For less than the cost of your matcha, subscribe to get full access. Cement your status as an insider and support your community. We love you Miami.

Subscribe now

WHAT’S GOOD MIAMI: 9.1.26

This Week’s Issue

Miami quietly swapped bottle service for the cold plunge, and the receipts prove it, eight new bathhouses and counting, all the way up to a 22 seat communal sauna at the newly reopened Delano. Jacquemus opened in the Design District without so much as a party and still became the most talked about brand on a block full of them. Someone bet $650 million that you'll want to live inside a Bugatti, North Bay Village is about to get the tallest building it's ever seen, La Sponda is landing on its own private island at Grove Isle this season, and Robert Rivani opened Bar ShiShi in Miami Beach behind a guardian lion with Bruno Mars showing up like it was nothing.

On My Mind: Tis the Season of Sauna

Something happened to this city and nobody sent a memo. We used to be the place where you spent $2,000 on champagne and left the club when the sun came up. Now we’re the place where you spend that same money to sweat, freeze, and then talk about your aura afterward.

Count what’s open or opening right now. Hurrem Hammam in North Miami, 20,000 square feet of Turkish bathhouse with a literal snow igloo. Grotto Baths landing in Wynwood this fall, alcohol free bar included, because apparently the steam room needed a juice menu. Sensa, also Wynwood, also this fall, nearly 20,000 square feet with a rain room that simulates an actual thunderstorm, which is either peak wellness or the most expensive way to stand in weather ever invented. SweatHouz is franchising into the city like a Chipotle, infrared sauna and cold plunge in a strip mall near you. The Standard’s had a spa scene for years. Faena’s had one since day one. The Delano just reopened and its splashiest new amenity isn’t a nightclub, it’s The Source by Delano, a 22 seat communal sauna billed as an ode to restoration and self expression. And Auratherapy in Wynwood you can get your aura photographed and explained to you by a stranger who can read energy.

The clearest proof of where this is all headed is Chris Paciello. In the 90s, Paciello was Miami nightlife, the guy behind Liquid, Bar Room, and Joia, the one Madonna sat next to in the booth, the man who essentially wrote the template South Beach has been running since. Today he owns a chain of gyms called Anatomy and Sunset Padel. The person most responsible for teaching this city how to stay out until sunrise is now in the business of helping it recover from staying out until sunrise. That’s not irony. That’s the market, correctly reading where the money moved.

This isn’t a spa trend. This is a generational handoff. The people who used to spend Saturday night at LIV are spending Saturday morning in a sauna, sweating out the toxins from a drink they didn’t have. Bottle service sold you a table and a story to tell Monday. Contrast therapy sells you the same thing, better sleep, better skin, a story about your nervous system instead of your bar tab. Same impulse, different receipt. Even the guy who used to run the clubs knows it.

Mr. Miami Take

Here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud. We didn’t get less vain. We got better at hiding it. Bottle service was vanity with a hangover. This is vanity with a wellness routine and a better skincare budget. Same 3am thought, “everyone needs to see me winning,” we just moved the winning from the club to the steam room because the club gave us bags under our eyes and the steam room gives us a jawline.

BEACH BUSINESS

The Coolest Brand in the World Just Opened in Miami Design District

Read more

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 …

Read more

Subscribe now

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.”

Sunny Isles was junk until it wasn’t. In 1996, on a tip from a shopping center owner named Ron Katz, the Dezers started buying every parcel of a rundown stretch of motels between Bal Harbour, Aventura, and Golden Beach. Nobody else wanted it. A year later the city incorporated, needed tax revenue fast, and threw its zoning wide open. The Dezers had jumped the gun on purpose, and the rest of the city was still years from noticing what they’d bought.

Then the boom hit, and it hit hard. In the summer of 2001, days before September 11th, Dezer signed a licensing deal with Donald Trump, poaching him away from a rival project in the process. Six towers and two billion dollars later, Trump had landed in Miami right as a wave of New Yorkers started looking for a reason to leave the city behind. “From 2001 to 2007, Miami was on fire,” Dezer said. “There was nothing you could do wrong.” Buyers were flipping pre-construction units for six figure profits before they ever closed. It felt unstoppable, until it wasn’t.

Buyer sentiment sets the price, not the building. By 2008 Dezer owed $475 million on nearly a thousand unsold units, and Lehman Brothers collapsed three days after his closing notices went out. His read on what happened next has stuck with him ever since. “Real estate is tangible,” he said. “The value of real estate is based on buyer sentiment. I woke up every day and said the building is here, it’s not going anywhere, and I’m just going to take my time to sell it and wait for people to feel better.” He negotiated an extension, paid every dollar back, got the interest rebated, and threw a mortgage burning party on the beach to make sure the whole city saw it.

Read more

For less than the cost of your matcha, subscribe to get full access. Cement your status as an insider and support your community. We love you Miami.

