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

GOOD COMPANY INTERVIEW: ILAN WAISBROD, DESIGNER BEHIND BOND ST, CAFETERIA, TAO VEGAS, W HOTELS, OPENS STUDIO IN LITTLE RIVER TO DO HIS BEST WORK.

The Man Who Designed the Rooms You Remember Just Moved to Miami to do his best work.

There is a generation of New Yorkers who came of age in a particular kind of room. A long communal table. A light they couldn’t explain. The feeling that a place knew exactly what it wanted to be and didn’t need to tell you. Republic in Union Square. Cafeteria in Chelsea. Bond Street in Noho. The 40/40 Club. The W Seoul. The MGM Skylofts and Tao in Las Vegas.

Most of those people couldn’t tell you who designed those rooms.

That’s exactly how Ilan Waisbrod wanted it.

The man who designed the rooms you remember just moved to Little River.

Ilan Waisbrod is the founder of Studio Gaia, one of the most consequential hospitality design firms of the last half century. If you have eaten at Republic in Union Square, drunk at Cafeteria in Chelsea, had your first sushi at Bond Street, or stood in the 40/40 Club or the W Seoul or the MGM Skylofts or Tao in Las Vegas, you have been inside his work. You just didn’t know his name.

That’s how Ilan prefers it.

I sat down with him this week for a full conversation — his childhood in Tel Aviv, the Israeli army, the leap to Milan with $100 in his pocket and no Italian, the fight with Jay Z, the pandemic, the decision to leave New York after thirty years, and why, at this stage of his career, he is doing the best work of his life in a small office five minutes from his apartment in Miami.

I should say something about how we got here, because it’s part of the story.

The NBA Finals are here. We sat down with Charles, founder of Crosscourt (Find out more about Crosscourt at this LINK), the Equinox-meets-Barry’s-Bootcamp of basketball coming to Miami very soon, for the debut episode of the Miami Basketball Show. We talked Brunson, Wemby, KAT’s inevitable stupidity, and why destiny might just be a real thing.

The Western Conference was a bloodbath. OKC crumbled. The Spurs survived. Meanwhile the Knicks walked through the East like they owned it, no Giannis, no Jokić, no Halliburton, and somehow made it look inevitable.

Now it’s Jalen Brunson and a 53-year drought against Victor Wembanyama and whatever planet he came from. It’s the best possible Finals matchup, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise just because the Heat aren’t in 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 GOOD MIAMI: 7.28.26

Today's newsletter includes, Google quadrupling its Miami footprint as Larry Page and Sergey Brin plant their flags, a subscription private jet ticket for fleeing hurricanes, why the Florida Keys are quietly becoming Miami's Montauk, a rumor that a Nolita red-sauce legend Emilio’s Ballato is eyeing the former Stiltsville space in Sunset Harbor, LeBron James is joining the most dysfunctional family in Philadelphia, our hunt for Miami's most trusted doctors, and the pair of pants I can't stop talking about.

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 ak@whatsgood.miami

On My Mind: LeBron James, the New Boss of the Philly Mafia

LeBron just walked into Philly like Tony Soprano walking into Satriale’s, everybody stands up straighter, nobody asks why he’s there, and somebody’s already making him a plate he didn’t order. Two years, vet minimum, for a guy worth half a billion dollars.

But here’s the problem, and I need you to sit with this for a second, Lebron didn’t walk into an empty house. He walked into a house that already has a dysfunctional family. Maxey. Kid’s been grinding, finally got his own spot, finally feels like a made guy, and now Uncle Tony’s at the table asking why the sauce isn’t ready. Then you got Junior in the corner, that’s Embiid, brilliant when he’s all there, but half the time he’s yelling about his knee and nobody can tell if he’s dying or just wants attention again.

Then Jaylen Brown shows up. And Jaylen Brown is not Paulie. Jaylen Brown is Janice.

You know Janice. Everybody’s got a Janice. Comes back into your life saying she’s changed, she’s found herself, she did yoga in Seattle, and within four episodes she’s shot somebody at the kitchen table over absolutely nothing. Doesn’t even remember why. “He was being disrespectful.” Tatum wasn’t being disrespectful, Janice! He asked if you wanted ketchup!

So now picture this. Second season, first month, everybody’s still learning where the bathroom is, and VJ Edgecombe looks at Jaylen Brown wrong during a shootaround. Nobody knows why. Kid was quiet, ran his sets, minded his business, and suddenly he’s frozen out of the offense like he insulted somebody’s dead mother. That’s not basketball. That’s Janice showing up to Thanksgiving already mad about something that hasn’t happened yet.

Here’s how this actually ends, and everybody in Philly already knows it in their bones. It goes up in flames by February. Embiid gets hurt, because Embiid always gets hurt. LeBron gets his money either way, cashes in on the Fanatics or Topps deal, and rides off looking exactly as unbothered as Tony Soprano always looked. Daryl Morey watches the whole thing from a safe distance with the quiet satisfaction of a man who already got paid. And Philly? Philly keeps doing what Philly does best, collecting one more heartbreak for the pile, muttering about how of course this happened to us, and starting the inferiority complex clock back at zero for next season.

BEACH BUSINESS

Google Quadrupled its Miami Office Space. Telling You Everything You Need to Know About Where Power Is Moving.

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: 7.20.26

• ON MY MIND: Will Creative Agencies Exist In An AI World?

  AI is a tool. A better paintbrush doesn’t make the painting less the painter’s.

Beach Business

• “Animal House”: Brickell’s Most Notorious Building

  Police reports describe drunk guests passed out in the lobby, porn shoots on the balconies, sex in the jacuzzi, and a permanent haze of weed smoke.

• Miami Passed New York. Sort Of. If You Live in the Bronx.

  This is metro-versus-metro, not Miami versus Manhattan. Once you know what’s actually being measured, the story changes.

• LeBron Watch: Pat Riley Just Told Everyone How He Really Feels

  Twelve years later, and Riley’s still calling it what it was. Not a business decision. A dynasty that got interrupted.

Hospitality Local Insider

• Medium Cool Is Closing. It’s Not Dying, Its Home Is.

  Medium Cool didn’t get out-competed. It got out-leased. The brand survives, the room doesn’t.

• What’s Going To Be Good: Bibi’s Burgers, Surfside

  Come for the wagyu. Stay for the hospitality. Bibi’s is not a restaurant to miss.

• With All The Closings, We Thought It Would Be Exciting To Talk About Some Openings

  There are never a shortage of new operators looking to open in Miami, because Miami is always a good idea.

ON MY MIND: Will Creative Agencies Exist In An AI World?

AI is getting good. Genuinely good. Ai graphic design that was mediocre a year ago is now ten times better. Video is closing the gap fast. Web development that used to require a team now happens in a prompt. And the question that’s actually worth asking isn’t whether AI can be creative it’s what happens to the people and companies who used to sell creativity as a service.

