Some of our favorite Miami restaurants closed in 2020. Here’s why we will miss them

Every year we lose a favorite restaurant in Miami, but the losses this year seem to sting more.

The coronavirus has shown us what life without them is like, these places where we celebrate anniversaries and birthdays, meet for job interviews or escape to, if for nothing more than to luxuriate in a quiet lunch during a particularly stressful workday.

Updated: These Miami restaurants are permanently closed after the COVID-19 pandemic

We make memories in restaurants and maybe that’s why our nostalgia brings us back even when they may have fallen off a bit. Our memories outlive the restaurant itself.

For some in Miami, coronavirus closures sped up the planned or the inevitable. Others that couldn’t switch to offering curbside pick-up, takeout or delivery, looked at their balance sheets and shut the doors.

All of them leave a void.

These are some of the Miami restaurants that closed in 2020 that I’ll miss most.

Balloo

Timon Balloo made a name for himself as the chef-partner at Sugarcane Raw Bar Grill, but it was at this cozy, colorful spot at the end of a long hallway, tucked inside a downtown office tower, where cooked the food closest to his heart. He created dishes like curried goat and housemade roti bread that shared a menu with chung fun noodles, roasted calabaza with labneh and fried rice dusted with furikake spices — all in a restaurant with 26 seats (when the fire marshal wasn’t looking).

I took my cousin Julio there for our last meals inside a restaurant before the pandemic, where we feasted on dish after dish of explosive flavors. It lasted less than a year, but Balloo promised in an Instagram post that he will find a new home for Balloo. I hope he does.

Note: Balloo is still offering meal kits you can pre-order and have delieverd at OrderBalloo.com.

Cake Thai

Few South Florida restaurants produced Thai cuisine the way Chef “Cake” did in his tiny Upper East Side kitchen. That was no fluke.

When Phuket Thongsodchareondee opened the original Cake Thai in 2014, he set out to recreate the flavors that shaped his palate and his life in Thailand. And in that six-table, strip-mall restaurant — set apart from his neighbors by a bright orange façade — he did just that.

I’ll never forget sitting down for lunch at a competing Thai restaurant with my significant other, being told to hurry up because the kitchen was closing in an hour, and dumping the restaurant to head straight for Cake, where his mom worked the front. Together, they made a warm atmosphere, where dishes bursting with fresh and hard-to-find ingredients never caved to an Americanized palate. We had the best Thai food in the city all to ourselves for an hour that afternoon.

David’s Café

The longtime Miami Beach restaurant continued losing its lease and changing locations since it left its original spot on Lincoln Road, but it always found an audience. Serving unpretentious, simple Cuban food since 1977 — particularly pan con bistec sandwiches — David’s kept Miami Beach running with late-night cafecito and pastelitos.

A long list of court filings shows the restaurant was well on its way to closing before the pandemic first shut county dining rooms in March. It happens. The restaurant business is a tough business. I bought pastelitos at the last location on the way to meet Michelle Bernstein for a Miami Herald podcast and video interview series, La Ventanita, and met the agent who would get my book published at the original spot 10 years before that. I’ll miss it.

Ember

Ember made me crave mashed potatoes.

Brad Kilgore’s comfort food made you gush at what seemed like simple dishes, as he applied the advanced cooking techniques that made him a James Beard award finalist for best chef in the South to dishes diners recognize. Poutine. Beignets. Beef Stroganoff. And yes, mashed potatoes, a swirled soft serve topped unironically topped with a pad of butter, that somehow evoked crema Catalan, folded with a smoked gouda cheese foam and roasted garlic. It was a far cry from his groundbreaking Wynwood restaurant, Alter, a concrete laboratory, where the dishes resemble art installations with names to match. Ember was as warm as the name suggested. And the pimento cheese-stuffed beignets I shared on a date night will make me mourn a restaurant that was closed during the pandemic longer than it was ever open.

JohnMartin’s Irish Pub

John Clarke and Martin Lynch, joined at the hip since childhood like their pub’s name, arrived in Coral Gables four years apart in the early 1980s and decided Miracle Mile needed an Irish pub.

With several Irish investor friends pooling $1.5 million, they turned an old Greek diner and adjacent antiques store into the pub of their dreams, bringing life to a sleepy Miracle Mile in 1989. They built a polished mahogany bar to run the length of the restaurant and the maple wood floors were reclaimed from a shuttered Dublin church.

They had planned not to renew their lease when it came up in May 2020, but the coronavirus closures kept them from throwing a series of weekend celebrations leading up to the last day.

On St. Patrick’s Day, they were the life of a party that closed down the Mile every year. They might easily go through 200 pounds of corned beef and 125 kegs of beer at their peak. I can neither confirm nor deny sitting on the closed street outside the bar with a buddy and our kids, babysitting while drinking a pitcher of cheap beer.

Kaido

Only one place could get me to endue oontz-oontz music and that was Kilgore’s Japanese-style lounge, directly upstairs from Ember.

Kilgore is quick to point out he is no sushi chef. But there has always been something of an homage to the Japanese masters’ respect for quality ingredients and simplicity in the fastidious, stylish and impeccably presented dishes that made him a star of the culinary world. Kaido was that cocktail lounge that could create beautiful drinks and pair them with scratch-made crab rangoons that the chef himself would pound by the fistful. Slip through a disguised door and you were in a private sushi bar, where you found yourself dipping into a seafood fondue, topped with caviar, and one after another omakase came to your seat, some topped with caviar, others paired with champagne. I’m still feeling the champagne headache (and the bill).

Le Sirenuse

Le Sirenuse brought lavish sophistication to the reimagined Surf Club, a Roaring ‘20s club for American elite that was renovated three years ago within a new Four Seasons hotel. It was quite possibly the only restaurant in town that could overshadow Thomas Keller’s The Surf Club Restaurant, which happens to be right next door. It was impossible not to want to sit at the champagne bar in a rich and gilded room, watching the crash of the ocean perfectly framed through floor-to-ceiling windows. (I won’t miss the valet smoking the clutch on my GTI.)

Ortanique on the Mile

Ortanique arrived in Coral Gables at a time when the flavors of the Caribbean — from Jamaica to Haiti, from Cuba to the Dominican — were finally being afforded the respect they deserved at white-plate South Florida restaurants. Chef Cindy Hutson and partner Delius Shirley cultivated a dedicated following, international acclaim and a distinctly South Florida flavor at their Pan-Caribbean restaurant for 21 years. Hutson’s plates were beautifully styled — learned from Norma Shirley, her mother-in-law who was dubbed the Julia Child of the Caribbean, an owner of several U.S. restaurants.

I remember ordering a thick jerk-seasoned pork chop during an interview for a job I would have hated that eventually went to someone else. But that’s OK. A decade later, the same woman hired me to work at the Miami Herald.

Sorry Not Sorry: California Pizza Kitchen

I know we’re not supposed to love franchises. And there was nothing special about the only California Pizza Kitchen in Miami-Dade county, on a corner on Miracle Mile, or any of their locations in America. Maybe there was at one time when Wolfgang Puck innovated new flavor combinations to top a pizza, but that’s not why I went there with my daughters. The food came out hot, the pizzas were flavorful, the drinks never emptied and the service was quick — exactly what you want when you’re trying to fuel up three kids, all two years apart, particularly when they were all under 10.

But don’t let that fool you. As teenagers, they still asked to go, and didn’t turn down crayons and coloring menus.

But the pandemic hit, their lease came up and a landlord dispute forced them to close the doors.

I still haven’t told my kids about it. Certainly there is much better pizza in Miami. But what we created here are memories. And that’s why we love restaurants — and why we’ll miss our favorites.