Michael's Genuine Food & Drink

[Miami Danny]

Lot to love about this place-great beers, wine list, good staff and friendly owners. As hip as Michy's is homey. Very diferent from Michy's, though, from the little snacks to the signature pizzas. Favorite item-wood roasted Brussels sprouts with pancetta and lemon aioli, and the stout braised clams with fennel, potatoes and bacon.

[Miami Danny]

...and perfect meatballs-$5

[Miami Danny]

Chef Michael Schwartz will be a judge on Top Chef on 9/5, for those of you who watch the show.

[molto e]

Michael's Genuine Food & Drink

305) 573-5550

130 Ne 40th St

On a Saturday night, I tried Michael's Genuine for the first time and walked into a restaurant popping with energy. The restaurant has outdoor seating in the courtyard in front of the restaurant that would be ideal dining on a pleasant night. I was early for my reservation and hungry so I settled at the bar and had my meal there. All the Front of the House were very friendly and completely knowlegeable about the menu.

Menu

I had a hard time narrowing down what I wanted for dinner and I found all the sizes of the dishes to be generous.

Snacks

chicken liver crostini

crisp hominy with chile & lime

First off the portion size of a "snack" was larger than I expected it to be but somehow that did not deter me from finishing them. The chicken liver crostini's were creamy and the caramelized onion added a sweet oniony note. I would not have normally sought out the hominy but I had read many positive remarks about it and I found them addicting.

Small

yellowfin tuna tartar with grapefruit, avocado & crispy potatoes

This was a miss...the tuna was a bit oxidized and overall uninspired (the only miss of the night).

Medium

steamed mussels with tomato harissa broth, sticky black rice & garlic chips

This was a novel spin on mussels, the tomato harissa broth was divine with the perfect balance of the sweet concentrated tomato and the spicy tang of the harissa. I have to say this was the most memorable mussel dish that I have had in a long time. I would have loved to dunk frites into that broth.

Large

slow roasted berkshire pork shoulder with anson mills cheese grits, pickled red onion & parsley sauce

fork tender pork and the grits were particularly good

Dessert to follow...

Edited August 31, 2007 by molto e (log)

[ulterior epicure]

Did anyone catch last night's episode of Top Chef? Chef Michael Schwartz was on as guest chef. I was seriously sorry for what they subjected him to... especially Hung's "Quick Fire" cereal landscape.

[annecros]

Did anyone catch last night's episode of Top Chef?  Chef Michael Schwartz was on as guest chef.  I was seriously sorry for what they subjected him to... especially Hung's "Quick Fire" cereal landscape.

←

That was sad. The guy has really done a remarkable job of showcasing what is best about indigenous Florida ingredients, and somehow has made them trendy.

Top Chef Miami has been long in coming. It has done us a world of good. There really is a great deal of remarkable food down here.

[ulterior epicure]

I was pleased to spy Chef Michael Schwartz as my table was seated to dinner recently at Michael's Genuine Food & Drink. Although our party was awfully tempted to sit en dehors in the balmy night breeze, a couple in our party preferred the air conditioned environs and thus we ducked inside the small, boisterously upbeat, and (the photographer in me will note) dark dining room.

Still, I managed to get photos of all of our food for you, which you can see, and read about, here on my flickr account.

As with my report on Michy's, I'll dispense with the "411" and get down to the food and overall experience, which I'll try to do in broad strokes, more or less, 'cause I know the blow-by-blow can get pretty boring:

Here's what we ordered and ate (oy, did we really eat all that?):

Small

House Salad

Medium

Butter Lettuce

Heirloom Tomato & Baby Beet Salad

Crispy Sweet & Sour Glazed Pork Belly

Chargrilled Octopus

Large

Grilled Pumpkin Swordfish

Wood-Roasted Harissa-Spiced Black Grouper

Sides

Wood-Roasted Cauliflower with Parsley Sauce

Wood-Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Pancetta and Lemon Aioli

Desserts

Chocolate Cremoso

Angel Food Cake with Cayenne-Spiced Strawberries

1. I love the wine list. They have a truly interesting selection by the glass (I didn't bother looking at the bottles, as the by-the-glass list was pretty upstanding in itself.

