1675-2 Brown's Hotel CORR - SOBE'S PRIME 112 A RARE STEAK HOUSE 03/04/2004
THE MIAMI HERALD
Copyright (c) 2004, The Miami Herald
DATE: Thursday, March 4, 2004 EDITION: Final
SECTION: Tropical Life PAGE: 12E LENGTH: 80 lines
ILLUSTRATION: color photo: Myles Chefetz and chef Mike Sabin (a)
SOURCE/CREDIT LINE: BY VICTORIA PESCE ELLIOTT, vpe@aol.com
MEMO: REVIEW; Correction ran March 5, 2004; see end of text.
SOBE'S PRIME 112 A RARE STEAK HOUSE
Amid mad-cow fears, rising beef prices and a shrinking supply of prime
meat, who would have thought a high-end steakhouse would create a sensation on
the tip of South Beach?
Leave it to the uncannily savvy restaurateur Myles Chefetz (Nemo, Big Pink,
Shoji) to make it happen. He sourced superb, dry-aged beef from New York,
commissioned a little-known designer to create a luxe look for the historic
Brown Hotel and hired some of the area's most personable and professional
servers to complete the clubby feel of this temple to high protein.
The talented Mike Sabin, who trained under Mark Militello among others,
mans the stoves. Now just try getting a reservation. Saturday night prime
times are booked through April. Even on a rainy Wednesday, we waited 30
minutes in the sleek bar for a table. (We passed on the cave-like upstairs -
great for a small private party but otherwise Siberia. )
The waiter put in our drink order and we contemplated the impressively
varied wine list. Of the more than 200 bottles (not counting halves and
magnums) , just over a dozen are under $40 - no surprise given what must surely
be the highest dinner tab in town.
Enter the $18 sauteed Hudson Valley foie gras with a lovely, crisp, almost
blackened crust but a bright pink center that was a bit too raw for my taste.
Just-wilted watercress and spicy-sweet pineapple jam were superb accents.
The signature salad, a massive bowl of chopped romaine, spinach, hearts of
palm, cucumber, carrot, celery, grape tomatoes and asparagus, was a
masterpiece with its tangy green goddess dressing and hunks of smoked bacon.
Count on sharing it with the entire table.
The yellowfin tuna tartare with monstrous cassava chips was tepid and timid
despite peppery seasoning and a dainty quail egg garnish. Not so the
main-course wild king salmon. It was grilled to medium-rare and served with a
mound of caper-flavored whipped potatoes, all doused with a subtle lemon and
asparagus nage.
But it was beef we came for. The 12-ounce filet mignon with its perfectly
seared crust and juicy interior benefited from the optional
Gorgonzola-flavored butter the waiter recommended. (Other flavors: truffle,
garlic herb, foie gras, chipotle. )
The 22-ounce bone-in rib eye was tastier with a luscious, peppery hide, a
gorgeously marbled center and a pink interior bursting with clear juices. Best
of all was the whopping 48-ounce porterhouse for two. No adornments necessary
for this bad boy.
The Kobe beef burger - hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, get the sauteed
mushrooms - is as good as it ought to be for $30, but how about throwing in
the fries? Eight bucks is steep for hot spuds, especially when the waiter
promised them for free.
Among other sides, the vanilla-flavored whipped sweet potatoes were
luscious and dessert-like, the scalloped potatoes unfortunately milky rather
than creamy and the sauteed broccoli rabe perfectly crisp, its pepperiness
accentuated by chili-lemon olive oil.
After a splurge like this you can't walk away without dessert - especially
when they're by one of the nation's finest pastry chefs, Hedy Goldsmith. We
passed on Key lime pie with huckleberry sauce and bananas Foster cheesecake
with rum-toffee sauce in favor of the rustic Granny Smith apple pie with
walnut streusel and caramel sauce plus an order of cookies - only two? - in an
avalanche of powdered sugar served with three scoops of rich, creamy chocolate
ice cream.
. Nothing subtle about these sweet conclusions - just perfect for a
knock-down, drag-out meal we look forward to again. That is if we can get in -
and get someone else to pay.
Place: Prime 112. •
Address: 112 Ocean Dr. , Miami Beach.
Rating: Very Good.
Contact: 305-532-8112.
Hours: 6:30 p.m.-midnight daily (weekday lunch, 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m. ,
scheduled to begin Monday.)
Prices: Starters $10-$18, entrees $28-$42, desserts $9.
FYI: Reservations required; call well in advance. Full bar plus seafood
bar. Valet parking $10. Credit cards; AX, DN, DS, MC, HX.
CORRECTION: An item in Thursday's Tropical Life section
erroneously stated that Prime 112 accepts the Herald Extra Card.
WHAT'S OLD IS NEW: RELIC GETS A REBIRTH 12/07/2003
THE MIAMI HERALD
Copyright (c) 2003, The Miami Herald
DATE: Sunday, December 7, 2003 EDITION: Broward
SECTION: Broward & State PAGE: 3B LENGTH: 120 lines
ILLUSTRATION: photo: Nelson Fox and Robert J. Mooney and Myles Chefetz (a) ,
historical photo of Brown's Hotel in Miami Beach (a) ; map: Brown's Hotel (see
microfilm)
SOURCE/CREDIT LINE: By ANDRES VIGLUCCI, aviglucci@herald.com
WHAT'S OLD IS NEW: RELIC GETS A REBIRTH
The renovation was difficult, expensive and, at times, plain crazy. But
Miami Beach's very first hotel has been unearthed and resurrected, repainted
in the same vanilla-yellow that it bore when it opened in 1915, the year of
the city's birth.
