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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
