly customizable. You can choose the exact percentage of sweetness for each drink, whether you want it topped with cheese foam (you do), and the boba choices are plentiful. This place makes one of our absolute favorite taro milk teas, if that's what you're into. And they have food too—a small but tasty menu of hot dogs, dumplings, and egg waffles with ice cream. It's quiet, relaxing, and a good coffee shop alternative to bring your laptop and get some work done.
Once you cross from North Miami Beach into Sunny Isles, the restaurants become more Slavic and Central Asian, including this excellent Uzbek spot. Chayhana is named after the tea houses found throughout Uzbekistan where folks gather on beds to sip tea and chat. And the interior evokes that. The traditional Uzbek dishes include lamb and pumpkin manty, a lamb and rice pilaf, stir-fried lagman beef noodles, and a variety of kabobs. The rest of the menu is a mix of Russian, Georgian, Armenian, and Ukrainian dishes, including chicken tabaka that’s cooked under a brick so it’s nice and crispy.
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings
If we wake up and decide it's a dim sum day, then Sang’s is at the tippy top of our list. They offer dim sum every day from 11am-4pm—not just on the weekends—and it’s so good. There are over 40 dim sum plates to pick from—lots of dumplings, buns, and congee. The tables are also big enough to accommodate the extra six things you probably didn’t need to order. Just please be sure to get the general Cheng's chicken (their take on general Tso’s). Each piece of chicken is covered in a sweet, glossy sauce but somehow stays very crispy.
This Haitian restaurant is in a tiny strip mall behind a Taco Bell. The takeout-only spot is often packed, but the line moves swiftly as customers grab boxes of fritay, stews, and other Creole dishes. If you’re running short on time, get something from the steam counter, like a solid legim, ble, or mayi kole, and you’ll be out in minutes. They also have buttery baked pate. The fritay takes a little longer since everything is fried to order, but it’s worth the wait.
