‘Calle Ocho is mostly dead.’ Why this Cuban ice cream shop opened in Kendall
Great ice cream alone wasn’t enough to keep the lights on at Little Havana’s famous ice cream shop.
The sales at Azucar, the Calle Ocho ice cream store with Latin flavors in its gelato and a towering ice cream cone sculpture outside, were 25 percent of what they were a year ago in August. Coronavirus had kept away the tourists that brought life to the heart of Miami’s old Cuban neighborhood.
So Azucar owner Suzy Batlle got an idea: Open a second store to subsidize the first.
At the height of the coronavirus spread, with restaurants closing indoor dining, Batlle, who opened the original Azucar on a sleepy Southwest Eighth Street in 2011, opened a second location across from the Dadeland Mall, positioned between Kendall, Pinecrest and South Miami.
It worked.
“I opened in Downtown Dadeland to pay the rent in Calle Ocho,” Batlle said.
Batlle said she saw what was happening in her stretch of Little Havana when the Big Red Bus tour buses stopped coming. That stretch of business experienced pointedly what is happening in restaurant and entertainment districts around Miami and the country.
“The second COVID hit, the tourists left — the buses, all that stuff, from one day to the next,” she said.
On that one-block stretch alone, where tourists once clamored, several businesses closed temporarily or permanently. The Tower Theater remains closed. Ball & Chain bar and restaurant, whose owners have been locked in a federal legal fight with commissioner Joe Carollo and a dispute over code violations with the city, remains closed after an extensive renovation. The popular Ella’s Oyster Bar closed. And El Exquisito Cuban restaurant, a mainstay on this block since 1974, has been closed indefinitely the last three month and its future is uncertain.
“Unfortunately Calle Ocho is mostly dead,” she said. “It’s nuts what’s happening to us…. I said, ‘I’ve got to do something.’”
So Batlle thought of another revenue stream.
She had long been thinking of a way to bring her ice cream to the suburbs when she found a location in the Downtown Dadeland complex. The area has been trying to lure restaurants for years and now has a new feature, a closed down main street where outside seating can be set up.
Batlle signed a one-year lease based on a percentage of her sales in the same block as the award-winning Ghee Indian Kitchen, Abi Maria bar and Pubbelly Sushi, at 8845 SW 72 Pl. And the burbs have shown up, she said, with south Miami-Dade diners glad to cut out the long trek east.
Meanwhile, Batlle started selling her ice cream nationally. First she teamed with Goldbelly and GoPuff.com, national delivery companies, and has now signed a national distribution deal with TheBite.Life, a company owned by financier and business reality TV show host Marcus Lemonis, her new neighbor who recently bought a stake of next-door Ball & Chain to help reopen the venue.
“He asked me, ‘Don’t you like making money?’ And it just clicked,” she recalled. “I had to start thinking outside the box.”
Just in the last few weeks, Battle said she has started seeing Little Havana “finally doing better,” thanks, she said, to Florida’s warm weather and laxer dining restrictions drawing northern tourists. But, as a cancer survivor, she is hoping for the day the coronavirus vaccine will be widely available to people like her, who are especially at risk.
“If we can get this vaccine out, that’s the key,” she said. “We’ll all wear our masks and we’ll dance.”
Azucar Downtown Dadeland
8845 SW 72 Pl., Miami
