Brasserie Laurel

There are moments during dinner when you get to meet the restaurant Brasserie Laurel wants to be. It’s there, in dishes like the foie gras, which is scored with the alien precision of a crop circle, sprinkled with cocoa nibs, and paired with a perfect canelé soaked in berry gastrique. 

It is beautiful and delicious. Salty and sweet. It lives up to Laurel’s mission statement of serving “French-inspired Miami cuisine.” 

But a delightful dish or two aside, what you end up meeting is the restaurant Brasserie Laurel actually is: a stiff, expensive place white-knuckling so hard for perfection that it’s forgotten to have any fun at all.

photo credit: FujiFIlmGirl

photo credit: Courtesy Brasserie Laurel

photo credit: Courtesy Brasserie Laurel

Brasserie Laurel is the debut restaurant of the Miami Worldcenter, a 27-acre mixed-use development that supposedly cost around $4 billion and erased entire blocks of Downtown Miami in the process. Almost everything about it projects aristocratic sophistication—particularly the price point. The menu’s most substantial entrees soar over $100. Inside the sanitized dining room, a soundtrack of old French songs makes us feel a bit like an old wooden marionette. The staff seem so intensely dedicated to providing a monocle-worthy fine dining experience that one gets the feeling a dropped fork could send them all to their knees, sobbing. It makes it a bit hard to relax during the meal. 

And yet certain details of the restaurant—the boring tableware, the cloudy ice cubes in the watery cocktails, the generic Bic you’ll be provided to sign your formidable tab—seem to have missed the fine dining memo entirely. The dense pucks they drop in front of you for bread service vary wildly in size, leaving you to negotiate for half of your dining partner’s roll. The focal point of the menu, a $150 boeuf en croûte, is encased in dough that’s not fully cooked through.

There is a great restaurant trapped underneath Brasserie Laurel’s tense, knotted muscles. It’s there. You can’t have a meal here without tasting at least some sort of sauce that will send a message of joy from your tongue to your brain. But you’ll also encounter as many mistakes as miracles on the plate. Laurel can dance but it’s so afraid of stepping on its partner’s toes that it can’t loosen up and do something—anything—interesting.

Food Rundown

photo credit: FujiFIlmGirl

Foie Gras

Fascinating flavor combinations, a generous portion of foie gras, visually impressive plating—this is the kind of dish we wish Brasserie Laurel had more of.

photo credit: FujiFIlmGirl

Boeuf En Croûte

The pastry encasing the meat is soggy and borderline raw in the middle. And that meat is sliced too thick to easily cut with the glorified butter knife they generously refer to as a “steak knife.” This dish is nowhere near it needs to be to justify its $150 price. Plus, it only feeds two and comes with zero sides.

photo credit: FujiFIlmGirl

Frog Legs

This handful of lollipopped frog legs are fun little bites, but they’re also a bit too chewy and gone in approximately seven seconds.

Turbot

It’s a solid dish that’s more memorable for its plating—two dueling sauces arranged in a sort of yin-yang pattern—than its flavor. Everything on the plate is executed pretty well, and yet it’s still hard to get excited about. It just doesn’t impress like a $50-plus entree should.

photo credit: FujiFIlmGirl

Venison

No complaints about the interior of the venison, which is tender and soft enough to cut with that silly little house “steak” knife. But the exterior crust is tough and leathery to the point where it’s almost inedible.