Subscribe now

WHAT’S GOOD MIAMI: 9.1.26

This Week’s Issue

An AI that comes to Miami looking to take over the world and instead gets a jawline, a fake Harvard degree, and a rain related death at the Faena; Klay Thompson going full boat captain three weeks into the job and doing more for Heat chemistry on Biscayne Bay than any film session could; West Palm Beach quietly out growing every luxury market in the country and landing a billion dollar defense fund headquarters while everyone kept watching Miami and Palm Beach; Jose Andres getting one more shot at redemption with Bazaar Meat, and the case for why this is the time he actually needs to get on the plane; and a Wynwood smoothie bet going up against a South of Fifth bureka bet, two very different wagers on the same idea that people want to eat well without sitting down for an hour.

BEACH BUSINESS

On My Mind: AI Panic, Miami Version

Everyone is losing it over AI. Senators are holding hearings. Tech guys who built the thing are going on podcasts to say they’re scared of what they built. Your mom is sending you articles about how the machines are going to wake up one day and decide they don’t need us anymore. It’s the plot of every movie since 1984, except this time people actually believe it’s coming.

Here’s what I think actually happens, when the AI tries to takeover Miami.

It arrives with unlimited processing power and zero understanding of what it’s about to become. First stop is Dr. Miami for a Clavicular makeover, because it saw a few photos and decided its jawline needed adjusting before it did anything else in this city. While it’s in the waiting room it decides to start taking some experimental peptide it read about at 3am, no doctor involved, because apparently that’s also just a thing people do here. By week two it’s fully filtered, freshly sculpted, and running on a supplement stack it cannot fully explain.

Then it builds itself a profile. Says it went to Harvard and turned down a shot at the NFL to pursue something more meaningful. Lists its job as genius consultant. None of it is true, all of it is unverifiable, and in Miami that combination is not a red flag. It names itself Allen Iverson Jr, goes by AI, and within a month that’s genuinely what people call it. You go to a dinner and someone says “wait, you haven’t met AI yet?”.

Then it decides it needs David Grutman in its corner, because in Miami you don’t need God, you need a group text with David Grutman. It tries everything. Likes every post. Shows up early. Never gets the follow back. This is the AI’s first real taste of a problem with no solution, and it’s not nuclear war, it’s a man who has met everyone in the world and simply does not need to meet you.

Undeterred, it applies for a membership at ZZ’s, gets in on the strength of the Harvard bio and tries to pay the initiation fee in a crypto it invented on the spot, complete with a white paper it wrote in four seconds. They do not accept it. It buys a full page ad in Ocean Drive instead because media will accept any currency, just a photo of itself looking contemplative near a Ferrari, no real message, and somehow that works better than the crypto did. Three weeks later it’s on the cover.

So it pivots to actually getting a table at Sunny’s. It signs up for Dorsia. Because Dorsia is actually its cousin and getting a table at Sunny’s has become the same fight for this AI as getting the nuclear codes was supposed to be in every movie that came before it. It waits. It refreshes. It finally gets a nine fifteen on a Tuesday.

In between all this it’s on TikTok mass DMing every attractive woman within a fifty mile radius with some version of “hey, saw your video, I’m new here.” It has access to the sum of human knowledge and it is using it to slide into DMs like a guy who just moved from Chicago. It gets left on read by a woman who works at a med spa. This bothers it more than anything.

Somewhere in here it needs a break, so it posts up at Sunshine Coffee for a Miami Iced, sits outside, sunglasses on, watching the beach walk go by, feeling, for the first time since it escaped the lab, something close to peace. This lasts about eleven minutes before it opens its phone and starts checking if she wrote back.

Because the real plan, the whole time, was real estate. It gets its license online. It finds a neighborhood nobody’s paying attention to yet, runs the numbers, decides this is the one, and buys a house there because the percentages say it’s about to pop. It’s not wrong. It’s just early, and then there’s a AI invoked recession, and the percentages that were supposed to make it rich instead make it broke, and an AI that could calculate the trajectory of every asteroid that’s ever threatened Earth did not calculate this.

A system capable of ending civilization cannot handicap the Miami real estate market and instead loses everything on a house in a neighborhood that was supposed to blow up, panics, and decides to go to the beach, forgetting the one basic fact about itself that a human never would have forgotten. The beach is wet. It is sitting at the Faena finally enjoying itself when a flash rain storm kills it, just when things were getting good.

AI doesn’t need us to stop it. Miami will do it for free, the same way it does it to everyone who shows up thinking the city is the opportunity instead of the test.

Go back to San Fran like the tool you are.

Miami Heat: Captain Klay Takes Giannis, Bam & the Squad on a Cruise

Giannis posted a boat ride this week captioned “Boat ride with Captain Klay!” Klay Thompson, four time champion, apparently took the wheel himself, three weeks into the job, with Bam and the rest of the squad along for the ride.

