WGM Weekly: Sweetgreen Sunset Harbor Closed & Peter Thiel's Secret Society is Cooler than ZZ's
+ North Beach Fireworks, Louis Vuitton South of Fifth, Bye Bye A La Folie
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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
