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We’ve Got The Art Week Reservations You Forgot To Book
Visit us at the Chase Sapphire Lounge at SLS South Beach, and we'll help you get a table at some of our favorite Miami restaurants during Art Week.
Presented by
Chase Sapphire
There's a lot to keep track of at Art Week, from art fairs and concerts, to parties and whether or not NFTs are still a thing. But, you'll also want to eat in some of Miami's hottest restaurants. That's where we can help. Chase Sapphire Reserve cardmembers are invited to join us at The Infatuation's Dining Concierge at the Chase Sapphire Lounge on Friday, December 2nd, from 11am to 3pm at SLS South Beach. We'll help you book exclusive brunch and dinner reservations at 23 of our favorite Miami restaurants. We'll also have expert restaurant recommendations for every situation -- whether you're in the mood for Italian, want seafood with a waterfront view, need a spot in Wynwood, or just want to feel like you're at a private dinner party. Check out the full list of restaurants, with reservations only available at the Chase Sapphire Lounge during Art Week.
THE SPOTS
Jaguar Sun
You can go to Jaguar Sun just to drink, but if you sit in their little dining room, it feels more like a restaurant than a bar. And once the outstanding food shows up alongside your excellent drinks, it’s clear this place takes both of those aspects very seriously. Any order here should start with the Parker House rolls with honey butter, which are soft and sweet and will make you consider ordering five more and just telling people you’re carbo-loading for some imaginary race. After that, the menu is mostly pasta-focused and it’s all very delicious. Jaguar Sun is one of our favorite places for a fun dinner in all of Miami, because it hits that energetic sweet spot: it's upbeat enough to make you feel like you went out, but won’t have you waking up the next morning with ringing in your ears.
Los Felix
At some point during dinner at Los Félix, you may forget you’re at a restaurant. It could happen while chatting with the staff, who have seemingly graduated with a master’s degree in The Art Of The Dinner Party. Or it might happen when the lights cut out and the disco ball starts spinning, making the entire restaurant feel like a very fun living room. Like any great host, Los Félix leaves you basically no choice but to relax and have fun. But once the plates start hitting the table, the dinner party illusion fades away. Because the food at the laidback Coconut Grove Mexican restaurant is better than the sweaty cheese plate you’ll encounter at a friend’s house. And it is this effortlessly fun energy combined with some really excellent dishes like sope, crudo, tostada, and tetela that make Los Félix such a great spot.
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings
If Los Felix is like a very fun dinner party, Krüs Kitchen, directly above it, is the extra bottle of wine on the couch once the plates have been cleared. It is a space so relaxing and intimate that it feels like shoes should be optional (which they, thankfully, are not.) While Los Félix focuses on Mexican dishes, the only through line at Krüs is seasonality. The menu (which changes with the seasons) ranges from pasta to crudo to grilled vegetables. Dishes are centered around fresh ingredients—embellished with fancy-sounding things that add layers of flavor, but never outshine the main stars on the plate.
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings
Tropezón is an Andalusian gin and tapas bar on Española Way. And not only is it worth weaving through the street’s omnipresent crowd of tourists, but it’s one of our favorite spots in South Beach. The space—a 50/50 split between a bar and dining room—has a snug interior featuring lots of wood and legs of jamón hanging from the ceiling. In other words: exactly the kind of spot where you can spend a couple hours grazing on small plates and sipping gin. They have a selection of infused gin, ranging from mango to nori and shio kombu. The food menu is mostly tapas, like a yuzu kosho tortilla and pan con tomate, but there are also larger entrees like a coffee-rubbed ribeye and arroz al horno. Whether you come to drink or eat (or, ideally, both) this is the reservation to make next time you need a fun night out involving gin.
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings
We tend to be as suspicious of big Wynwood restaurants as we are of an unknown number that wants to talk to us about the money we’re owed by the IRS. But Doya is a wonderful surprise, and dinner here is as delightful as finding out the IRS does, in fact, owe you $5,000. There’s really nothing we don’t enjoy about Doya. The big Aegean restaurant has some lovely outdoor seating and a spacious dining room that’s pretty enough for a date but casual enough for an easy Wednesday dinner. The best part about Doya, though, is the food. The menu is a huge list of very good meze plates. The octopus in the octopus salad is as tender as fresh mozzarella, the lamb kebab is beautifully cooked, and the huge mussels are served in a perfectly balanced wine and garlic sauce.
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings
Macchialina
Even though the menu changes occasionally, we always know what to expect at Macchialina: Italian dishes (mostly pasta) that feel like a final draft, edited to near perfection without so much as one superfluous fragment of parmesan on the plate. Food aside, Macchialina is just always a thoroughly enjoyable experience—which makes it all the more valuable in South Beach, a neighborhood where it's too easy to have a thoroughly unenjoyable experience. But at Macchialina, the service is excellent, the drinks are great, and the restaurant's indoor and outdoor seating is exactly where you want to spend a night eating Miami’s best pasta.