Here’s what I know for certain: AI is a tool. A better paintbrush doesn’t make the painting less the painter’s. AI has gotten extraordinary at execution and still has almost no ability to do the thing that actually matters, be tasteful. Creative direction. Style. Knowing what’s good before it exists. That’s not a software problem. That’s a human one, and it’s the one thing AI hasn’t touched.

But here’s the part that should scare a lot of people in this industry: AI didn’t just replace the software. It replaced the person who ran the software. The graphic designer who knew Photoshop, the editor who knew Premiere, that skill set is evaporating. And that means the only people left standing are the ones who actually have taste, who can creative direct, who know what “good” looks like before AI shows it to them.

Here’s the problem, though: a lot of the people with the taste the ones who should be creative directing right now aren’t used to working. They’re not used to sitting down and doing the work themselves. They’ve spent their whole careers relying on someone else to know the tool, to run the software, to translate their vision into the file.

Right now, everyone’s calling AI output “slop.” Fine. Say that today. But that judgment is temporary, and it’s aimed at the wrong target. It’s like calling a music slop because it was made with a mixer or soundboard. The creative is still doing the creating. The instrument just stopped being the bottleneck. The people clinging to “AI work is worse” aren’t making an aesthetic argument they’re making a eulogy for their own relevance, and they don’t know it yet.

The Real Real: I don’t need to convince the people who think this way that they’re wrong. The market will do it for us. The creative directors too lazy to learn to creative direct AI themselves are going to feel like the human version of a BlackBerry, perfectly fine, perfectly confident, right up until the moment everyone else used the iPhone.

BEACH BUSINESS

“Animal House”: Brickell’s Most Notorious Building Has A Name Now

The Club at Brickell Bay used to be exactly what its name promised, a quiet, 43-story residential condo in the financial district, 643 units, the kind of building where you knew the doorman and nobody photographed your hallway.

Now it’s a crime blotter. Police reports describe drunk guests passed out in the lobby, porn shoots on the balconies, sex in the jacuzzi, and a permanent haze of weed smoke. The building’s own residents have started calling it Animal House. One owner who’s lived there since 2004 told the Herald she feels like a prisoner in her own home.

Here’s how it happened: the HOA is run by five board members, none of whom actually live in the building. Last month’s board election was allegedly marred by forged ballots. The former property manager is awaiting trial for grand theft and fraud. And when homeowners complained about the illegal short-term rentals overrunning their floors, they didn’t get help they got cease-and-desist letters from their own HOA’s attorney.

The math explains the madness. Miami bans short-term rentals in multifamily residential buildings. The Club is doing it anyway, because one investor - a former board president runs six Airbnbs in the building himself and says a single unit clears $50,000 a year. Code inspectors rarely write citations, and the ones they do write get quietly dismissed. When the person enforcing the rules is profiting from breaking them, the rules stop existing.

Miami Passed New York. Sort Of. If You Live in the Bronx.

Miami’s cost of living has technically surpassed New York’s for the first time on record, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Here’s what’s getting buried under that headline: this is metro-versus-metro, not Miami versus Manhattan. Once you know what’s actually being measured, the story changes.

Read more

Small Business Summer: Silver Mirror Facial Bar, Miami’s Best-Kept Skincare Secret

Small Business Summer keeps bringing us to the same kind of story: a Miami native leaves, builds something real somewhere else, and comes home to do it right here. This week, that story belongs to Matt Maroone, founder of Silver Mirror Facial Bar, now open in Coral Gables…

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: 7.13.26

• ON MY MIND: AI Made Everyone Sound Smarter and Say Nothing

  I got a text from a friend last week. Perfectly worded. Warm, professional, structured like a memo. Not one word of it sounded like him.

• SMALL BUSINESS SUMMER: State of Kid, Where Miami Kids Hang

  There are kids, and then there are Miami kids. And there’s no cooler place for a Miami kid to be than State of Kid.

Beach Business

• Star Island Says Sayonara to Sean “Diddy” Combs

  Sean “Diddy” Combs’ company has sold his waterfront mansion at 1 Star Island Drive for $55 million to John Franklin of Franklin Management.

• Ocean Update: Don’t Drink the Water. Or Touch It.

  Sargassum was the appetizer. Now Miami-Dade’s water has a fecal bacteria problem too.

• Marine Stadium: One Step Closer to Relaunch

  Miami decides the stadium’s near-term future in an August 18 special election.

Hospitality Local Insider

• Vilebrequin La Plage: An 18,000 Square Foot French Bathing Suit Wonderland

  Here’s the pitch: take a swimwear brand, slap it on a bar on top of a hotel, call it “La Plage”.

• Summer Shakeup: Wynwood Continues to Overpromise and Underdeliver. Shiso is Closing.

  One year. That’s all Shiso Asian Smokehouse got before Wynwood decided it would rather have another event space.

ON MY MIND: AI Made Everyone Sound Smarter and Say Nothing

I got a text from a friend last week. Perfectly worded. Warm, professional, structured like a memo. Not one word of it sounded like him.

I knew immediately. He ran it through AI first.

Here’s what’s happening in Miami right now, in every city right now: people are asking ChatGPT how to respond to the people closest to them. Everyone sounds smarter. Everyone sounds calmer. And underneath it, nobody knows what’s actually going on with anyone else.

A real text has a stumble in it. A real message has one sentence that’s a little too honest, because the person writing it was actually feeling something when they hit send. Strip that out and you’re not communicating — you’re issuing press releases to the people who are supposed to know you best. I’ve started noticing it everywhere: two people, two AIs, laundering the tension out of every conversation until nothing real gets said, and nothing moves.

Connection doesn’t happen at a polished distance. It happens in the stumble. Use the tool for your invoice. Don’t use it for the people who matter.

SMALL BUSINESS SUMMER: State of Kid, the Only Kid Spot in Miami That Actually Gets It

There are kids, and then there are Miami kids. And there’s no cooler place for a Miami kid to be than State of Kid, the spot every parent in this town already knows, and the ones who don’t need to.

Alana Oxfeld built it herself, from nothing, starting in 2019 when she was a mom of a two-year-old looking for exactly what didn’t exist yet: one place that had the best clothing, toys, and accessories, and also ran the classes. Music, art, cooking, occupational therapy from actual experts. Not a shop. A hub.

Everyone loves Alana. She’s the Mayor of Miami Beach Moms, the person every parent in this city seems to know, trust, and text when they need to figure something out. That’s not an accident. She and her team aren’t buying what sells, they’re buying what they’d want for their own kids, because most of the people running State of Kid are parents themselves. That’s the difference between a kids’ store and a kids’ store an entire community builds its week around.

And it works on every level. You can come for the art, stay for the classes, and let your kid experience everything the neighborhood has to offer without needing to buy into every brand in the building. They have three locations now, Miami Design District, South Miami, and the Miami Beach Botanical Garden.