2. Overall, the food was excellent. My two favorite courses were the Sweet & Sour-Glazed Pork Belly and the Grilled Pumpkin Swordfish. The Pork Belly dish, which has been much talked about, really was very nice. Honestly, I think I enjoyed the pork belly meat (and fat) itself than the accompanying syrupy sweet & sour "kimchi." The sauce was a tad too sweet for me (n.b. I have a sub-standard tolerance for sweetness). However, the pork was truly well executed and the meat itself, without the help of any sauces, was quite flavorful. It was probably the best dish we had. The grilled pumpkin swordfish dish was also another favorite. The fish itself was rather boring and much too meaty. I hesitated on ordering the swordfish because I generally prefer flaky/softer fishes to the steakier ones (i.e. swordfish, sturgeon (sometimes it can be wonderfully silky if done correctly), tuna steak, mahi mahi, shark, etc...). But, the accompaniments sold me, and in when realized in my mouth, won me over pretty handily. The ragout of artichoke hearts, fennel, and cipoline onions garnished with crispy onions in a seductively fragrant warm white wine (perhaps a touch of vermouth?) broth was exquisitely balanced, well-executed (the vegetables were *perfectly* cooked) and comforting.

3. The one (needlessly) disappointing dish was the House Salad - a mix of chopped lettuces with champagne grapes, Manchego cheese, and blanketed with a generous slices of Serrano ham. It was way over-salted. I was particularly looking forward to tasting the riesling vinaigrette, which turned out to be, in practice, a salt vinaigrette. I could hardly taste the sweet bead-sized champagne grapes - everything else disappeared into a otherwise indistinguishable textural study of SALT. With the Serrano ham and Manchego cheese, really not much additional seasoning was needed. Pity - it would have been a stellar salad if it had been properly seasoned.

4. What Michael's has mastered, more than Michy's, and perhaps not as well as Sardinia, is the art of the wood oven. Two of the most enjoyable courses came from the wood-oven: the brussels sprouts, which were nicely charged with fat cubes of pancetta and side of bracingly tart (a good thing) lemon aioli, and the roasted cauliflower coated with a nice parsley sauce.

5. Desserts, which are usually done with passing interest, were pretty good. What I enjoyed about the two we tried - the "Chocolate Cremoso" and the "Angel Food Cake," was that neither was very sweet. The Angel Food Cake, which came sided with a spicy cayenne-spiked mix of macerated strawberries and what appeared (and tasted like) a cayenne-infused syrup, was simple, yet made the earth move slightly beneath me. There were a few moments where I had sworn I had discovered the 8th Wonder (of what, I know not, but the 8th Wonder, no less). It was a fantastic combination which tickled my palate. The cayenne syrup was intoxicating... each bite of the cake took a progressively longer dunk.

6. Service for our table, sadly, was pretty shoddy. While the back wait staff was very diligent and efficient, at times they were really too eager to clear plates. For example, bread, disappeared after the salad course, never to reappear!! Our server was really just absent way too much. After desserts were dropped, I think he must have dropped (somewhere in the back kitchen) as well - we had to finally grab (yes, almost literally, as all the other servers seemed to be blind to our frantic waving) what appeared to be the manager to get our check. We outlasted a good two table turns - and not because we were eating slowly or purposely dallying. This was a pity as I probably would have been doing cartwheels out of the restaurant had our service matched the quality of our food - it really put a noticeable damper on the evening for our party.

7. On an aesthetic note (since I am a photographer and a self-consciously artistically-inclined fellow), I love the (for lack of better description), red box lanterns, which swayed to and fro freely with the draft above... I also very much enjoyed the open kitchen and the kitchen counter, which was lined with dozens of gorgeous, plump, over-turned heirloom tomatoes. If I were a lone diner, or even on a casual date, you'd probably find me at one of those counter seats.

Again, you can see all of my photos and read detailed descriptions of each on my flickr account.

Edited November 4, 2007 by ulterior epicure (log)

[ulterior epicure]

Two add-ons:

1. My negative observations about service was pretty limited to our server, who was really just absent. That being said, I have to commend the back wait staff. They were extremely graceful and efficient - it was like watching a (very loud) carefully choreographed ballet (or, rather, tango).

2. Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream on the dessert menu. I frowned. Everything else here was so good - especially the desserts... why would they bother with anything other than home-made ice creams??

Edited November 5, 2007 by ulterior epicure (log)

[drosendorf]

This thread hasn't been updated in some time, and since I finally finished a magnum opus rundown on my several experiences at Michael's Genuine Food & Drink, I figured it was the right time.

I first experienced Chef Michael Schwartz's cooking more than a decade ago when he was the chef at the then newly-opened restaurant Nemo on South Beach. The food at Nemo was full of flavor but still executed with something of a light hand, and for years the place was one of my favorites. Schwartz left Nemo several years ago after a falling out with partner Myles Chefetz, and pursued a few other ventures. Some of these went by pretty quickly - a brief stint at Atlantic in the now-demolished Beach House Bal Harbour then owned by the Rubell family (both the restaurant and the hotel were hidden jewels for a brief period of time); a menu of "beauty cuisine" at the short-lived restaurant Afterglo in South Beach.