Brown's Hotel was South Beach before Art Deco, before the causeways or even
Ocean Drive.
Who knew?
For more than six decades, the original two-story clapboard building lay
entombed under a stucco shell applied in a 1935 "modernization, " all but
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❑forgotten, presumed dead.
Everyone thought this one had disappeared. Everyone thought it had been
demolished, " said Allan Shulman, the architect who has overseen its
painstaking rehabilitation.
Now the small building, its restored facade resembling nothing so much as a
Western saloon, seems preposterously out of place among the new faux-Deco
high-rises that surround it near the southern end of Ocean Drive.
LIKE A STAGE SET
"It doesn't look real. It looks like a stage set, " marveled Myles
Chefetz, the Miami Beach restaurateur who will run the reincarnated Brown's as
a modish boutique hotel and steakhouse. It opens Dec. 15.
Yet Brown's is authentic down to the scarred Dade County pine floorboards
in the upstairs corridor.
Much of the building's original structural elements, including beams of
Dade County pine, remain in place. So does a good part of the exterior
clapboard.
. "The strength of the original Dade County pine was incredible, " said
Thomas Mooney, the Beach's historic preservation officer. "It's an amazing
building. "
The partners who undertook its restoration - the building sits in a
historic district and could not be torn down - had no idea what they were
getting into. After the stucco was scraped off, the building had to be raised,
shored up and shoved back 13 feet. At times, the work amounted to an
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❑archaeological dig. Literally.
NO WRECK FOUND
Because legend had it the hotel was built over the remains of a shipwrecked
Spanish galleon, the partners had an archaeologist dig for evidence. He found
nothing.
In hindsight, it's something I would never do again, " Nelson Fox, a real
estate broker who co-owns the property, said of the renovation with a rueful
laugh.
But the historic renovation that Fox and his partner, Bob Mooney, pulled
off, the city preservation officer said, is "one of the best in the 10 years
since I've been here, " unusually successful in acknowledging history while
wholeheartedly embracing the new. (The two Mooneys are not related. )
Brown's was built by W.J. Brown, a Miami hotelier, in the first year of
Miami Beach's existence, when a ferry was the only way across Biscayne Bay.
It set the pattern for many of the Beach hotels that followed, Shulman said
- long two-story buildings with a corridor down the center. But its plain
style was quickly abandoned. By the early 1920s, the clapboard look was
supplanted by stucco-and-barrel-tile Mediterranean Revival, which later gave
way to Art Deco.
CHANGING FACADES
"The city changed faces so quickly, " Shulman said. "But it really all
began with this hotel. "
Long used as a rooming house, the little building had been rediscovered,
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❑deteriorated but otherwise intact, when Hurricane Andrew in 1992 peeled off a
piece of the stucco shell. The stucco acted as a protective seal, preserving
the Dade County pine under it like a mummy in a casket.
But the building needed work, lots of work, so it sat boarded up for 10
more years.
' 'A lot of people were scared of this building, " Shulman said. "It was in
bad shape. No one knew how it could be reused. "
Removing the stucco was only the first step in bringing it back. The
hotel's front porch had been chopped off when Ocean Drive was built. And its
first floor was too low at just seven feet to be usable today.
MAJOR RENOVATION
So the building was jacked up and moved back on tracks, its ground floor
raised to 10 feet over a new foundation and its porch rebuilt.
Shulman took samples of tiles, flooring and paint chips to determine the
building's original colors and materials, much of which has been matched
inside and out. So stringent were Beach preservation officials that they asked
the partners to reproduce the damaged tile flooring found inside the entrance
and the clear light bulbs that outlined the parapet over the front.
The simple building was then retrofitted to meet modern hurricane,
structural and safety standards, often despite the doubts of Beach building
and fire officials unaccustomed to dealing with a wood structure.
At one point, one official wondered out loud what kind of horrible
conflagration would ensue if an out-of-control car slammed into it and burst
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Tinto flames.
. BUILDING FUNCTION
Finally came figuring out what to do with a small 1915 hotel in a rapidly
glitzifying neighborhood.
Fox and Mooney settled on,a restaurant and a nine-suite hotel, supplemented
by a small and unobtrusive three-story addition at the rear designed in a
modern style by Shulman.
They lured in Chefetz, of Nemo and Big Pink fame, who hit on playing off
the hotel's rustic exterior by combining warm wood and brick accents on the
interior with high-tech, high-speed Internet service and plasma televisions in
every room.
When it came to the restaurant, Chefetz asked interior designer Alison
Antrobus to devise "a sexy steakhouse, " she said.
So there are wood-coffered ceilings, yes, but also an open kitchen,
plexiglass bar stools, glowing light panels embedded with grasses and, at the
foot of each brick column, light boxes that make the building seem to
—float" - an allusion to its being raised during renovation.
On the wood floors, light-colored insets mark where the original interior
walls stood. Upstairs, where the rooms are, the look and the layout hew close
to the original - so much so that W.J. Brown himself might not feel entirely
lost today in the hotel that he built.
Although you wonder what he might make of those plasma TV things.
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❑CAPTION: C.W. GRIFFIN / HERALD STAFF THE MEN BEHIND THE HOTEL: Nelson Fox,
Robert J. Mooney and Myles Chefetz are responsible for renovating Brown's
Hotel, the oldest hotel on Miami Beach.
MIAMI BEACH: A HISTORY BY HOWARD KLEINBERG BACK THEN: Brown's Hotel in Miami
Beach was built in 1915 near the south end of Ocean Drive. It is scheduled to
reopen Dec. 15 as a boutique hotel and steakhouse.
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