Breakthrough Offer: Summer Class Packs, Drop it like its hot!

For the first time ever, State of Kid is offering summer class packs, four-packs and eight-packs, usable across any class, any kid, weekday or weekend. Got four kids? Use it on all four. Packs start under $40 and expire end of August, summer only, not available during the school year.

→ Sign up at StateOfKid.com. This won’t last.

BEACH BUSINESS

Star Island Says Sayonara to Sean “Diddy” Combs & His Unusually Soft Skin

Read more

Subscribe now

Good Company Interview with Joe Furst on building the Nora District, Wynwood, and Bringing Downtown Culture to West Palm Beach

I don’t hand out the “most important cultural project in Florida” label lightly. But that’s what Joe Furst is building in West Palm Beach, and after walking the Nora District with him and sitting down for an hour after, I’m more convinced than I was before I got there.

The Wynwood Pedigree

Furst is Miami born and raised. Ransom School. Hamilton College. A law degree he never wanted, used as a ticket into Goldman Properties, where he spent ten years under Tony Goldman building Wynwood from a wholesale garment district into the arts neighborhood the world came to copy. He signed leases at $4 a square foot to wholesalers who’d never heard of a gallery. He helped capitalize Panther Coffee and put Zach the Baker into business. He watched the first Wynwood Walls go up in 2009 and turn street art into museum art overnight. That’s not resume padding. That’s the actual blueprint for how a neighborhood gets built from nothing, and Furst was in the room writing it, landlord as content curator, four walls as a platform, everything else as programming around it.

He’ll also tell you Wynwood got away from itself. Peak Wynwood, KYU, Zach the Baker, Panther Coffee, the Walls before they became a photo backdrop instead of a gallery, ran roughly 2013 to 2015. Then the Business Improvement District pushed an upzoning overlay, land speculation took over, and a wave of investors with no relationship to the original vision started building whatever they wanted i.e. Frida Kahlo apartments. Goldman owned less than 20% of the neighborhood the whole time. Everyone assumed Goldman controlled it. They didn’t. That’s the lesson he carried out the door in 2018 when he left with no plan at all, no big idea, no next thing lined up, just ten years of pattern recognition and a law degree he still wasn’t using.

How Nora Happened

Six months after he left, a call came about two buildings under contract on a forgotten street in West Palm Beach called North Royal Avenue. Furst’s partner Richard Born described the first time he saw it as walking onto a movie set, vacant, bizarre, frozen in time, like someone could flip a switch and the whole block would come alive. Furst flipped the switch. Working with partners at NDT and Wheelock Street Capital, he systematically assembled over 90 parcels through the middle of Covid, when West Palm was still a tertiary market that nobody outside of Related and Steve Ross was paying attention to.

What he did next is the part that separates Nora from every other “up and coming neighborhood” story you’ve heard.

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: 7.6.26

• ON MY MIND: We Can Split the Atom. We Cannot Beat the Seaweed.

  USF’s Optical Oceanography Lab is calling 2026 another major sargassum year, and not the good kind. It’s already stacking up on the Keys and the southeast coast, and it’s not slowing down.

• SMALL BUSINESS SUMMER: Orilla Is the Best Steakhouse in Miami You Haven’t Heard Of

  South of Fifth is packed with restaurants fighting for attention. Orilla isn’t fighting. It’s just quietly cooking better food than most of Miami.

Beach Business

• Tesla Robotaxis Land in Miami. Miami Beach Doesn’t Make the Cut.

  Tesla flipped the switch on driverless rides in Miami this month, no safety driver, no human in the front seat, fully unsupervised from day one.

• Miami Sports Report: LeBron & DeRozan Free Agency Watch

  LeBron James and DeMar DeRozan are now the two names running through Heat conversations, and neither is a reach anymore.

Hospitality Local Insider

• Baguette Nir Is the Best Sandwich in Miami. It’s Not Even Close.

  This is one of the great sandwiches this side of the Mississippi, made in a neighborhood most of Miami still overlooks. Don’t sleep on it.

• Mister O1 Quietly Hit 30 Locations. Nobody’s Talking About It.

  This started with 18 seats inside a South Beach office building in 2014.

• Negroni Bankruptcy & More Closings in Brickell

  Brickell is proving a hard truth about hospitality in this city, a packed dining room doesn’t mean a healthy business if the rent was never sustainable.

ON MY MIND: We Can Split the Atom. We Cannot Beat the Seaweed.

We split the atom. We got to the moon. We built AI. And every summer, a pile of brown algae drags Miami to its knees. USF’s Optical Oceanography Lab is calling 2026 another major sargassum year, and not the good kind. It’s already stacking up on the Keys and the southeast coast, and it’s not slowing down.

Let’s be honest about what this actually is: disgusting. It rots on the sand and starts pumping out hydrogen sulfide, the rotten-egg gas, thick enough to irritate your throat, your eyes, your skin if you get too close. Add in whatever’s living inside those piles and you’ve got a beach that looks like a postcard from fifty feet away and smells like a dumpster up close.

We can’t legally clear it before it hits shore, fine, there’s an ecosystem argument, I get it. But “we’re not allowed to touch it” can’t be the entire strategy for a problem that shows up like clockwork every single year. Somebody’s got to have a better answer than towels and low expectations. Or, and I say this with love: Febreze, this is your Super Bowl. Fix the beach, reinforce your brand promise, no one in Miami will ever buy Glade again.

SMALL BUSINESS SUMMER: Orilla Is the Best Steakhouse in Miami You Haven’t Heard Of

South of Fifth is packed with restaurants fighting for attention. Orilla isn’t fighting. It’s just quietly cooking better food than most of Miami. The bone-in rib eye arrives with three sauces and peppercorn, cooked exactly right, next to charred broccoli that wows your palette. That’s the tell of a serious kitchen, vegetables that could headline the plate on their own.

The pasta shouldn’t be this good at a steakhouse. The shrimp bucatini with a spicy sauce is homemade, fresh shrimp, better texture than most dedicated Italian spots in this city manage. The Palm should be jealous. The branzino comes with preserved lemon and garlic, crisp skin, flaky inside, one of the best versions of that fish anywhere in this city. The salads aren’t an afterthought either. Fennel salad is beautiful and flavorful. The Orilla salad with shaved parmesan, greens, and herbs better than Jen’s, that taste like they were picked that morning.

Then there’s the Wagyu cheeseburger, because apparently Orilla refuses to only be great at one thing. Wagyu on a brioche bun, provolone, smoked pork belly, caramelized onions. This is Argentine steakhouse cooking at a level that competes with anywhere in the city, the meat, the seafood, the pasta, the vegetables, all firing at once. Easily one of the best Argentinian steakhouses in Miami, hiding in plain sight south of Fifth.

Breakthrough Offer: During the summer What’s Good subscribers buy one bottle of wine, get one free or two complimentary glasses of wine with any Prime Bone-In Steak.