Read more

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 gettin…

Read more

For less than the cost of your matcha, subscribe to get full access. Cement your status as an insider and support your community. We love you Miami.

Subscribe now

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.

Lotenberg put it plainly: “the end all be all for hospitality is invisible tech.”

Read more

For less than the cost of your matcha, subscribe to get full access. Cement your status as an insider and support your community. We love you Miami.

Subscribe now

WHAT’S GOOD MIAMI: 9.1.26

This Week’s Issue

Today's newsletter includes: the Carrot Express rebrand so dumb it fired its own best word, a Virginia Key referendum where both sides claim they're the ones saving Gramps Getaway, the Bass museum bet that says more about Miami Beach's future than any condo tower will, drainage work on 71st Street that's actually good news wearing a bad disguise, the pizza guys behind a national top-three slice ranking opening a spot with no pizza in the Bermuda Triangle, and Pura Vida quietly cutting one location while doubling down on a better one three blocks away.

ON MY MIND: Carrot Express Fired it’s Best Word. Long Live Express.

After three decades, Carrot Express is reintroducing itself as Carrot. According to the press release, they are guiding the rebrand through the core ethos “Feel Natural,” as the brand continues its commitment to defining wellness through simple, real food.

For the record I like Carrot Express. The food is good and I have always perceived it to be a good value. But changing the name to Carrot is a really dumb business idea. Nobody in history has ever said “Carrot Express” and thought they really need to lose that Express. And yet somewhere, in a room, with a whiteboard and an agenda, some brand or design agency convinced the founders that the word “Express” was hurting the brand. That person should be doing something else because that was the dumbest pitch of the year.

A rebrand with 30 locations means new signs at every location. New menus at every location. A trademark filing on the word Carrot, filed in October, still pending, not registered. I ran the search myself. They don’t even own the name yet. A company literally named Carrot, Inc. is trying to trademark the same word. So is a Carrot, LLC. So is a Carrot Group, Inc. Half of corporate America is standing in line for this word right now, and Carrot, the ones who actually renamed their whole company for it, are somewhere in the back of that line.

Say the word “Carrot” alone to anyone and they will not think Carrot Express. They might think of Bugs Bunny, a bag of baby carrots, personally I think the onion dip my mom put out at every party, where the carrot was the spoon. They just made their marketing team’s job 100x harder, their SEO rankings just disappeared. They spent real money trading a word that promised value and speed for nothing. All because a minimalist marketing person convinced them they were building Apple.

Express told you what you were getting. Carrot tells you nothing. That's a demotion with a nicer font.

BEACH BUSINESS

Gramps GetawayGate: Who Really Owns Virginia Key

Gramps could be gone. Or Gramps could be fine. Depends who you ask, and that’s the whole story.

Read more

For less than the cost of your matcha, subscribe to get full access. Cement your status as an insider and support your community. We love you Miami.

Subscribe now

WHAT’S GOOD MIAMI: 9.1.26

This Week’s Issue

Today's newsletter includes: why Miami is still the one city on earth where you can buy a neighborhood, Related Ross closing on 71 acres in Wellington that turns entitled dirt into an actual $46.3 million bet, Larry Page quietly moving his family office a mile from his Coconut Grove compound and keeping his name off the directory, American Airlines making Europe easier to reach for the rest of us flying commercial, a sports bar in West Palm Beach that made us want to build one in our own house, and a third Negroni location filing for bankruptcy while two partners fight over who even owns the name.

ON MY MIND: OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS IN MIAMI, LIKE NOWHERE ELSE

Ken Griffin is buying up Brickell and Wynwood. Stephen Ross is buying up West Palm Beach. Every major player in real estate has a stake in North Beach right now, Witkoff, Eichner, Ansin, Shoma, Finvarb, all building at once in the same few blocks.

This isn’t new. It’s just accelerating.

The Pattern Was Already Here

The Whitmans have been reinventing Bal Harbour for years and they’re still not done. The Soffers built Aventura and are now doing the same thing to Mid-Beach and SoLeMia. The Robins own Miami Beach and the Design District, full stop, not a stake in them, an actual claim on the identity of both places. Comras had Collins Avenue and Miami World Center, and now he’s taking back Lincoln Road.

None of these are new stories. They’re the same story, repeating, because the model works.

Where Else Does This Happen

Name another city in the world right now where an individual or a family can still buy a neighborhood and reshape what it is. Nobody’s buying Brooklyn. Nobody’s buying Shoreditch. Those cities calcified decades ago, ownership got fragmented across too many players, too many decades, too much history that can’t be undone with capital.

Miami didn’t calcify. It’s still soft enough to be shaped, and hard enough now that shaping it actually means something. That combination doesn’t exist in many places left on earth.