If there were a culinary award for "Comeback Player of the Year," Michael Schwartz would have won it in 2007. Following about a year behind Michelle Bernstein, who took a first bold step by opening up Michy's on a dodgy section of Biscayne Boulevard in 2006, Michael opened Michael's Genuine in late March 2007 in the Design District, another neglected neighborhood with no evening traffic whatsoever at the time (in any legitimate business activities, in any event). And people came.

My first visit there was about a week after they opened, and I was immediately hooked. Here was a restaurant that felt like a neighborhood place but was still classy enough to bring a date or a client; food that was creative without being goofy, made with high-quality ingredients and a focus on local products; the "small plates" menu options made it possible to try a number of different items; and the prices weren't crazy.

The furnishings are low-key but classy, with simple wood tables covered with white paper and a polished concrete floor, the primary decoration being a few large artworks on the walls and some big red-shaded rectangular lamps hanging from the ceiling. It reminds me of the kind of places we've been to in the Pacific Northwest - comfortable, casual, but still nice enough for date night. There's outdoor seating in the atrium out front which is nice in the cooler months, and a second dining room adjacent to the main space has been added - though it has something of a Siberian feel to it, the food still tastes just as good there.

The menu is divided into "snacks," small, medium, large and extra-large dishes, as well as several vegetable side dishes. When they first opened, snacks were $4, and in two years that's only increased to $5-6. Prices across the menu have generally held steady, with most "small" and "medium" dishes being mostly in a $10-15 range and larger items (including the "extra-larges" which are meant to be shared) in the $20s-$40s.

The food at Michael's Genuine has a few defining characteristics: a focus on artisanal, high-quality ingredients; a dedication to local and sustainable products (including neglected species and cuts); and a purity and vividness of flavor. This is a place that features things like Poulet Rouge chicken (an heirloom breed descended from French stock now being raised in North Carolina and Georgia), Fudge Farms pork (more on this below); locally sourced fish that you'll almost never see on a restaurant menu like pumpkin swordfish, cero mackerel, triggerfish, and golden tilefish; fresh local produce from Paradise Farms and Bee Heaven Farm; house-cured bacon and sausages; and "variety meats" like chicken livers, sweetbreads, beef cheeks, and pig ears all put to great use. Chef Schwartz styles himself as a disciple of Alice Waters (the chef, not the more annoying public persona of late) and it really shows in the menu. He even has a "forager" regularly hitting the produce markets and farms to source great product for him.

But to focus exclusively on the ingredients and their provenance would pay short thrift to the creativity and quality of the cooking here, which puts out combinations like a beef cheek over a celeriac mash with a chocolate reduction and a garnish of celeriac salad (since replaced on the menu), or a crispy pork belly and watermelon salad with a soy-inflected dressing. Yes, much of the good stuff happens on the farm, but a good bit of it still happens in the kitchen too.

On my blog I've given an extensive rundown of many of the items I've tried over the past two years, which I won't duplicate here. The menu changes quite regularly, and while there are some stalwarts, new dishes appear frequently, old ones come and go, some are just momentary inspirations based on what's fresh that week, and still others get tweaked here and there depending on what ingredients are at their best and what's interesting to the kitchen at that time. I have often said that I think this approach is one of the keys to a successful restaurant in Miami as, among other things, it gives the locals reason to come back repeatedly and provide a base business not subject to the fickle and seasonal whims of the tourist crowd. Indeed, I suspect the menu at Michael's Genuine probably changes more in any three-month span than the menu at Nemo has changed since Chef Schwartz left several years ago.

Instead I'll just describe here the last meal we had at MGF&D a couple weeks ago. The "snacks" section of the menu is always a good place to begin, and this time around we had the crispy hominy, the puffed kernels fried and dusted with a sprinkle of chile powder and a squeeze of lime; the potato chips with caramelized onion dip, a favorite of Frod Jr. and Little Miss F (it also hits all the right nostalgic notes for the grown-ups); the falafel (another of Little Miss F's favorites, the balls of mashed chickpeas crispy outside and tender inside, and flecked with fresh parsley and mint); and a newer addition to the menu, crostini shmeared with a fresh goat cheese, an apricot thyme jam and a little sprinkle of micro-greens so fresh they seemed to still want to stand upright, a nice light warm-weather starter.