Available through September 1st. Don’t overthink this one. Go.

→ Book Now

BEACH BUSINESS

Tesla Robotaxis Land in Miami. Miami Beach Doesn’t Make the Cut.

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: 6.30.26

• ON MY MIND: FREEDOM

  July 4th, 2026. America turns 250. We have more freedom than at any time in human history. But the majority of us do nothing with this freedom.

Beach Business

• Who Wants to Be a Member of a Private Club When You Could Be a Member of a Secret Society?

  Forget the Soho House. Forget ZZ’s. Forget La Gorce. There’s a tier above it all.

• North Beach Winning: Argentina Game Friday & Fireworks Saturday, The Greatest Neighborhood in Miami Keeps Getting Greater

  Two nights, two reasons to never leave the neighborhood. Most of Miami spends July 4th weekend stuck in traffic trying to get somewhere else. North Beach just sits back and lets the world come to it.

Hospitality Local Insider

• Katana’s River Is Finally Crossing the River

  Finally opening a second location, this one on Coral Way.

• Sunset Harbour’s Bermuda Triangle: Sweetgreen is Closing

  Sweetgreen at Sunset Harbour is done, and I want to be honest about something: this one should never have happened in the first place.

• Restaurant Rumor Mill: Louis Vuitton South of Fifth? Bye Bye, À La Folie & Hard Rock Cafe

  Three stories, one theme: the Summer Shake Up Continues.

ON MY MIND: FREEDOM

July 4th, 2026. America turns 250.

We have more freedom than at any time in human history. But the majority of us do nothing with this freedom. Instead, we impose constraints on ourselves, despite fighting so hard to remove these constraints.

That’s the real American paradox. 250 years of fighting for freedom, political freedom, economic freedom, creative freedom, and most people spend it enforcing artificial limits on their own lives. Not because someone is stopping them. Because they’re scared.

Miami doesn’t do that.

That’s the structural truth about this city. The people who end up here didn’t take the safe road. They left somewhere. They chose a city that doesn’t have a script, doesn’t have a consensus reality, doesn’t have rules about who you’re supposed to be or how you’re supposed to build.

Miami is where people come when they are done negotiating with their own potential.

Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps and still managed to articulate the most important idea I’ve ever read, said it this way: Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

The barrier to entry lives in your mind. The only ceiling is the one you installed yourself.

The more you build something that people trust, something they return to, something that means something, the more latitude you earn to keep going on your own terms. That’s what we’re building here. Something free.

On the 250th birthday of the freest nation ever conceived, I’m most grateful for this: that we live in a city that takes the promise seriously. That treats freedom not as an inheritance but as a daily practice. That proves what’s possible when you stop asking for permission and start building.

Put away your fears and go. After all, you’re free.

That’s What’s Good Miami.

RANT: Ives Dairy Road Is One of the Worst Roads in the World

I once sat in Istanbul traffic on the road hugging the Bosphorus, boats gliding by, the call to prayer drifting over the gridlock, and somehow that felt more dignified than this. I lived in New York for thirty-five years. I’ve survived the BQE during construction that outlasted entire mayoral administrations. None of it compares to Ives Dairy Road, the short stretch between I-95 and Aventura that takes longer to cross than the flight that got you to Miami in the first place.

It doesn’t matter what time of day. Tuesday at 11am, Saturday at midnight, Ives Dairy has achieved a permanent, undefeated, all-weather state of gridlock. Rush hour isn’t a window here. It’s a lifestyle. Whoever conceived this road looked at the volume of people trying to get from 95 into one of the densest corridors in South Florida and decided: two lanes, a few traffic lights spaced like a cruel joke, zero capacity for the next fifty years of growth.

Ban whoever built it from ever touching a road again.

Better yet, make them drive it. Every day. At 5:45pm. Forever.

BEACH BUSINESS

Who Wants to Be a Member of a Private Club When You Could Be a Member of a Secret Society?

Read more

Small Business Summer: Ashoka Miami

Don’t Sleep on this Incredible Indian Food Direct from the Holy Spirit

There is a restaurant in Doral that has been quietly serving some of the best Indian food in Miami for ten years, and if you don’t know about it yet, that’s on you, but we’re fixing that right now. Ashoka is the kind of place that makes you wonder why you ever settled for anything less. The owners left everything, careers, comfort, 8 thriving restaurant locations in Costa Rica, because something bigger told them it was time to move. They landed in Miami, found Ashoka, and transformed it into something the city didn’t know it was missing: a restaurant that goes far beyond the butter chicken. Rava Dosa. Pistachio lamb chops. Chaat. Chicken Tikka. Everything made from scratch, from a kitchen where the owners feed their own kids, you can taste the love.

Now, G-d has told them to do something even crazier. New York has Gray’s Papaya, a 50-year institution where the Recession Special gets you two hot dogs and a drink for $7.50. Simi is doing that for Indian food in Miami. In honor of Ashoka’s 10th anniversary, the buffet is back, one month only, all of July, and $20 gets you endless curry and dosas at lunch. An elevated, made-with-intention spread from one of Miami’s most authentic kitchens, at a price that is genuinely an act of generosity in 2026. They’re calling it the The Second Coming (of the Buffet). We’re calling it the most important lunch deal in Miami this summer. Gray’s Papaya built a legend on a hot dog and a papaya drink. Ashoka is building one on butter chicken, pistachio lamb chops, and the kind of hospitality that makes you feel like family.

Go to Doral now, and eat lunch like its 1999.

Breakthrough Offer: The Second Coming (of the Buffet): $20 lunch | Endless Curry + Dosas | All of July

→ Order Now

The Heat is On: WGM X The Leftovers Heat Index

I’ve spent the last decade arguing that Miami deserves real media. Not pay-for-play coverage dressed up as editorial. Not another breathless opening item because someone bought a table at a charity dinner. Real opinions from people who’ve actually eaten the food, sat in the room, and don’t owe the publicist anything.

This week, that argument got company.

On Wednesday at What’s Good Studio at The Moore, I sat down with three of the most credentialed food journalists this city has ever produced, Erin Michelle Newberg, Olee Fowler, and Matt Melzer, to record the first episode of “What’s Good? The Leftovers”, a monthly podcast collaboration between What’s Good Miami and The Leftovers Miami. Sixty collective years of food writing. One room. Zero sponsored content.

The centerpiece of everything we’re building together is The Heat Index, and I’ll say it plainly: this is going to be the most important restaurant list in Miami. Not because we say so. Because of who’s making it and why.

Why the Heat Index is Different

Every city gets the food media it deserves. For too long, Miami got press releases repackaged as reviews. Got stars handed out by people who flew in on a Tuesday. Got “best of” lists shaped more by advertising relationships than actual opinions. The result was a city with world-class restaurants and no one trusted enough to tell you which ones actually earned it.