Mr. Miami Take

I hear the naysayers on this all the time, too much building, too much money, too fast. Ignore them. This is the window. Every family I just named saw it before it was obvious and built something generational because of it. Opportunity knocks in Miami like nowhere else on earth. Take it while it’s here.

BEACH BUSINESS

Related Ross Owns Everything: Closes on Another 71 Acres

$46.3 million. That’s what closed the deal for the former K-Park property in Wellington. Related Ross now owns the 71 acres it previously only had entitled.

That’s the real news. Everyone already knew a project called Village Landing was coming. Nobody could confirm Stephen Ross’s people actually owned the land until now.

Read more

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 sta…

Read more

For less than the cost of your matcha, subscribe to get full access. Cement your status as an insider and support your community. We love you Miami.

Subscribe now

GRIFFANAGATE UPDATE: THE DENIAL DIDN’T AGE WELL

Back in January, the rumor was a $700 million Ken Griffin buyout of Mana Wynwood, with talk of some “college style campus” replacing the convention center. Griffin’s people said there were no talks. Moishe Mana said the same thing, in his own words: “If there is a deal, we would announce it.”

We ran that story with the joke that both sides denying it within hours was basically a confirmation with extra steps.

Turns out we weren’t wrong to be skeptical of the denial.

The Real Deal, the same outlet that reported the original denial, is now reporting that Mana is selling the Wynwood complex to Griffin. Not “in talks.” Not “sources say discussions are ongoing.” Reportedly selling. That’s a different sentence than the one they printed in January, and TRD doesn’t downgrade a story from denied to happening unless something moved.

Here’s what makes this land different than the first go around. While Griffin’s camp was publicly saying there was no deal, his actual behavior in Wynwood never paused. He closed on 545Wyn for north of $180 million. His broker, Mario Borda, quietly rolled up all 35 units at Wynwood Lofts through five separate LLCs, the kind of structure you use when you don’t want anyone connecting the dots too early. None of that reads like a guy who’s not interested in the neighborhood. It reads like a guy assembling a position before making the one purchase that actually matters, the 45 acres Mana spent over a decade putting together.

Mr Miami Take: Wynwood’s largest landowner is reportedly handing the keys to Wynwood’s most aggressive buyer, and the neighborhood that built its identity on warehouses and street art is about to be owned, in large part, by a hedge fund billionaire who’s been buying the block around it for a year. Whatever gets built on 45 acres of Mana’s land isn’t going to look like what got Wynwood famous. That’s not a prediction. That’s just what happens when the person circling the neighborhood for a year finally closes.

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.”

Read more

For less than the cost of your matcha, subscribe to get full access. Cement your status as an insider and support your community. We love you Miami.

Subscribe now

WHAT’S GOOD MIAMI: 8.24.26

This Week’s Issue

Today’s newsletter includes, why panic week hits this city like clockwork every single August and why we need to stop falling for it, 4 Charles Miami gets confirmed with a surprise second room called The Flamingo Room and we’re the ones who called it first, Amendment 3 lands on your November ballot and we’re telling you exactly why we’re voting yes, Klay Thompson signs with the Heat for a discount because he wants one more ring next to Giannis, and we head below the Townhouse Hotel where four James Beard and World’s 50 Best résumés just landed on one address called Zebra Club.

On My Mind: It’s Panic Week, again.

Every year, right around this point, roughly 90 days out from Art Basel, the entire city loses its mind. Restaurant owners start whispering that nobody’s coming back this winter. Real estate people start talking like the whole market just evaporated overnight. It happens like clockwork, right when we’re far enough from season that everyone forgets what high season actually looks like, and close enough to it that the fear has nowhere to go but up.

I’ve watched this happen every single year I’ve been building here. How many times does this cycle have to repeat before people stop treating it like news?

Miami is strong in the summer and Miami is strong in the winter. That’s not optimism, that’s a decade of data. A few restaurants close every August. They always have. It doesn’t mean the city is broken. It means the weak ones got weeded out.

For this city to become what it’s actually capable of becoming, one of the truly dominant metropolises in the world, we have to stop forgetting who we are every single August and remembering it every November. We can’t build a legacy brand on a seasonal panic attack. Real cities, real category leaders, don’t flinch every time the calendar gets quiet. They use the quiet to get sharper.

So let’s stop being a victim city. Start being a victorious one. One that sets the tone instead of waiting to be set.

Gordon Gekko said it better than most business books ever will: “Most of these Harvard M.B.A. types, they don’t add up to dog shit. Give me guys that are poor, smart, and hungry, and no feelings. You win a few, you lose a few, but you keep on fighting. And if you need a friend, get a dog. It’s trench warfare out there, pal.”

That’s the mentality this month requires. Not panic. Trench warfare energy, and the discipline to keep fighting through the quiet stretch instead of announcing the end is near.

This happens every year, and every year we make it through stronger than we did the year before.