L’atelier De Joël Robuchon
L’Atelier in the Design District is a fine dining French spot that’s a guaranteed impressive dinner. The restaurant has a cool, futuristic interior and counter seating with a great view of the open kitchen. The food is rich and decadent (prepare for lots of foie gras) but also fun, interesting, and gorgeously plated. They have some pricey tasting menu options that won’t disappoint, but if you’re going a la carte, make sure to get the kampachi sashimi and le foie gras au torchon, a little puck of the best foie gras you’ll ever have with slices of buttery grilled brioche so you can assemble your own toast. The menu does change seasonally, so if you don’t see those two dishes—don’t panic. Whatever you have here is going to be some of the most memorable food you’ve eaten all year. Oh, and also quite expensive.
Le Jardinier
Le Jardinier is the sister restaurant to L’Atelier, located right below it, and connected by a gorgeous spiral staircase. The restaurant - which looks and feels a bit like a spaceship - is far from casual, but it’s a little less showy than L’ Atelier. Still, the menu (which changes seasonally) is every bit as sophisticated. Another difference at Le Jardinier is that many of the dishes here focus on vegetables and seafood. They do things with beets, cauliflower, and turnips that’ll make you very happy. It’s all very fine dining-y, though, with beautifully plated food and great service.
photo credit: Photo Courtesy Michael's
Michael's Genuine
Michael’s Genuine was the first restaurant that made people want to eat in the Design District when it opened in 2006, and it’s still one of the neighborhood’s best spots. It’s a great place to sit outside for brunch on a nice day, and is equally good for a proper sit-down dinner. Michael’s one of the few upscale options in the Design District that doesn’t feel designed for people with yacht brokers, and their mostly American menu includes some great proteins—especially the massive whole roasted tuna collar.
photo credit: Tasty Planet
Amara At Paraiso
People visiting Miami tend to be overwhelmed by the urge to eat next to a body of water. This can be dicey in Miami, since so many of those spots are pretty awful and overpriced. But Amara At Paraiso not only has one of Miami’s best waterfront views, it actually makes an effort when it comes to the food, too. The menu is pretty much all seafood, with a small raw bar and a great grilled snapper. Come during the day if you really want to see the view in all its glory—and make a reservation at The Infatuation’s Dining Concierge if you want a guaranteed outdoor table.
Editor Pizza
The food at Editor Pizza—mostly pasta, salads, and pizza—is all various levels of good. But it’s also not the biggest reason to come here. We really like this place because it’s casual yet stylish, fun but not cosplaying as a nightclub, and (for the neighborhood it's in) reasonably priced. That kind of restaurant is an exceedingly rare breed in South Beach. So you should definitely have this place on your radar for a weeknight dinner with friends, a date, or splitting an impressively large fettuccine bolognese and having a few negronis before a night out. The restaurant is located inside the Urbanica Hotel, and has a narrow dining room that feels like a classic bistro. The indoor/outdoor space has high ceilings, warm lighting that'll hide the pimple that decided to make its debut three hours before dinner, and curtains on the windows, so you won’t get distracted by tourists racing their rental cars up and down 5th Street.
Orilla Bar & Grill
Orilla is a great place to finally debut that outfit you’ve had planned in your head for like three months now. Not that there’s a strict dress code at the South of Fifth Argentinian spot—it’s actually quite laid-back. But Orilla is the kind of stylish, cool restaurant where you and your adventurous shirt will feel appreciated. Also, the food happens to be great. We’ve very much enjoyed the arancini, roast chicken, and excellent wagyu cheeseburger. The cocktails here are also outstanding—just be careful not to spill any of this stuff on that nice outfit of yours.
photo credit: Rami Sabban
NIU Kitchen
This Catalan spot is one of our favorite restaurants in the entire city. It’s also a great place to relax after a long day with a bottle of wine and some of the most interesting food in Miami. Order liberally, because everything here is very good. But definitely make sure the cold tomato soup with mustard ice cream and the ous—a bowl of poached eggs and truffled potato foam—are on the table too.
photo credit: Michael Stavaridis
The River Oyster Bar
Sitting at the bar here with a dozen oysters in front of you is a good call, whether you’re looking for a seafood-heavy dinner or just trying to hide from the truly hideous rush-hour traffic that circles this place like a shark without car insurance. But whether or not you’re here for cheap Happy Hour oysters or the outstanding raw bar, it’s one of the best (and least pretentious) restaurants in Brickell. They have a pretty big menu, but anything that used to live in the ocean is going to be good here.