The Heat Index changes that. Erin Michelle Newberg has been covering Miami’s food scene as an OG journalist for decades — she knows what’s happening behind the scenes before it hits anyone’s feed. Olee Fowler spent ten years as editor of Eater Miami and is a fourth-generation native; if it opened in this city in the last decade, it went through her hands. Matt Melzer covered Miami for Thrillist for thirteen years. Combined, these three have forgotten more about Miami restaurants than most critics will ever know.

They are not here to be nice. They are not here to protect relationships. They started The Leftovers because private equity gutted Eater Local and Thrillist Miami in the same week, both owned by Vox Media, both cut, and they looked at what was left and decided Miami deserved something better. The Heat Index is that something. It is a monthly ranking of the most culturally relevant restaurants in Miami, built on sixty collective years of expertise, assembled by people who eat here, live here, and genuinely care what this city becomes.

Placement is never for sale. That’s not a tagline. That’s the entire foundation.

The List June 2026

The June 2026 Heat Index is live. Twenty-five restaurants. Three Michelin stars. One Palm Beach import that just walked into the building like it owned the place.

Buccan sits at No. 1. Chef Clay Conley’s Coral Gables debut, fifteen years of earned Palm Beach reputation landing on Miracle Mile, is the most anticipated opening in Miami earning exactly the spot it deserves. No hype machine. No corporate backing. Just a chef who came up under fine dining and never forgot how to run a room that feels human.

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: 6.9.26

• Special Report: Happy Giannis Day. Finally!!!!! Miami Heat Sign Giannis

  Pat Riley built this city into a basketball destination through sheer force of will and an almost frightening refusal to be outworked. And now, at what everyone assumed was the end of his run, with every chip on the table, he went and got the Greek Freak.

• On My Mind: James Dolan Doesn’t Need Your Vote

  Congrats, James Dolan. Thanks for showing us what real determination looks like, what it looks like to build when nobody believes, to stay when everyone says sell, to speak your mind when the whole world wants you to shut up.

Beach Business

• Jeff Soffer’s Billion Dollar Bailout Of Mercedes Benz Miami

  Jeff Soffer’s Fontainebleau Development is bailing out the Mercedes-Benz Miami condo project, stepping in as a partner to close a $1.06 billion construction loan and end the foreclosure litigation.

• W South Beach Has Closed

  W South Beach is closing August 20, 2026. The Marriott/W affiliation is severed. 337 employees notified. No reopening date announced.

Hospitality Local Insider

• The Nora Hotel And Pastis West Palm Beach

  The Nora Hotel opens this fall in the heart of the NORA District, a 40-acre mixed-use development rising along North Railroad Avenue just north of downtown.

Real Estate

• Luxe Developments We Love: Waldorf Astoria Hotel & Residences Miami

  The vertical flex. 300 Biscayne Boulevard. Downtown Miami. A 1,049-foot tower stacking ten glass cubes into the sky above Biscayne Bay.

Happy Giannis Day. Finally!!!!!

Let’s talk about what just happened.

Michael Jordan, the most competitive human being who ever laced up a pair of sneakers, said the most competitive person he ever encountered was Pat Riley.

Pat Riley does not lose gracefully. Pat Riley does not rebuild. Pat Riley does not accept a narrative where Miami isn’t the center of the basketball universe. And Pat Riley, at 79 years old, just scored! The Miami Heat acquired Giannis Anetkoumpo, two-time MVP, one of the best players alive, and made the entire league look stupid for sleeping on us. And not for nothing, we went all in on this prediction months ago in a very public way.

The Celtics thought they had him. An hour before the announcement, Celtics odds on Kalshi shot above 70%. The whole league was watching, the whole internet was watching, Boston was already celebrating — and then Miami walked in and closed.

Because that’s what Miami does.

This isn’t a sports story. This is a city story. Miami attracts. The weather, the culture, the freedom, the feeling, the upside, it’s a different proposition than it was twenty years ago and everybody knows it. Giannis knows it.

Pat Riley built this city into a basketball destination through sheer force of will and an almost frightening refusal to be outworked. And now, at what everyone assumed was the end of his run, with every chip on the table, he went and got the Greek Freak.

Fuck a rebuilding year. Fuck a five-year plan. Fuck the Celtics.

The Knicks are on notice. Boston is on notice. The rest of the East is on notice. And Bam and the Greek Freak are the perfect antidote to the Alien.

Pat Riley isn’t going out anywhere but on top. The same place Miami is going.

Welcome to South Beach, Giannis. Thank g-d you don’t have to live in the US anymore.

What’s Good, Miami. Everything. And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

On My Mind: James Dolan Doesn’t Need Your Vote

For twenty years, James Dolan was the punchline.

Worst owner in sports. Couldn’t get out of his own way. Couldn’t get out of his father’s shadow. Charles Dolan built Cablevision into an empire. James inherited it and got mocked on ESPN every other week for what he was doing to the Knicks.

But here’s what nobody talks about: he didn’t stop.

While everyone was writing him off, he was building something no one had ever built before. A $2.3 billion sphere in the desert. Not a stadium. Not an arena. Something that had never existed. People said it was ego. People said it was insanity. People said it would bankrupt him.

The Sphere is now the number one grossing venue in the world. 2.2 million tickets. $290 million at the box office. Booked through the end of the year. Abu Dhabi next.

And the Knicks? NBA Champions for the first time in 53 years.

Two days ago, at the championship parade, the mayor of New York gave an eight-minute speech about Knicks history. Passionate. Detailed. The crowd went crazy.

Then James Dolan walked to the podium.

“I don’t need your vote. I don’t need to quote to you about what happened here because if you’re a Knicks fan, you know it already.”

That’s it. That’s the whole speech.

People hated it. Of course they did. But that’s exactly the point. The man has spent twenty years being told he was wrong, being told he was a failure, being told to sell the team, being told the Sphere was a $2.3 billion ego trip, and two days after winning a championship he built from the ground up, he walked to the microphone and said what he’s always said.

I don’t need your vote.

That’s not arrogance. That’s a very specific kind of freedom most people never access, the freedom to be wrong in public, repeatedly, and keep building anyway.

Congrats, James Dolan. Thanks for showing us what real determination looks like, what it looks like to build when nobody believes, to stay when everyone says sell, to speak your mind when the whole world wants you to shut up.

Persistence and determination are omnipotent. Calvin Coolidge said it. James Dolan proved it.

BEACH BUSINESS

Jeff Soffer’s Billion Dollar Bailout of Mercedes Benz Miami

The most important stalled development in Miami just got a lifeline, and the man providing it knows this market better than almost anyone.

Jeff Soffer’s Fontainebleau Development is bailing out the Mercedes-Benz Miami condo project, stepping in as a partner to close a $1.06 billion construction loan and end the foreclosure litigation that had the project frozen. Michael Dell’s BDT & MSD is among the lenders. The deal hasn’t closed yet, but the direction is clear: Soffer is in, the capital stack gets rebuilt, and one of Miami’s most ambitious developments gets back off the ground.