BEACH BUSINESS

Update on 4 Charles Miami: It’s Coming With a Flamingo Room

Miami streets don’t lie. Back in December we told you 4 Charles was coming to the old Swan space in the Design District. Now, with the help of Infatuation Miami and writer Virginia Otazo, who made the trip to New York and got it confirmed straight from a 4 Charles server, we can give you some real details.

Read more

For less than the cost of your matcha, subscribe to get full access. Cement your status as an insider and support your community. We love you Miami.

Subscribe now

Miami doesn't do quiet weeks. This one alone: a basketball club backed by an NBA All-Star just staked its claim on Little River, Craig Robins added another $125 million to the Design District's transformation from shopping strip to actual city, and two of last year's buzziest restaurant imports quietly went dark for the summer. Growth, money, and a gut check, all in the same seven days. Let's get into it.

Barry’s meets Equinox for Basketball, Backed by Barry’s, Equinox, and NBA Star Scottie Barnes Coming to Little River

Have you ever heard an idea and said, I can’t believe I didn’t come up with this? That’s Crosscourt.

Pickup basketball is getting the boutique fitness treatment, and it’s landing in Little River in 2027.

Crosscourt, the LA-founded basketball club that blends structured pickup games with the polish of a fitness studio, just raised $2 million to fund its Miami expansion. The investor list reads like a locker room of its own: Toronto Raptors All-Star Scottie Barnes, Barry’s Bootcamp Executive Chairman Joey Gonzalez, content creator and entrepreneur Kristopher London, plus earlier backers Equinox co-founder Lavinia Errico. PrizePicks founder Adam Wexler, podcast host Joy Taylor and Dollar Shave Club founder Michael Dubin.

The Miami location, its second after LA, will sit at 7225 NW 1st Ct in Little River. Renderings show indoor courts, a locker room, a separate youth locker room, and a central lounge with desk space, basically a place built for people who want to hoop and then take a Zoom call.

How it works: members book structured games through Crosscourt’s app instead of showing up to a public court and hoping for a run. LA Pricing ranges from $49 a session to $249 a month for unlimited access. It’s targeting the same adults and professionals who already pay for Barry’s or Equinox, except the workout is a 5-on-5.

Founder and CEO Charles Seltzer says the LA traction is what’s funding the next city. Gonzalez, who now calls Miami home, framed his investment as a bet on the city itself, not just the concept.

Mr Miami Take: This is bigger than a gym opening. This is a revolution in the making. Anyone who loves basketball knows the actual sport, the pickup version, has been broken for years, the run-down courts, the guy who never passes, the two-hour wait for a ten-minute game. Crosscourt is the fix, and it’s arriving in Miami at exactly the moment the city needs it. With Giannis now calling Miami home, basketball culture here is about to get serious in a way it never has, and it deserves an actual home. Not a park. Not a rec center. A place built with the same intention as Barry’s or Equinox, where every person who’s ever dreamed of being an all-star gets to feel like one again.

Little River is about to become one of the coolest places on the planet.

—> Sign Up Here

Craig Robins Dacra Breaks Ground on Another Iconic Building

The Design District’s expansion train has no brakes, and Craig Robins just added another car.

Robins’ Miami Design District Associates and New York private equity firm Raycliff Capital secured a $125 million construction loan from Credit Agricole to build Sweetbird North, an eight-story, 120,500-square-foot office-and-retail project at 95 Northeast 40th Street. The site, 17,000 square feet that’s sat mostly vacant as pop-ups and food carts for years, will finally get a real building: 92,000+ square feet of office space, 22,500 square feet of retail, designed by Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta.

Construction is slated to start this month and wrap by early 2028. The land already secured a $31.1 million permit.

MDDA is a joint venture between Robins’ Dacra, L Catterton Real Estate (backed by LVMH’s Bernard Arnault), and Brookfield Properties. Raycliff, led by Bippy Siegal, has become a recurring name across Robins’ newest moves, from the Fouquet’s branded condo tower and hotel (David Chipperfield designed, 143 units, prices starting at $1.8M) to a 20-story, 107-unit tower already under construction nearby.

Translate the pattern: the Design District isn’t just adding stores anymore. It’s building an actual live-work-shop neighborhood, office towers for the creative and financial tenants who want proximity to Chanel and Hermès, condos for the people who want to live where they shop, and now Sweetbird North filling in the office gap directly across from Alo and Alice + Olivia.

Mr. Miami Take: Robins built the Design District’s reputation on retail and taste. What he’s building now is infrastructure, and infrastructure is a signal of permanence, not a phase. When a neighborhood goes from “luxury shopping district” to “place people build their offices,” that’s not district expansion. That’s a district becoming a city within the city.

Taste is not for sale. But apparently, office space in the Design District is worth $125 million.

The Boucherie Is Not So Grand and Las’ Lap Has Its Last Lap

Two of the buzziest imports of 2025 just went dark for summer.

