I hadn’t spent any time in Miami since I went to the U to see Yasmani Grandal and Matt Harvey face each other back in 2010 – Grandal took him deep – but have now been there twice inside of nine months, for last year’s Futures Game and now to see the University of Florida’s two first-round pitchers pitch against the Canes.
The big novelty of the trip was the brand new St. Roch Food Market in the Design District just north of downtown, not far from Wynwood. This is the second St. Roch, with the original in New Orleans, and I believe this location has different vendors with the same concept – a 10,000 square foot open area with about a dozen different stalls along the walls, selling all kinds of food, including a salad stand, a noodle bar, a pasta/Italian stand, a Japanese stand with cooked and raw fish preparations, a coffee/tea bar, and a vegan bakery. You pay at each stand as you order, and at least in my case someone brought the food to my table since I was sitting nearby. I ate at the Japanese stand first, getting a seaweed salad and a grilled freshwater eel dish over rice with radishes and allegedly cucumbers (which were nowhere to be found). The vegan bakery is better than you’d expect, or than I expected, with an excellent shortbread-only version of a Linzer tarte called a ‘compassion cookie’ because they intend to donate a portion of the proceeds from its sale to animal shelters. The coffee stand uses Counter Culture beans and a high-end tea purveyor I hadn’t heard of. The whole concept is fantastic – it’s fresh food, mostly made to order, with great inputs – but on day one their execution was spotty. Another stand didn’t have one of its main proteins ready, and didn’t tell me until I’d paid and the order had gone to the cook. I’m hoping that was just Opening Day jitters.
I ate two meals down in Coral Gables, both above average. The Local is on the Miracle Mile pedestrian-only street, serving southern-inspired dishes, a lot of them takes on bar food, with an extensive cocktail list as well. Their cornmeal-crusted catfish was outstanding, perfectly crispy on the outside and hot enough that it had to have come right from the fryer; it’s served on a mild remoulade with hand-cut fries on the side that had probably been sitting a little while before I was served. They have about a half-dozen craft cocktails of impressive complexity as well.
Shelley’s is a very unassuming seafood bar very close to the Canes’ stadium, with maybe 2/3 of the menu items including fish or shellfish. I went with the server’s suggestions for both starter and main; the mofongo fritters were lighter than I expected, served with both a sugar cane compound butter and a clear garlic-chili sauce, while the rum-glazed scallops were perfectly cooked as well, but I thought the whole combination of scallops with house-cured ham and candied pecans overpowered the delicate flavor of the scallops themselves.
I mentioned Panther Coffee in my wrap-up last July, and went there twice on this trip, also grabbing a bag of beans from Finca La Illusion, a Nicaraguan farm, to bring home. I don’t know how long they’ll have it but it’s excellent, big bodied with some warm berry notes and a mild cocoa note too.