MIAReview
Eating House
Maturity is good when it comes to dining choices. Without it, you might be eating cereal for dinner with friends who just discovered they can use Totino’s Pizza Rolls as a pizza topping. But we all have to grow up at some point. That’s what Eating House did after it closed and reopened a year and a half later in Giralda Plaza—and it’s better for it.
The previous version of Eating House was a pop-up-turned-restaurant that served the kind of dishes one might attempt to create in a kitchen at 3am. It threw big parties on April 20, hung graffiti art on the walls, mixed Tang mimosas for brunch, and paired steak with a blueberry teriyaki sauce they called "blueberryaki."
Today’s Eating House is quite the contrast—with plain white walls decorated with long mirrors. The bare dining room is filled with black chairs and tables. It evokes corporate buzzwords like “streamlined” and “optimized.”
But the restaurant still knows how to have fun with its food. This is most obvious in their rotating tasting menu, which experiments with dishes that pay homage to classic Miami restaurants like Knaus Berry Farm and Tropical Chinese. The regular dinner menu also still has some Eating House originals such as the heirloom tomatoes with frozen coconut milk and the brussels sprouts caesar. But at the new Eating House, those sorts of dishes aren’t the best things to order. The menu’s standouts are now the seemingly simple items like Parker House rolls, rigatoni, and a perfect NY strip.
Going to Eating House feels a lot like learning about behavioral economics from that one kid who ate Play-Doh in high school. It's come a long way. And even though it still lets loose from time to time (there are Cap’n Crunch pancakes on the brunch menu), it also understands that just because you can add Totino’s to a pizza doesn’t mean you should.
Food Rundown
photo credit: Eating House
Parker House Rolls
These are Parker House rolls that also give strong biscuit vibes. They’re fluffy, flakey, very buttery, and showcase the kind of subtle creativity we like about Eating House.
Buffalo Carrots
Carrots are tossed in a carrot hot sauce and stacked like wings on top of gorgonzola and worcester. The buffalo-style carrots were inspired by Sports Grill's chicken wings. And at the risk of pissing off all of South Miami, that carrot hot sauce makes them even better than the original. It’s one of our favorite dishes here.
Housemade Rigatoni
So many wonderful textures are happening here. It’s creamy from the broccoli pesto and crunchy from breadcrumbs. It’s deliciously garlicky, but could use a little lemon zest to cut through the rich pesto. Still, it’s a big portion we’ll happily attempt to finish.
Grilled Prime NY Strip
Steak on a plate—not very imaginative, but it doesn’t need to be with steak this good. It starts with quality ingredients: prime beef sourced from South Dakota that’s perfectly seasoned, expertly crosshatched, and grilled to the right temperature. They’re cooking flawless steakhouse quality steaks here.