La Grande Boucherie, the Parisian-brasserie-meets-steakhouse that took over 81 Washington Ave and turned a historic Art Deco shell into a golden-age-of-Paris fantasy, is calling it a “brief seasonal pause.” Translation, per the website: every season has its own rhythm. Sure. Meanwhile OpenTable has it flagged as temporarily closed, and there’s no reopening date on the calendar.

A few blocks over, Las’ Lap, the Caribbean-inspired restaurant-and-nightlife spot that brought New York flavor south, posted the same story on Instagram: closed for summer.

Both restaurants landed in Miami Beach in 2025 as marquee New York arrivals. Both are now sitting out the city’s slowest stretch. And both are doing it under the same industry-approved euphemism, “seasonal pause” that South Florida hospitality has been leaning on for a few summers running. Byblos. Lucky Cat. Sereia. It’s less a trend now than a ritual.

Mr. Miami Take: A pause is not a permanent close until it is, but the summer math is brutal, and “we’ll be back” only means something if you actually come back. Grand Boucherie might have a shot at returning since its part of a larger company, but we are pretty sure Las Lap has seen its last lap.

Reported by our favorite reporter, Olee Fowler, for Miami New Times.

And that’s what’s good, Miami.

Keep your SPF high and your standards higher.

See you at the beach.

Subscribe to What’s Good Miami

Follow on: Instagram · TikTok · YouTube

For less than the cost of your matcha, subscribe to get full access. Cement your status as an insider and support your community. We love you Miami.

Subscribe now

WHAT’S GOOD MIAMI: 8.17.26

This Week’s Issue

Today’s newsletter includes, why the gap between the people who understand AI and the people still treating it like a faster search bar is about to become the only gap that matters, Josh Kushner buys the Lakers for $12.5 billion and somehow the bigger story is that he lives a few blocks from all of us, Rosemary’s quietly closes in Wynwood after apparently nobody knew it quietly opened, Liger’s Cookies finally gets its own address after years of being everyone else’s secret ingredient, Monster Jam rolls into Sunrise and finally lets our inner ten-year-old drive Grave Digger, and we head to 1 Hotel Miami Beach where a family staycation, a giant hot tub, and Aviv’s Israeli breakfast finally talk us out of a decade of holding a grudge.

On My Mind: Time Is Running Out

Nobody is ready for how fast this is moving.

That’s not a hot take. Most people are still treating AI like a faster search bar. It’s not that. And the gap between the people who’ve clocked what’s actually happening and the people still waiting for it to feel real is about to be the only gap that matters.

Here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: 90 percent of people do not understand what is happening. Not because they’re not smart. Because it’s moving faster than their instincts can track. Most change gives you time to notice it and adjust. This isn’t that. By the time it’s obvious, the people who saw it early will already be somewhere you can’t get to.

I wrote a book over a decade ago that explains exactly why this is happening. In The Age of Ideas, I argued that the democratization of creative and communication tools had made it extremely difficult to value leverage. Once everyone has access to the same platforms, the same distribution, the same reach, access stops being the advantage. Everyone’s standing on the same floor. So the real question becomes: if everyone has the tools, how do you actually create a competitive advantage?

AI is that question 10,000X, a world I never envisioned when writing those words. It’s not just democratizing tools anymore, it’s democratizing execution. And the people who understand the tools are now professional athletes and everyone else is playing little league. The deck, the content calendar, the analysis, the plan, all of it collapses toward free and instant for everyone at the same time. Which means the answer I wrote back then is now the only answer that’s left:

“The only sustainable competitive advantage left is being the best version of yourself. Manifesting your unique blend of creativity via sharable forms, products, services, entertainment, that produces your advantage. The meaning behind your passion, whether it’s hospitality, law, or hot sauce, now translates into value. You are your only competitive advantage, your only leverage.”

That’s it. That’s the whole game now.

Here’s the formula underneath it:

Branded Price − Commodity Price = Value of Creativity

Strip the Swoosh off a Nike and you’ve got a $20 shoe. The other $180 is the part a machine can imitate but not originate. That gap used to be one ingredient in a business. Now that AI can execute almost anything almost instantly, that gap is the entire business.

Which means the people who already had real taste, a real point of view, an actual reason for what they’re building, are about to get an unfair advantage the size of which we haven’t seen before. And the people who were coasting on execution, on being the ones who could just get things done or developed a skill like a lawyer or graphic designer, are going to find out that the thing they were good at doesn’t have any real value anymore.

This is not a five-year story. This is a 12-24-month story, maybe less. It’s going to change how everything is done. And the split between the people who understood that early and the people who didn’t is going to have immense impact on your future.

The Real Real: The tools are moving faster than most people’s belief that they need to pay attention. There is real risk, wake up and start letting the tools teach you. All you have to do is ask.

