What's Good Miami

Most developers talk about square footage. Alison Greenfield talks about soul.

She walked into the Moore to meet me in a big hat with a bigger smile, and within ten minutes we were arguing about AI, Darwin and whether this generation has any grit. Then we got to real estate, and she was the most precise person in the room.

Thirty years in. Born in Pittsburgh, Barnard for college, then Parsons for a master’s in architecture in her late 20s, because contractors kept nodding at her and building something else.

WHAT’S GOOD? THE LEFTOVERS: RESTAURANT HEAT INDEX, VOL. 03

I walked into a new restaurant this week that has everything. Great operators, a beautiful build, food I would go back for. I would also bet the rent is north of $50,000 a month. That is a lot of espresso martinis.

That is the math of eating out in Miami right now. Milk costs more. Electric costs more. Staff costs more. And your customer will walk to the coffee shop next door to save a quarter. This was one of the hardest restaurant summers in recent memory, and not just here.

The Heat Index is not a list of the best restaurants in Miami. It is a list of the restaurants that matter most right now: the rooms people are talking about, booking, and texting their friends about. We build it with The Leftovers, Matt Meltzer, Erin Michelle Newberg and Ollie Fowler. We argue it out on the podcast, and the result is a ranked list of the restaurants generating the most heat in the city. Every spot is tagged. Best of Best is the elite. On Fire is the momentum. Classic is the institutions that still hold the room. New is the openings that earned a place fast. No placement is for sale. Taste is not for sale.

Every pick is judged against nine rules. Is it built to last or just trending? Are the people behind it actually in the building? Does the craft earn the return visit? Does the price earn its keep? Did Miami make it? Would you tell a friend about it without being asked? The list changes every volume because the city does. The Preheating Index tracks the ten rooms that just opened or are about to, the ones most likely to show up next time. When a restaurant drops off, it hasn’t failed. The heat just moved. So does Miami.

Season is weeks away. Which means The Heat Index is back. Not the best restaurants in Miami. The ones that matter most right now.

I recorded this edition with The Leftovers, Matt Meltzer and Erin Michelle Newberg. Ollie Fowler was frolicking in Massachusetts. She is the one who keeps us honest, and it shows.

What’s Good Podcast Episode #29: Kobi Karp, Architect Behind Everything in Miami. The Surf Club. The Shore Club. The Raleigh. And sooooo much more.

In 1990, Carlos Rosso was building the airport in Dubai. There was nothing there but sand. Thirty five years later he is doing the same thing in Midtown. Less sand. More padel.

Carlos is the founder and CEO of Rosso Development and the former president of condo development at Related Group. By his own count he has had his hands on roughly 20,000 condos in South Florida. “It’s an absurd number,” he told me. He’s right. Now he is building the Standard Residences and Midtown Park, which is about to double the size of a neighborhood most people couldn’t find on a map twenty years ago.

Lee Schrager has never met a no he couldn’t turn into a yes.

He’ll tell you that himself. When I asked what he wants people to say about him at his funeral, he didn’t hesitate: “No is just a starting place.” He thinks it might end up on his tombstone. I think it already explains everything.

Lee founded the Food Network South Beach and New York City Wine & Food Festivals. He’s Chief Communications Officer at Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, and he’s the closest thing this city has to a godfather of food. He’s also an old friend and I have been looking forward to sitting down with him since I started What’s Good Miami.

The Perigon on Collins. Cipriani Residences in Brickell. Little Palm Island in the Keys. Now Banyan Tree Residences in West Palm, the brand’s first residential project in the United States. I sat down with Camilo Miguel Jr., CEO and founder of Mast Capital, at the What’s Good Studio at The Moore for this week’s Good Company interview. Turns out we were born in the same hospital in Manhasset. Here is what stuck.

Miguel put it plainly: “I ask my team all the time, do you wish you were sitting there? Do you wish you were laying by that pool? And the answer needs to be yes.”

What’s Good Podcast with Gil Dezer, Sunny Isles Builder with the Last Pepsi in the Desert

Six Trump towers. Porsche Design Tower. Armani Residences. Now Bentley Residences, rising on that same strip right now. I sat down with Gil Dezer for this week’s Good Company interview and covered a lot of ground. Here is what stuck.