The backstory is messy. Michael Stern’s JDS Development had been in a foreclosure fight with Cottonwood Management since May, after an affiliate allegedly failed to repay an $86 million loan that matured in January 2025. The city of Miami had already notified the developer of a default on a public benefits agreement, including an $8 million fire station JDS was required to build. The whole thing was unraveling fast.

Now it isn’t.

The project itself is worth understanding. This is a 791-unit, two-tower, 67-story development on the Miami waterfront, the first Mercedes-Benz branded condo development in the world. Valued at over $2 billion at completion. 130,000 square feet of amenities, a 174-key hotel, 200,000 square feet of office and wellness space. Designed by SHoP Architects. Sales launched in 2024 starting at $500,000, led by Ryan Serhant’s firm.

Soffer brings more than capital. He and his collaborators understand Miami in a way that outside developers rarely do, the market, the relationships, the capital networks, the patience required to build something that actually gets finished. The Turnberry Resort & Country Club. Turnberry Ocean Club. The Fontainebleau. These are not just trophy assets, they are the connective tissue of South Florida, built and operated by a family that has been shaping this market for generations. His track record isn’t just impressive, it’s specifically Miami. When Soffer gets behind something here, it gets built. And he doesn’t blink.

W South Beach is Closed

Read more

The Weekender: A Field Guide to the Great Miami Summer Exodus

The most annoying question in Miami doesn’t start in summer. It starts in March.

You’re at a dinner. The bread hasn’t even landed. Someone leans in with a smile that already knows the answer, and asks: “So… where are you going this summer?”

It is not a question. It is an audit.

Because in this city, where you go is never random - it’s a verdict. Your summer address has a return label, and that label says everything. So we built the map. Find your block. We’ll tell you where you’re really going - and what it says about you, whether you like it or not.

LIVE: Fisher Island & Indian Creek → SUMMER: St. Tropez

The bunker crowd. They don’t pack they “have things sent.” The boat left in May without them; it keeps its own calendar. Lunch at Club 55 that becomes dinner that becomes a minor diplomatic situation. The flex was never about being seen it’s about being unreachable. Phone off. The assistant says “he’s in Europe.” Nobody can confirm which country, and that’s the point.

LIVE: Star Island → SUMMER: Wherever the Boat Happens to Be

For this set, the destination isn’t a place, it’s a question: whose deck? They don’t ask where you’re going. They ask if you’re “doing the Med this year,” as though there is only one Med and you simply haven’t been invited. Meanwhile the Star Island house sits dark, the plants on a drip system, one guy named Carlos holding the only key. The real house is 200 feet long and currently dodging a port tax off Sardinia.

LIVE: North Bay Road, Sunset Islands & Venetian → SUMMER: Ibiza or Aspen

Same waterfront, two completely different ways of lying to yourself about your age. Ibiza is for the ones who refuse to age out - villa in Es Cubells, sunglasses worn indoors, will tell you the DJ “is actually a really close friend.” Aspen is for the ones who swapped the DJ for the Food & Wine Classic, did exactly one hike, and have brought it up unprompted every week since “rosé at altitude just hits different.” Both are flexes. Only one of them requires an IV drip the next morning.

LIVE: Coral Gables → SUMMER: Nantucket & East Hampton

The Gables spent a hundred years engineering itself to look old, so naturally it summers somewhere genuinely old, just to feel seen. Nantucket reds, grey shingles, a rental that’s been in someone else’s family since 1840. The East Hampton contingent wants the establishment and the ocean and will correct you, gently but firmly, if you say “the Hamptons” like it’s all one place. It is not all one place. You’ll be told why.

LIVE: Coconut Grove → SUMMER: The Berkshires & Shelter Island

Sailboats, banyan trees, and at least one man who will explain his catamaran to you in full. The Berkshires set wants Tanglewood, a tote bag, and Yo-Yo Ma with the picnic. The Shelter Island set finds the Hamptons “a bit much” while owning a home there. Old money that reads, will ask what you’re reading, and will visibly recalibrate based on your answer.

LIVE: Bal Harbour → SUMMER: Southampton

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: 6.9.26

• On My Mind: Yesterday I turned 47.

  Some years bring life-altering wins. Others bring deafening failures. I’ve had both. What I’ve learned is that the journey doesn’t lead to the destination — it is the destination.

Beach Business

• The New Conquistadors: The Smartest Hotel Group You’ve Never Heard Of Just Made Its Move

  Dean Group bought the Gates a few months ago and now they bought the Mayfair.

• North Beach Update: A Gourmet Grocer is finally on the Way

  A grocery store that matched the neighborhood’s ambition. A place where you could buy a $14 jar of tomato sauce and feel genuinely good about it.

• Magic City: The $3 Billion Bet That Refused to Die

  Zangrillo is partnering with Plaza Equity Partners on a proposed 7.8 million-square-foot, $3 billion mixed-use district anchored around artificial intelligence, asset management, and venture capital.

Hospitality Local Insider

• The Economics Of Summer Restauranting

  The restaurants that survive summer aren’t necessarily the best ones. They’re the ones with the deepest pockets, the leanest operations, or the most loyal local base.

Real Estate

• Luxe Developments We Love: Ocean House Surfside

  9317 Collins Avenue. Surfside. Nestled between Miami Beach and Bal Harbour on one of the last truly serene stretches of oceanfront in this county.

On My Mind: Yesterday I turned 47.

I don’t know what I thought 47 would look like. But I never imagined it would look like this.

It’s better than I thought. Deeper. More profound. More alive.

It’s also harder than I thought. More uncertain. More humbling.

That tension, between the beauty and the weight of it, is something I’ve stopped trying to resolve. It’s not a problem. It’s the point.

The difference between greatness and failure is inches. Between the life you dreamed of and the one that slipped away, a conversation you had or didn’t have, a bet you took or didn’t take, a moment of clarity or cowardice. Achieving anything real is about threading the needle, over and over, finding that slight edge and having the courage, and the stamina, to exploit it.

And the only way to find those edges is to persist. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. I believe that completely.

Some years bring life-altering wins. Others bring deafening failures. I’ve had both. What I’ve learned is that the journey doesn’t lead to the destination — it is the destination. The results matter. I intend to deliver them. But what I cherish more every single day are the relationships, the small moments, the look on someone’s face when they experience something I helped create. Watching each of my children fall asleep at night. Finding a creative solution to a problem I didn’t think I could solve.

The most important choice any person can make is to choose positivity. To choose happiness. To choose love. To see the good in things and assume positive intent — because whether or not the world earns it, what is life if you don’t wake up every morning reaching for joy, toward the people you love, toward the endless possibility of what’s still ahead?

