New York restaurant groups swooping into South Florida
Jeff Zalaznick didn’t have to think too hard before shifting the focus of his New York restaurant empire to Miami.
Zalaznick, one of the three primary partners in a restaurant group that owns New York City’s hit Carbone as well as 21 others, sheltered in sunny Miami Beach as he watched the world shut down in March 2020. But while
other states around the country remained in lockdown, Florida reopened dining rooms after a month.
Zalaznick had a gut feeling he knew where this was headed. He decided to stay, enrolled his children in school and quickly signed leases to open five new restaurants by the Major Food Group here. They even put up a billboard in Brickell, visible from Interstate 95, announcing their arrival.
By late September, while New York City’s dining rooms reopened and closed, Florida had done away with coronavirus dining room limits altogether. Miami-Dade County said all restaurants must be allowed to open at least 50 percent of their indoor dining.
The result? The first of his restaurants to open, Carbone, has a three-month waiting list for a table at a space that seats more than 200. That’s a list more than 2,000 names deep.
“I’ve never seen demand quite like this in my entire career,” he said.
He’s not alone.
Miami, what New Yorkers like to call the Sixth Borough, has seen a stream of New York Citybased restaurants open n the last two months. Pastis Miami, an outpost of the Manhattan original, announced it was opening a location in Wynwood. There are 11 new restaurants in Wynwood alone, according to the business improvement district.
New York has led the way, with restaurants from San Francisco, Portland, Los Angeles, Vancouver and Montreal rushing to stake their claim here. Six new restaurants from New York-based companies have opened in the last month alone.
“This is only the beginning,” said real estate developer Lyle Stern, who helped negotiate Carbone’s lease in the South of Fifth neighborhood, near Joe’s Stone Crab and
Prime 112.
The Miami area was becoming a hot spot for new business over the last two years, before the coronavirus outbreak, several local developers said, for all the usual reasons: Florida has labor laws that favor business owners, no state income tax and warm weather to do business all year round.
Now one more accelerant was thrown on the fire: Restaurants in most of Florida are allowed to open at full capacity.
“It creates a great ecosystem for restaurants to thrive in,” said Simon Kim, who chose to open a second location of his Michelin-starred New York restaurant, Cote, in the Design District. “Government, either help us or get out of the way.”
Kim had been working on his second restaurant for more than a year when the pandemic hit, and he had the option to pull out of the contract. But he said he stayed in because of Florida’s strategy to keep businesses open despite the spreading virus.
“I don’t think in any other city I would feel comfortable opening a restaurant,” Kim said.
Owners of New York restaurants had been frustrated by rules meant to control the spread of COVID, without, they say, government aid needed to help them stay afloat.
The disease spread rampantly in New York City, which has recorded more than 740,000 cases and 29,000 deaths. For comparison, all of Florida, with its older population, has seen 31,000 die among 1.9 million cases, according to state data.
“We were all living in a horror movie,” said Philadelphia restaurateur Stephen Starr, 63, who owns 22 restaurants in his home state, four in South Florida and nine in New York, where he has spent the last year sheltering in place.
The country’s other top restaurant cities were mostly closed for business.
In New York City, indoor dining was closed for most of 2020, opening and shutting before finally reopening at 25% in February, increasing to 35% a week ago. In Los Angeles, which saw new COVID-19 infections and deaths spike between December and January, indoor dining remains closed and outdoor dining is limited to 50 percent. Chicago recently reopened its indoor dining to a quarter capacity.
Restaurants looking to expand to other markets like California instead looked to South Florida.
“What’s different is California is closed. Everything is shut down,” Zalaznick said.
Meanwhile Florida opened the floodgates.
Governor Ron DeSantis’ executive order in September meant that all restaurants must be allowed to open at full capacity unless a municipality showed a reason why it shouldn’t.
Then-Mayor Carlos Gimenez used the county’s population density as a reason to tighten the rules, but not by much. MiamiDade restaurants must be allowed to open at least 50% inside — even if restaurants can’t put six feet of social distance between diners at different tables. They can open their inside dining rooms at 100% if they can distance tables.
The result is restaurants packed with locals and out-of-towners during South Florida’s peak season — with varying states of social distancing and mask wearing.
“The idea of shutting down restaurants around the country is insane,” Zalaznick said.
He said Florida’s coronavirus rules make outdoor dining “not necessary, but it’s nice to have.”
Florida took a libertarian approach, advocating for personal responsibility rather than rules, Cote owner Kim said.
“In Miami, there’s no restrictions. Guests decide how safe they want to be. Businesses decide how safe they want to be,” said Kim.
Meanwhile, Florida’s servers and restaurant workers remain among the only professionals who regularly interact with the unmasked public. (After private gatherings, inside dining rooms have been shown in scientific studies to be one of the highest-risk places, since diners must take off masks to eat.) In places like New York City and San Francisco, servers have been eligible to get the coronavirus vaccine.
Starr had not traveled in more than a year before he flew to Miami last month — only after he received the vaccine. He was surprised how many people he saw in South Florida resuming their lives despite coronavirus and “pretend it doesn’t exist.”
“Miami put both feet in normalcy, and that’s a blessing and a curse,” he said. “Psychologically, those palm trees take away the fear that we feel inside.”
Starr bet on that feeling. Last week he announced he and New York restaurateur Keith McNally will open an outpost of Pastis in Wynwood in 2022: “COVID will be over by then.”
Calls from around the country have kept coming.
As Miami restaurants close in numbers too great to catalog, out-of-town restaurant owners swoop in to grab them.
“Places that are restaurant-ready have a line of tenants waiting,” said developer Michael Comras. “Miami is on fire.”
New York restaurants La Goulue, Sant Ambroeus, Almond and Roberta’s Pizza all have signed leases for Miami locations, with others searching for spots, according to the New York Post. Five New York-based places opened locations in Miami by Feb. 1
Zalaznick’s group is opening a second restaurant later this month, ZZ’s Sushi Bar, in a space that held two restaurants by celebrated Miami chef
Brad Kilgore that closed during the pandemic — a metaphor for the New
York takeover. Carbone opened where another restaurant, Upland, went belly up.
And the prices out-oftown restaurateurs are paying are near the top of the market. Two sources said Carbone is paying $80,000 a month in rent for its South Beach location. Stern would not confirm the number.
“The more time we spend here, the more we want to do business here,” Zalaznick said. “It’s open, it’s optimistic, it’s welcoming, it’s pro-business.”