Michael sent out a new item he's been working on for us to try, a crispy corned beef dish. Keep your eyes out for this one. Many of MGF&D's dishes work with what I think of as "complementary contasts" - crispy and tender, salty and sour, the contrasts keeping the palate refreshed - and this was a great example. A slab of super-tender house-cured corned beef is given a bread crumb coating and seared for a crispy exterior, and is paired with a creamy remoulade/Russian dressing sauce, and some finely julienned sauerkraut-like pickled cabbage. Crispy, tender, creamy, salty, sour - like the best Reuben sandwich you've ever had. Mrs. F literally grabbed my arm after her first bite, she was so excited by this (but then she has a serious Reuben fixation - she basically subsisted on Reubens when pregnant with Frod Jr.).

We shared a couple more of the smaller dishes. The crispy pig ear salad is loaded with strips of shatteringly crispy strips of pig ear, tossed with tiny leaves of baby arugula, slivers of red onion, and thin disks of pickled radish (again with the pickled flavors - Chef Schwartz often makes great use of this flavor note). The strips of pig ear still visually reflect their origin (with a lighter strip of soft cartilage in the middle) but actually with the frying lose much of the ear-y texture some people find, well, eery. Frod Jr. wouldn't stop picking these off my plate. A local grouper ceviche, with a dice of mango and avocado, was one of the few disapppointments - not bad, just lacking the punch that MGF&D usually delivers.

I followed with a Fudge Farms pork chop which nearly brought tears to my eyes. This is, simply, some of the best pork I have ever tasted - rich, sweet and densely flavored. A server once described this to me as the "prime beef of pork" and that's probably pretty close to the mark. And one of the things I so admire about Chef Schwartz's cooking is that he knows how to stay out of the way of a great ingredient. The pork chop is just brined and grilled, and served with simple pairings of an apple chutney and mashed turnips. And - as if to prove a point - this is not presented as a composed plate, but rather each of the accompaniments is in its own small bowl, so as not to mess with this great pork unless you choose to do so.

Mrs. F had the grilled octopus as a main. The octopus (a big fat whole tentacle served as a "medium" dish) is first slow-cooked in olive oil at a low temp, and then briefly finished on the grill for a little crisping of the exterior and light infusion of smoky flavor, and served over a bed of fat white gigande beans, roasted red peppers, olives and a salad of torn herbs and leaves, all given a good drizzle of olive oil. Frod Jr. tried a new item for him - the Harris Ranch shortrib, which is roasted, cooled, sliced off the bone into planks and then also finished on the grill, served with a hearty romesco sauce. Little Miss F had a pasta dish of home-made fettucine with shrimp, strips of zucchini, shards of fiore sardo cheese and a generous dusting of black pepper. On prior occasions I've found Chef Schwartz's pasta almost too silky and slippery, so much so that it doesn't effectively hold the condiment. This iteration was tender and soft but had enough traction to grip the buttery sauce.

The standout dessert of the night was a bowl of Meyer lemon curd topped with strips of candied peel, with a couple of dainty currant scones alongside as well as a couple Meyer lemon jellies. Like a mini English tea service for dessert, this perfectly captured the perfumey aroma of the Meyer lemons. Frod Jr. had his favorite, the chocolate cremoso. I'm still not sure exactly what "cremoso" translates too, but I know this dessert features a lusciously rich quenelle of dark chocolate, almost ganache-like in texture, with a sprinkle of coarse sea salt, a drizzle of peppery olive oil, a crispy sourdough crouton for scooping, and a cold espresso parfait for contrast. Though the combination of chocolate, salt and olive oil sounds exotic, it is actually a delicious spin on a traditional Catalan dish.

Service at Michael's Genuine can be either outstanding or adventurous. There is a core group of veteran waitstaff who are consummate pros and an absolute pleasure to dine with, but there's simply not enough of them to handle the entire restaurant. For the remainder, there's unfortunately a lot of turnover, and while a few of them have stuck around and succeeded, there are usually always at least a few fresh faces. It's almost never a matter of bad attitude, just sometimes a lack of experience.

The wine list has always done a pretty good job of providing decent value, and of late has made some notable improvements. I've always felt that the list slanted too heavily toward California cabs and Bordeaux blends, which I don't see as the ideal match for MGF&D's food. The selection of pinot noirs in particular has been bolstered lately, but I'd still love to see more options from the Rhone and Spain, which I think would be a better complement to Michael's menu. There's also a somewhat unheralded (at least by me) list of more than 20 mostly craft beers, including a creamy, malty Old Speckled Hen pale ale we had one evening in lieu of wine.

Michael's Genuine has certainly not lacked for champions since it opened, with the New York Times' Frank Bruni naming it fourth last year in the solipsistic list of Top 10 New Restaurants Outside of New York and Gourmet magazine listing it in its Top Farm to Table Restaurants. Now a little more than two years old, it's refreshing and gratifying to see the restaurant is still regularly finding new and interesting things to put on the menu, still dedicated to local, sustainable and artisanal foods, and still absolutely at the top of its game.