Zitz Sum
This is the reservation to make in Miami when life feels mundane, and you’re going to scream if you see one more grilled octopus on a menu. Zitz Sum shocks us out of routine—and not just because their chili oil is perfectly calibrated. The food here is unlike anything else in the city. Dishes are influenced by Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Lao, and other Asian cultures. The menu has perfect dumplings and a brisket sheng jian bao made us forget everything we learned in kindergarten about sharing. And because the menu changes constantly, dinner here is still exciting even if you come on a weekly basis. Zitz Sum has not only managed to breathe fresh air into Coral Gables, but all of Miami-Dade County.
Azabu
You’ll find Azabu inside The Stanton hotel, and if you’re looking for a fancy night out in South Beach involving raw fish, it’s a solid choice. Azabu isn’t cheap, but it is delicious. It’s cozy and dim, with indoor and outdoor seating,as well as a special private dining room called The Den, which is where Azabu’s omakase takes place. A meal there will cost somewhere around $150-220 per person, but you can still have a great dinner just ordering things like thinly-sliced sliced hamachi jalapeño and the nigiri platter a la carte.
Abbalé Telavivian Kitchen
Abbalé Telavivian Kitchen is an Israeli restaurant in South of Fifth that’s an excellent choice for a weekend brunch or lazy lunch—especially if it's a nice day and you want to eat outside. The brunch menu includes a great shakshuka or Jerusalem bagel. The lunch menu has more good dishes, like crispy falafel and roasted local fish. But even if you got stuck on the causeway and missed the 4:30pm lunch cut off, don’t turn around and go home. Dinner here is tasty too, especially if you order the shawarma spiced wagyu.
Ariete
Ariete is the perfect place to engage in some classic Miami indulgence while still feeling like a classy adult. Everything on the menu is fantastic, but if you're coming here to celebrate or just want dinner to feel like a special occasion in and of itself, get the canard a la presse, AKA the duck press. They wheel this medieval-looking machine to the table and use it to compress various parts of the duck into a deep, rich sauce. They then use that sauce to smother the absolute best duck you’ll ever taste in your life. The meal, which costs around $135 and serves two, also comes with flaky duck pastelitos, and more rotating sides that utilize every millimeter of the duck and its various parts. The stunningly good monkfish wellington is also a great move.
Beaker & Gray
For almost as long as Wynwood has been a place where people want to eat, Beaker & Gray has been one of the neighborhood’s best options. The versatile restaurant is a good call whether you want a casual weeknight dinner or drinks and food before you go out. You could throw darts at their menu and most likely hit something very good, like the cheeseburger croquettes we could eat like movie theater popcorn. They have more Latin-inspired alongside very recognizable things like pork belly, octopus, and fried chicken. It’s good for big groups or parties of two, and the place is also part cocktail bar, which should trick your brain into thinking you went out and make you feel better about not leaving the house for the next week.
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings
Klaw makes you feel sophisticated. And that’s not just because they serve beautiful dry-aged steaks and deshell your king crab legs tableside with a fancy pair of scissors. No, even if this place served chicken nuggets and Easy Mac, we’d still put on nice clothes to come here. The restaurant is located in a gorgeous and historic Edgewater building with waterfront views, both in the indoor dining room and on the bar’s outdoor patio. The renovated dining room is spacious, and not so aesthetically busy that you can’t appreciate architecture like the huge arched windows that all point towards Biscayne Bay. Klaw isn’t cheap—you’re coming here for $100-plus steaks and fancy shellfish. It’s a business dinner/special occasion kind of restaurant. But the food is very good, the service is excellent, and the entire experience is worthy of the very dignified building it’s in.
La Mar by Gaston Acurio
La Mar is a restaurant on the mysterious millionaire island known as Brickell Key. They serve some of the best Peruvian food in town, and their waterfront view is also stellar—so good that it's almost not even worth coming here unless you can sit outside. It faces west, giving you a wide-open view of Biscayne Bay and the Brickell skyline. When you're not staring at that, you'll be staring at the food in front of you, which includes very good traditional Peruvian ceviche. They also make a great lomo saltado and have rotating anticucho options, including an excellent version with veal heart.
photo credit: Karli Evans
The Bazaar by José Andrés
The Bazaar is an upscale restaurant inside the SLS South Beach. The dining room looks like a library doing cabaret - and the food isn’t any less showy. Expect foams and dry ice and odd little dishes that pack a lot of flavor. It’s the kind of restaurant someone might unironically describe as “whimsical.” But unlike other gimmicky restaurants, the food here is very good. You might leave slightly hungry since portions are small, but you’ll be thinking about some of these dishes for a while.
With locations everywhere from the Bahamas to Dubai, Katsuya has become the universal symbol of “see and be seen” sushi. It's a solid choice for sushi enthusiasts—especially if you’re looking for a nice, sit-down dinner just a few steps away from Art Week events.