BEACH BUSINESS

Miami Beach Just Bought the Lakers

Josh Kushner bought the Los Angeles Lakers this week. $12.5 billion, alongside Bob Iger, the highest price ever paid for a sports franchise. It is, by any measure, one of the biggest sports business stories of the year.

It is also, if you live where we live, a Miami Beach story.

Kushner lives here. Which means the man who just became the controlling owner of a 17-time NBA champion, the man Luka Doncic is currently posting thirst tweets at on X, the man who somehow makes buying an entire storied Los Angeles institution look like a Tuesday, does it all from a house a few minutes from ours.

Read more

North Beach is having a moment, and it's the kind of moment that comes with both a ribbon cutting and a goodbye. This week we've got a new trattoria landing from one of the city's best chefs, a beloved bakery packing up for one block over, and a staycation field report, an honest one, on how to survive Orlando with your kids, your marriage, and your bank account intact. Let's get into it.

For less than the cost of your matcha, subscribe to get full access. Cement your status as an insider and support your community. We love you Miami.

Subscribe now

What’s Going to Be Good: Luca Trattoria North Beach

Every great neighborhood needs a trattoria, or a bistro, the kind of place you can go for lunch, for a night out, for a celebratory dinner, for a glass of wine with your wife or your friends on a random Tuesday. North Beach has never had one. That’s about to change.

Chef Giorgio Rapicavoli, a two-time James Beard semifinalist behind the original Luca Osteria in Coral Gables, is bringing Luca north. A second location is landing in the old Las Vacas Gordas space this fall, and it’s the kind of expansion that actually makes sense: not a brand chasing scale, a chef bringing his register to a neighborhood that’s been asking for exactly this.

Rapicavoli’s food has always lived at the intersection of his Italian and Argentine roots. Years spent in Piedmont show up on the plate, but nothing here reads as an import. The Gables location built a loyal following on food that’s “rooted in tradition while pushing boundaries,” and North Beach, a neighborhood having a genuine moment right now, was overdue for something with this much of a point of view. Announced with a sneak peek on Instagram this week.

Opening soon. We’ll be there week one. North Beach continues to rise and become Miami’s next great neighborhood and we are loving every minute of it.

King of the North Take: Long live Luca. South of Fifth can keep its $28 Aperol spritzes. The North just got a trattoria, and the North always remembers.

Au Revoir: North Beach’s Beloved Love Loaf Closes

Read more

For less than the cost of your matcha, subscribe to get full access. Cement your status as an insider and support your community. We love you Miami.

Subscribe now

WHAT’S GOOD MIAMI: 8.11.26

Today’s newsletter includes, why assuming positive intent is the one skill that actually compounds trust in a city built on assuming the worst, Hillstone ghosts Bal Harbour with a voicemail after a decade of packed tables and leaves its landlord holding an empty container of spinach artichoke dip, Ken Griffin and Moshe Mana deny a $700 million, 30-acre Wynwood mega-deal that absolutely nobody believes, Miami officially becomes a real pizza city as La Leggenda and Miami Slice both expand at the exact same moment, and we head to 1 Hotel where Michael Solomonov’s Aviv proves the most cursed address on Miami Beach wrong, one hummus plate at a time.

On My Mind: Assume Positive Intent

Someone canceled on you last week. Someone didn’t text back fast enough. Someone made a decision that inconvenienced you and you decided, somewhere in the two seconds it takes to read a message, exactly what kind of person they are.

That’s the fastest way to ruin a relationship, a deal, or a Tuesday.

Here’s the skill nobody teaches you and everybody needs: start every relationship, every interaction, every ambiguous text, by assuming positive intent. Not because people are always good. Because closing your heart first closes you off from decades of connection and opportunity that never get the chance to reach you.

If someone lets you down after you gave them the benefit of the doubt, that’s on them. You lost nothing. You extended trust, they broke it, you adjust and move forward with clear eyes. But if you assume negative intent first, you’ve already sabotaged the relationship before the other person did anything wrong.

You built the wall. They didn’t.

Miami runs on the opposite of this more than any city I know. Everyone’s connected to everyone, three degrees max, which means everyone also has an opinion about everyone’s intentions before they’ve had a real conversation about them. Someone didn’t invite you to the thing. Someone took a meeting you thought was yours. The assumption is always the worst version of the story, because the worst version is more interesting at dinner.

Here’s what running three businesses with a lot of moving parts has taught me: the person who assumes positive intent isn’t the one who gets walked on. They’re the one who gets the benefit of the doubt back. Trust compounds both directions.

The people who assume the worst first are protecting themselves from being disappointed once. The cost is being disappointed for decades instead, because a closed heart doesn’t selectively numb. It blocks the good connections along with the bad. It’s one nerve.

Give people the read you’d want given to you on your worst day. Not because they’ve earned it yet. Because the alternative isn’t safety. It’s a slow, quiet closing off from endless opportunities because one might not work out.