Dezer put it plainly: “It’s amazing how people can drive by the same street all day long and think it’s junk, but another person can have a completely different vision.”

Interview with Dorsia Founder Marc Lotenberg, and co-founders Josh Stern & Gabriella Shteiman

Building Impeccable Taste Into Impeccable Infrastructure

I have known Marc Lotenberg for twenty years. Before Dorsia, before Surface, before the W days at Conde Nast, he was running 944 out of Miami and I was building my own thing on the other side of that same media world. Josh Stern I go back with too, through his I Know the Chef days, back when getting a table at Carbone meant knowing somebody who knew somebody. Gabriella Shteiman, a co-founder as well, is new to our crew and just weeks into Miami, but already fluent in the brand.

The three of them run Dorsia, the membership platform that has quietly become the reservation infrastructure for the world’s best restaurants and, increasingly, the operating system underneath the world’s most exclusive clubs, festivals, and experiences. We sat down for this week’s Good Company interview and covered a lot of ground. Here is what stuck.

New Series Alert: Life in Short Form w/ Zoli Honig, Miami Entrepreneurship, Technology, & Life from the Frontlines

COVID shut the world down and opened a door for me instead.

I arrived at Reef Technology, through a teams call, not knowing a soul, and Zoli Honig was on the other side of the line. Reef raised over two billion dollars and was the largest startup in Miami. Sixteen of us were on a Microsoft Teams call at 8am every morning trying to keep it standing. Zoli was the one person in the building who already knew short form video was going to change everything. He taught me how it’s was done. I returned the favor.

We are done keeping those conversations off the record. Life in Short Form is a new monthly series I am launching with Zoli, taped out of the What’s Good Studio at the Moore. No script. No polish. Two guys who met as employees, went out and built our own things, and stuck around long enough to watch this city change shape in real time.

We both thought we could get rich living inside someone else’s dream. Turns out, like most things worth having, you only get there by doing it yourself, risk and all. That is the path to the money. It is also the path to fulfillment, and we didn’t understand that until we were already on it.

Building a Small Business in Miami

Every transplant from New York says the same thing in year one. Nothing moves. Zoli calls it the Miami stupid tax. Nobody calls you back same day.

Zoli’s wife closed her first real estate deal here and the clients called her the best agent they’d ever worked with. She didn’t do anything extraordinary. She showed up on time. She answered her texts. As Woody Allen said “eighty percent of success is showing up.” In Miami, showing up puts you in the top ten percent.

That gap is the opportunity.

“Hustle plus insight plus AI, you should be hitting grand slams.”

Miami also runs twelve to eighteen months behind New York, LA, and San Francisco on execution speed, even while it exports culture faster than many of them. Put an understanding of AI on top showing and the math breaks wide open. You can do damage here with that combination, that is rarely possible anywhere.

The Origin Story

Zoli built three companies before Reef ever knew his name. One landed him on Shark Tank with a deal from Mr. Wonderful. Say those two words to him now and his eyes roll into the back of his head. He could split the atom tomorrow and Shark Tank would still be the only line anyone remembers.

Zoli left because I asked him one question. What do you want your life to look like in five years. What is that going to cost? We wrote the number down. We looked at it together. I asked if Reef was ever going to pay him that number. He said absolutely not. So I asked the only question left. So what are you doing here.

We had both spent years thinking the dream we were chasing belonged to somebody else’s company. It didn’t. It was ours the whole time, waiting on us to go build it ourselves.

Everyone wants to talk about what’s hot. Nobody wants to talk about what’s permanent.

A legendary Miami restaurant isn’t just a good meal. It’s a place that got here before the city knew what it was becoming, and then helped decide what it would become. Some of these are still standing. Some are gone, replaced by a bank branch or a condo lobby, remembered only by the people who ate there before it mattered to anyone else. Either way, they mean more than dinner. They’re the reason Miami has a food identity at all instead of just a coastline.

Erin, Ollie, and I sat down for Episode 2 (we missed you Matt) of What’s Good? The Leftovers and put together the definitive list. Not the best. Not the newest. The legendary. We split it two ways: the locals who were born here and built the city from the inside, and the imports who arrived from New York and LA and never left because they didn’t need to.