Wish restaurant at the Hotel on Miami Beach has redesigned both its dining area and its menu. The restaurant closed in July for two weeks for the interior changes by fashion designer Todd Oldham, who also designed the restaurant when it opened in 1998.
The dining room and patio are decorated with shades of blue and green, inspired by the venue's oceanside location. The indoor space has new celadon and turquoise seat cushions and quartz-topped pedestal tables. The upper dining room, adjacent to the restaurant's main bar, now has a custom-made mahogany and maple wine cellar that houses 1,000 wines. Sliding mahogany and maple panels can separate the space to offer private dining for groups of 24.
Outside, the patio has antique wicker chairs, blue and green striped umbrellas, and color-coordinated tabletop accessories.
Chef Marco Ferraro’s new menu consists of contemporary American dishes with Mediterranean influences.
You have to hand it to the folks at The Hotel, one of South Beach's baby boutiques, for on-your-feet thinking.
The place opens as the Tiffany Hotel, designed to whimsical splendor by couturier Todd Oldham, and markets to monied travelers including New Yorkers. New Yorkers include the Tiffany jewelers. They object. New name: The Hotel.
Originating chef Gary Farmer opens the hotel's restaurant, Wish, with a vegetarian menu. The clientele is often limited, not surprisingly, to vegetarians, but there isn't enough of them to sustain high prices and high style. Farmer returns to New York, presumably not to have breakfast at Tiffany's, at least not with a rasher of ham.
Andrea Curto, Farmer's sous chef, takes over the ladle. She adds fish and meat, draws a crowd, puts Wish on the culinary radar and gets herself onto Food and Wine's 10 Best New Chefs of 2000 list. And then . . . she leaves, to marry a rival chef and start a new place with him.
Not to worry. Curto's replacement is E. Michael Reidt, who himself got named to Food and Wine's 2001 new-chef list, for stellar work at Bomboa in Boston, where he's still a part-owner. This brings us to today, although you must factor in an expansion, as well as an Oldham redesign of the Oldham design, for which they held the ''grand re-opening'' in February.
Reidt is an interesting fellow, a classically trained chef fascinated, through in-law connection, with Brazilian cuisine. This means, of course, fusion -- but Reidt takes it a bit beyond. He gets bored easily -- the menu changes nearly 10 times a year. His mother neglected to tell him not to play with his food, and the woman was wise. His exciting, innovative dishes pair ingredients that must have the sunburn-and-shorts set shaking their heads all the way back to Middle America, and the foodies giggling with glee.
Let's take, for example, a Brazilian classic, a pair of codfish cakes, Bolino de Bacalhau ($9). Imported down from Bomboa, where it was the most popular dish, it's a cake of potato, codfish and garlic. The wrinkles start with the addition of sautéed shrimp and the use of Japanese panko bread crumbs to hold it together, and then the fun begins -- a salad of sliced grape tomatoes and diced raw plantains, a lemon confit and a ginger aioli. The premise is that a fried cake can lean toward the dull, and the sharp, sweet and exotic flavors are there to wake it up. It works.
Vichyssoise ($10) is cold potato soup, of course, but here it's vibrant green, the potato pureed with avocado, flavored further with garlic, caramelized onion and caviar. Poured tableside from a porcelain pitcher, this is pure luxury, creamy without cream, buttery without butter. The soup fills a bowl in whose center rests a smoked shrimp salad with diced cucumber and tomato, put in place with a ring mold.
Roquefort salad ($12) proffers frisee lettuce and a large blob of the fragrant, flavorful cheese, and it's offset and then some by a couple of tempura bananas and a dressing made from the juice of fresh pears, vanilla bean and walnut oil. Sweet and pungent battle here, and neither wins. That's the idea.
On to entrees, where the hits keep on coming. Every restaurant does a grilled tuna ($29). Few marinate it with cachaça, the Brazilian sugar cane liqueur that fuels the national drink, the caipirinha, as well as pineapple, mint, ginger, cilantro and lemongrass. As meaty as it is, tuna can take all the flavor noise, and it makes for a great balance. The two logs of tuna filet are arrayed in an X on a bed of briny quinoa-jicama salad -- still more bracing flavors -- and . . . seared watermelon. Do try this at home. The fruit is cut in a ring mold, coated with salt, sugar and cayenne on the top side, layered with quinoa. It's fantastic -- precious food that you'd actually want to eat, again and again. Avocado pureed with lime juice and butter, a lush garnish, adds heft.
Top chefs tend to favor Bell & Evans chicken ($25), an organic chicken farmed in Pennsylvania. Reidt gets larger ones and roasts the breast, serving it with a smoked shrimp sauce (a traditional Brazilian combo), a confit of cashews with lemon and orange and fennel, not as nutty as it sounds. Mashed potatoes whirled with plenty of cilantro add color and an exotic flavor.
Churrasco-style beef short ribs ($26) are braised in red wine, veal stock and garlic for 2 ½ hours, until meat falls off the bone. The ''churrasco'' designation comes from the barbecue sauce with which it's brushed -- veal stock, red wine, ginger and tomato, reduced to a glaze. Starch and such is boniato puree with ratatouille, and the garnish that brightens up all the meatiness is grape tomatoes with shallots and raspberry vinegar.
Latin America meets Ohio with dulce de leche custard in an Oreo cup ($8) It's like a retake on the invention of the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup -- the chef had some Oreos; his girlfriend had some dulce de leche, and they . . . got together. Reidt fashioned a hard cup out of crumbled Oreos in a ring mold, spiked the dulce de leche with gelatin and packed it in there, drizzling the plate with an Oreo creme anglaise. Creamy and cool. That last tropical twist: sliced bananas soaked with Malibu rum.