I thank g-d for every moment I spend chasing my dreams, sharing my gifts, and connecting with the people I love and collaborate with.

I would not change a thing.

- Alan

BEACH BUSINESS

The New Conquisatadors: The Smartest Hotel Group You’ve Never Heard Of Just Made Its Move

Ponce de León didn’t stumble into Florida. He chose it. A calculated entry point into a new world.

Dean Group is doing the same thing.

The Dublin-based hospitality group — built by a team of former Ennismore executives who know exactly what it takes to make a boutique brand travel — just secured its second Miami property. Elliott Investment Management, Paul Singer’s $128 billion hedge fund, partnered with London-based Lifestyle Hospitality Capital Group to acquire the Mayfair House Hotel & Garden in Coconut Grove for $69.4 million. Dean Group is the operator. Miami is the jumping-off point.

Their model is simple and hard to execute: hotels rich in character, rooted in the culture of the neighborhoods they inhabit. No flags. No sameness. No corporate lobbies that could be anywhere. Every property has a point of view — and the Mayfair, whatever name it ultimately carries, will be no different.

This is Singer’s second South Florida hospitality play, following the $53 million acquisition of the Gates Hotel South Beach in 2024. The capital is serious. The operator is serious. And Coconut Grove is the right neighborhood — walkable, cultured, undersung — for a group that builds hotels for people who actually know where they are.

The States are next. Miami is just where they landed.

→ More on The Dean Group

NORTH BEACH UPDATE: A Gourmet Grocer is finally on the Way

For years, North Beach has been a tale of two Publixes.

Bookended by the one on 71st and the one on 41st, with a collection of beloved mom-and-pops filling the gaps, the neighborhood has made it work. Nobody complained too loudly. This is Miami Beach. There are bigger problems.

But something was always missing. A grocery store that matched the neighborhood’s ambition. A place where you could buy a $14 jar of tomato sauce and feel genuinely good about it.

That place is coming.

Fresh Market is officially headed to North Beach — and yes, we know there was a Target rumor. We mourned it briefly. We moved on. Because Fresh Market is not a consolation prize. Fresh Market is an upgrade.

Here’s what North Beach is about to experience for the first time: classical music piped through the speakers while you deliberate between three varieties of artisanal sourdough. Cheese sections that require a docent. Olive oils from regions you will immediately Google. Flowers at the entrance that make you feel like a better person just for walking past them.

Brickell can have Nude. In North Beach, we want gourmet.

Magic City: The $3 Billion Bet That Refused to Die

Some visions are too big to kill. Even when the legal system tries.

Bob Zangrillo first unveiled plans for the Magic City Innovation District in Little Haiti over a decade ago. He assembled the site, secured city commission approval in 2019, then watched it stall — not because the vision was wrong, but because federal prosecutors came for him in the college admissions scandal known as Operation Varsity Blues. He was later pardoned by Trump on the final day of his first term.

Now he’s back. And the timing couldn’t be better.

Zangrillo is partnering with Plaza Equity Partners on a proposed 7.8 million-square-foot, $3 billion mixed-use district anchored around artificial intelligence, asset management, and venture capital — with 2,600-plus residential units, a hotel, and retail. Palantir, Apple, Amazon, and Gemini have all expanded in Miami-Dade. The tech migration Zangrillo predicted 14 years ago has actually happened. He wasn’t early. He was just interrupted.

The unresolved question is the human one. The project has faced opposition from residents concerned about displacing Little Haiti’s working-class community. Zangrillo’s team has committed $31 million to the Little Haiti Revitalization Trust. Whether that’s enough depends on who you ask.

What isn’t in question: the man spent years in legal limbo and came back with a $3 billion swing. Miami has a way of rewarding that kind of persistence.

HOSPITALITY LOCAL INSIDER

The Economics of Summer Restauranting: Working Hard for Nothing

Let’s talk about what nobody in the restaurant industry wants to say out loud.

Summer in Miami is a math problem with no good answer.

The rent stays the same. Food and beverage costs stay the same. Insurance stays the same. The only variable, the only lever you can actually pull, is labor. And if you cut labor, you cut the product. And if you cut the product, you lose the customers you still have.

Read more

Subscribe now

GOOD COMPANY INTERVIEW: ILAN WAISBROD, DESIGNER BEHIND BOND ST, CAFETERIA, TAO VEGAS, W HOTELS, OPENS STUDIO IN LITTLE RIVER TO DO HIS BEST WORK.

The Man Who Designed the Rooms You Remember Just Moved to Miami to do his best work.

There is a generation of New Yorkers who came of age in a particular kind of room. A long communal table. A light they couldn’t explain. The feeling that a place knew exactly what it wanted to be and didn’t need to tell you. Republic in Union Square. Cafeteria in Chelsea. Bond Street in Noho. The 40/40 Club. The W Seoul. The MGM Skylofts and Tao in Las Vegas.

Most of those people couldn’t tell you who designed those rooms.

That’s exactly how Ilan Waisbrod wanted it.

The man who designed the rooms you remember just moved to Little River.

Ilan Waisbrod is the founder of Studio Gaia, one of the most consequential hospitality design firms of the last half century. If you have eaten at Republic in Union Square, drunk at Cafeteria in Chelsea, had your first sushi at Bond Street, or stood in the 40/40 Club or the W Seoul or the MGM Skylofts or Tao in Las Vegas, you have been inside his work. You just didn’t know his name.

That’s how Ilan prefers it.

I sat down with him this week for a full conversation — his childhood in Tel Aviv, the Israeli army, the leap to Milan with $100 in his pocket and no Italian, the fight with Jay Z, the pandemic, the decision to leave New York after thirty years, and why, at this stage of his career, he is doing the best work of his life in a small office five minutes from his apartment in Miami.

I should say something about how we got here, because it’s part of the story.

BOND ST, REPUBLIC, CAFETERIA, TAO, & W HOTELS

Years before I met Ilan in person, I knew him through books. Design books I kept for inspiration — the kind you flip through late at night looking for the feeling behind a room. His work was in those books. Cafeteria. Republic. Bond Street. I would study the photographs and try to reverse-engineer what made them feel the way they felt. I didn’t know his name the way I know it now. I just knew the rooms.

Then, years later, I got invited to consult on a project in Macau — a Playboy Mansion concept that never got built, which is its own kind of story. And there was Ilan. The designer from the books, standing in the same room. We shared meals in Hong Kong. We went to press conferences together in Macau. We stayed in touch the way you do with people you meet on the other side of the world — loosely, with genuine warmth, across a distance that makes follow-through hard.

Then life moved on. He kept building his empire in New York. I built a family and a life in Miami. A decade passed.

And then Miami brought us back together. He showed up in my feed. We reconnected. And now he has a studio ten minutes from mine, and we are figuring out what we might build here together.

That’s the version of this city I believe in. Not just the real estate and the hotel rates and the restaurant openings — though all of that matters. But Miami as a place that reunites people with unfinished business and gives them something new to make.

