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Best Dishes 2016

best food miami
Philly Cheesesteak at Daily Creative Food Co.

 

From seafood and meat to side dishes and ethnic cuisine, here are my favorite dishes of 2016.  There’s also a sandwich that made the cut.  Drum roll please: the best food Miami of the year. And watch for the best desserts next week.

 

Chef Killer Bee of NaiYaRa Thai restaurant branched out into a Burmese dish that gets serious kudos. The sweet and savory Burmese wraps are  rice noodles with chili, spicy palm sugar and peanuts.

best food miami
Burmese wraps from NaiYaRa

 

No ordinary au gratin potatoes these. The ones at Capital Grille are downright decadent, creamy and rich with jarlsberg and white cheddar cheeses,  all layered like lasagna, and then topped with crunchy roasted garlic and onion.

best food miami
Au gratin potatoes from the Capital Grille

It’s worth a visit to Sarsaparilla Club just for their sweet corn “grits”. They are the best creamed corn ever, made with green onion and arugula mascarpone that gives them some zip, and garnished with crisply choclo corn and pecorino cheese.

 

best food miami
Sweet corn grits from The Sarsaparilla Club photo courtesy of www.miamifoodpug.com

Doral has a winning candidate in Dragonfly Izakaya’s chaban, garlic blue crab fried rice with good size chunks of crab, the rice moist and tasting of the sea. I could have made a meal of that. The shrimp tempura on a bed of fried onions was a close second.

best food miami
Shrimp tempura from Dragonfly Izakaya & Fish Market

Chef Michael Schwartz’s revamped Cypress Tavern scored a homerun with its wood roasted short rib with faro risotto, apricot, crunchy marcona almond and mint. The meat was so tender it broke apart with the touch of the fork, and the accompanying ingredients added a complexity and were a perfect foil to the richness of the sauce.

best food miami
Wood roasted short rib from Cypress Tavern

It’s impossible for me to choose one standout dish from Caviar Russe’s power lunch menu. They’re all exceptional in taste and presentation. To start there’s a choice of Caesar salad with caviar and quail egg, a different conceit that really worked. Then there’s the lobster with green apple and heart of palm that was beautiful in presentation and exquisite in taste.The others were excellent too but these took  the prize.

best food miami
Lobster with Green Apple, Heart of Palm, Celery from Caviar Russe

At Corsair, the dish that stole the show (served during Miami Spice months) was the arugula and duck confit, the duck fashioned into something looking like a crabcake, tender in the inside and crunchy outside. It was teamed with a quail egg on a bed of humboldt fog and sherry vinaigrette. Corsair and Bourbon Steak are always star performers at Miami Spice.

best food miami
Arugula and duck confit from Corsair

High end Barcelona restaurant Klima does tapas better than anyone else in the city. And often they have a twist that puts them over the top, like the to die for piquillo peppers stuffed with creamy mascarpone cheese, honey, and caramelized nuts. The complexity of flavors worked perfectly, and they were a sight to behold as well.

best food miami
Pimientos de piquillo from Klima

Even if you’re not a fan of risotto you’ll love the new chocolate risotto dish, part of the “Moderna” menu at Toscana Divino. It’s made with beef juice, mushroom stock, 65% cacao from Ecuador and topped with black chanterelles. You can’t taste the chocolate as everything blends together. In fact, if you had your eyes closed you couldn’t tell what was in the dish, but you’ll enjoy every last morsel. A close second was the seafood carbonara.

best food miami
Seafood carbonara

 

I must be prone to really good comfort food this year, so maybe it’s not surprising that a Philly Cheesesteak made my top ten list. It couldn’t be just any Philly cheesesteak since, you see, I went to college in Philadelphia so know something about this MidAtlantic regional favorite.  The Daily Creative Food Company on Biscayne Boulevard got it all right  — a warmed bun that’s just a little chewy, good quality meat, provolone cheese (never cheez whiz or velveeta), sauteed onions, and even a pickle.

 

A best salad of the year goes to Db Bistro Moderne’s beet salad on the fall menu. Beautiful to behold, it’s extraordinarily tasty thanks to the complex flavors and textures of the red and yellow beets, caramelized walnuts, and thinly sliced pears.

best food miami
Beet salad from Db Bistro Moderne

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Karen Escalera

Karen Escalera

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