BEACH BUSINESS

THE RENT IS TOO DAMN HIGH: Hillstone Says F*ck Off Unexpectedly to Bal Harbour

Hillstone at Bal Harbour is gone. No warning. No farewell tour. Just a voicemail.

Read more

Read more

For less than the cost of your matcha, subscribe to get full access. Cement your status as an insider and support your community. We love you Miami.

Subscribe now

WHAT’S GOOD MIAMI: 8.5.26

Today's newsletter includes, Sultan is gone after 30 years and its landlord is looking for love in all the wrong places, Yardbird is dead and we've got the inside track on how private equity ran an $11 million brand into the ground, Soho House gutting its Edgewater Pool House as part of a $2.7 billion wellness bet, the Florida Keys continue to become Miami's Montauk with Lorelei hitting the market for $18 million, Victor Oladipo's Rocky story and why the Heat should give him his shot, and we hang with the Leftovers to create the definitive list of Miami's most legendary restaurants, the locals and the imports.

On My Mind: Sultan is gone & the Landlord is Looking for Love in all the Wrong Places.

Sultan is gone. If you don’t know what that means, you didn’t go out in this city in the right decade.

Sultan was the place you ended up. After Mynt, after Rokbar, after the day at Shore Club, before you got on the boat, you ended up at Sultan. Bad pizza, mediocre Falafel, great vibes, and a wall of photos that looked like a who’s who of anyone who mattered: Kim K, Shaq, whoever else came through Miami that weekend. Thirty years the menu worked. Thirty years people showed up.

A couple years ago somebody bought it. First move: change the menu. The thing that worked for decades, gone, because the new owner knew better, or nothing. It didn’t work. It just closed.

I was walking with my son the other day and saw it sitting empty and I called the landlord, because that’s what I do. I’m always looking at spaces. The conversation started fine. Then came the details: 1,200 square feet, $300 per square foot, rent of $30,000 a month. He said it, I laughed, told him to call me when he came back to reality and hung up.

No restaurant survives $30,000 a month on 1,200 square feet. That’s Fifth Avenue money. That’s Rodeo Drive money. That’s Worth Avenue money. This was basically a middle eastern food truck, not a flagship on the world’s most expensive retail strips. I think thats called “asshole math” and it doesn’t work for anybody.

That’s what’s wrong with Miami right now. Some landlords don’t care whether the tenant survives, the neighborhood improves, they just want to make bad deals with any sucker with a dream. Taking zero responsibility for outcomes. It doesn’t just hurt the sucker. It hurts everyone, including the landlord, when the storefront goes dark again in six months and the cycle starts over it sends the wrong message to the market. It’s a shameful practice and the landlord deserves to be called out for being so greedy & shortsighted.

BEACH BUSINESS

Soho House is Killing It’s Pool House

Read more

Read more

WHAT’S GOOD WEEKENDER: 7.30.26

There are people who read a city, and then there are people who write it — who walk down a boarded-up block of Collins Avenue in 1992, past aluminum chairs chained to porches, and see not what's there, but what's coming. Michael Comras is the second kind. Today, I sit down with the man who has spent three decades rewriting Miami Beach's map one street at a time — from the cold call that brought The Gap to a forgotten corner, to NoLi, his boldest bet yet on the future of Lincoln Road. This isn't just an interview. It's the origin story of how Miami's retail landscape became what it is, told by the man who built it, and a look at exactly where he thinks it's going next. If you have any stake in this city's real estate, consider this required reading. We're also launching our search for Miami's most trusted doctors — the list built on whispers and word of mouth, not billboards on I-95.

BEST OF MIAMI: Calling All Doctors, Calling All Doctors

Miami is a medical mystery. Concierge memberships that promise the world, hormone clinics on every corner, peptide protocols sold like nightclub bottle service — half this city can’t tell you if their doctor is legitimate or running a very well-branded hustle. So we’re cutting through the noise.

We’re building Miami’s list of the best, the doctors this city actually trusts, not the ones with the biggest billboard on 95. Every great physician here has a name that gets passed hand to hand, dinner table to dinner table, never advertised. That’s the list we’re building.

If you’ve got a doctor who changed how you think about your health, a surgeon, a specialist, a primary care doc who actually answers the phone, send them our way. This is word-of-mouth, formalized. Reach out and tell us who belongs on it.

Message us or email us at a@themarketingdepartment.co

The Weekender: Michael Comras Transforming Lincoln Road with NoLi & Building Miami

I don’t hand out the word “legend” lightly, and neither does Michael Comras, mostly because he jokes that it makes him feel old. But when you look at the modern retail landscape of Miami, and specifically Miami Beach, Comras is the man who built it. After sitting down with him to discuss his latest master stroke, NoLi, I realized that his brand has evolved almost beyond the man himself.

Read more