Before any of the restaurants, before New York, before the hotels, there was Milan.

Ilan arrived in the mid-eighties with almost nothing — a student visa, a new wife, a daughter named Gaia on the way, and a hunger that had been building since he was a child in Tel Aviv filling notebooks with invented figures. He had been pushed there by a mentor at his design school who told him plainly: you’ll get wasted here. Go.

MILAN & THE MEMPHIS MOVEMENT

He arrived at exactly the right moment. Milan in the late eighties was the center of the design world, and at the center of that center was the Memphis movement — a collective of designers led by Ettore Sottsass that included Michele de Lucchi, Alessandro Mendini, Andrea Branzi, and collaborators from Japan and the United States. What Memphis declared, loudly and deliberately, was a reversal of everything the Bauhaus had established. Form does not follow function. Function can follow form. A chair sits empty for twenty-three hours a day. It’s a sculpture. Design it like one.

The colors were saturated. The shapes were unexpected. The references were global and irreverent. And the underlying philosophy — that beauty was not an indulgence but a legitimate purpose, that the emotional experience of an object or a room was as real and valid as its utility — was something Ilan had been feeling his whole life without having the language for it.

Milan gave him the language.

He studied at Politecnico di Milano. He knocked on doors. He was taken under the wing of Alberto Scattella, a dean and architect who handed a group of international students a real commission, a new student housing building, and told them to design it while he watched. Ilan did. He kept working with Scattella after. He went to the Fiera di Milano, the furniture fair where Philippe Starck was making small exhibitions outside the main hall and nobody yet knew who he was. He met people who were building the world he would eventually inhabit.

“It was explosive,” he told me. “These designers were saying: who said it has to be this way? And just taking things and turning them upside down.”

That inversion never left him. You can find it in every room he’s ever designed, the moment where something unexpected appears, the light from a place you didn’t anticipate, the swing in the corner, the color that shouldn’t work but does. Modern, warm, playful without being obvious. The Memphis influence metabolized into something distinctly his own: hospitality spaces that felt like they had a point of view without making you feel like you were inside someone’s thesis.

A few more things that stay with you from the conversation.

He designed Bond Street before he had ever eaten sushi — one of the most celebrated sushi restaurants in New York history. The first time he tried it was at Bond Street’s opening night, when he mistook an entire mound of wasabi for guacamole. He describes what happened next with the kind of matter-of-fact humor that belongs to someone who learned long ago not to take himself too seriously.

He spent years sending emails to Adam Tihany, another Israeli designer who had made it in New York, that went unanswered. Years later, they ended up in the same hotel meeting with the Palace Hotel with the Sultan of Brunei. Tihany looked at him and said: There’s a time for everything. Come work with me when you’re done here. Two months later, Ilan did. He spent three years learning hospitality design at the highest level. It changed everything.

He designed Republic in a studio apartment with Jonathan Morr, working at night after everyone went home, with no real concept of what they were building. The restaurant ran for twenty-two years. A few weeks before it closed, he went for dinner with his ex-wife and a nineteen-year-old waitress told him it was one of the coolest, most modern restaurants she’d ever worked in. He had designed it three years before she was born.

He left New York because the pandemic broke something that couldn’t be put back. Not the city — the era. His era. The one he’d spent three decades building inside twenty-five-person offices, eight hotels on the drawing board simultaneously, running between projects and clients and deadlines. He realized that era was finished. He realized, more slowly, that he didn’t want to rebuild it.

He is now doing three projects at a time. A 16th-century building in Tuscany. A restaurant for a superstar chef in New York. A men’s club in Coconut Grove. He is sketching by hand. He is putting the music on at six when the rest of the team goes home. He is, by his own description, doing things without knowing exactly what he’s doing — the way he did when he was a child in Tel Aviv, filling notebooks with invented figures, front view, side view, top view, before he knew what perspective was.

“I think I have another ten years of doing it,” he told me. “I want to do it more in an artistic way than a professional one. Almost like an artist who wakes up in the morning, draws something, does a painting, and takes a glass of wine in the middle of the day.”

The full interview is live. Watch it. It’s one of the best conversations WGM has had.

The Mr. Miami Take: Miami keeps attracting people who have already built something significant and are now building something true. That’s a different kind of city than the one that just attracts people who are hungry. Both are necessary. But only one of them produces work that a nineteen-year-old calls modern thirty years later.

KEN GRIFFIN IS BUILDING A CITADEL CITY WITHIN OUR CITY

The WSJ had the story this week and it deserves more attention than it got. Ken Griffin, Citadel founder, $50 billion net worth, the most consequential financial transplant Miami has received since the city started pulling capital away from New York, just revised his plans for the 2.5-acre site at 1201 Brickell Bay Drive. He’s adding a 300-unit residential tower and a 1,420-space parking garage to a development that already includes what will be the tallest office building in Florida. The $2.5 billion Citadel headquarters supertall hasn’t broken ground yet. He is already thinking about what surrounds it.

This is not a real estate play. This is a declaration of permanence. Griffin moved Citadel from Chicago to Miami in 2022. Since then he has spent over $1 billion assembling waterfront land, commercial buildings, and estates from Miami to Palm Beach. In January he partnered with Goldman Properties to buy 545Wyn, the premier office building in Wynwood, for $180 million. He owns a private superyacht marina in Miami Beach with pools, pickleball, and crew facilities. He paid nearly $200 million combined for homes in Coconut Grove and Star Island. He is not hedging. He is building infrastructure for a life, and a headquarters, that assumes Miami is permanent.

The revised Brickell proposal adds 300 apartments and 1,420 parking spaces to the site, alongside the supertall office tower already in planning. What’s interesting about that combination, residential, office, parking at scale, is that it’s the blueprint of a neighborhood, not a building. Griffin is not just coming to Miami. He is attempting to build the kind of walkable, self-contained urban ecosystem that Brickell has been gesturing toward for twenty years but never quite delivered. When capital at this level commits to a specific block, the blocks around it reprice. When an investor of his caliber enters a neighborhood, underwriting assumptions immediately change, cap rates compress, land pricing recalibrates, and long-term institutional capital feels safer stepping in. That’s not hype. That’s how cities get made.

The Mr. Miami Take: Miami has been selling itself as a serious city for five years. Ken Griffin is the proof of purchase. He didn’t come here for the weather. He came here because he believes Miami is where the next chapter of American financial power gets written. More than 74 companies relocated their headquarters to Florida between 2020 and 2025, more than any other state. Griffin isn’t leading that trend. He’s accelerating it. The question Miami should be asking isn’t whether he’s committed. It’s whether the city can build the infrastructure, transit, schools, housing, fast enough to deserve what’s coming.

WHAT’S LISTED: BEST REAL ESTATE LISTINGS THIS WEEK IN MIAMI

Read more