AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
I first met Aaron Brooks at an Australia Day party at the Four Seasons Miami, where he was running the outdoor grill station. He stood over the coals with the kind of calm that comes from knowing exactly what you’re doing, brushing chimichurri on lamb leg that was smoky, punchy, and so good I would’ve eaten it every night if he’d let me. It felt obvious even then that grilling meat over fire was the thing Brooks was put on this earth to do.
That’s the same energy he’s channeled into Sunny’s Steakhouse. It opened last year and quickly became a favorite restaurant in Miami, the only Florida restaurant to land on The New York Times list of the country’s 50 best restaurants. Sunny’s is technically a steakhouse, but in the same way LCD Soundsystem is technically a rock band—it’s familiar but bent into something more interesting. The food is big and indulgent, but also bright and clever, the raw bar and pastas every bit as serious as the cuts of beef. It’s the rare restaurant that feels like Miami could export the idea elsewhere, rather than the other way around.
Aaron Brooks
Brooks grew up in Australia with a mother who cooked at home and a father who ran pubs. His dad loved the parts of the animal that required attention—secondary cuts, offal, charcuterie—and took him to the butcher to talk through what was good. “That’s where I get my love for the craft,” Brooks told me. That sense of respect for sourcing shows up at Sunny’s too, where he still obsesses over purveyors and what they can deliver to his kitchen.
Foie gras
Cooking stopped being just a trade for him after he completed his four-year apprenticeship. “By the end of it, I knew this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life,” he said. He cooked his way from the Gold Coast to Vancouver to Boston, eventually landing in Miami. Of all the places, this is the one that stuck. “Miami has to be my favorite port of call,” he said. “It’s the most influential on the flavors I cook—that’s why I call it home.”
Those flavors slip onto Sunny’s menu in ways that feel like a biography of Brooks. There’s razor clams with mango criolla, hokkaido scallops with aguachile negro, chicken liver mousse with starfruit mostard, bucatini with Florida clams—this is Miami, refracted through a wood-fired grill.
Rotisserie chicken
Hokkaido scallops
The hearth itself is the restaurant’s heart, built into the space as if it had always been there, a pandemic pop-up that became a permanent idea. “It shows the utmost respect to the proteins we’re grilling,” Brooks said, though he’s quick to point out that Sunny’s isn’t only about meat. It’s pastas, seafood, raw bar, and whatever else comes off the line that night, all of it meant to upend what you think a steakhouse is supposed to be.
Dry aged ribeye
The wine list plays the same game. Sunny’s favors natural bottles and grower champagnes over safe picks, pairing them with dishes that make the choices make sense. Brooks gets particularly excited about those razor clams—chilled, chopped, and marinated in mango criolla—next to a glass of Dhondt-Grellet Champagne. “It’s so refreshing and bright,” he said, and he’s right. It’s a dish and a pour that explain the whole place in one bite and sip.
For all that, Brooks still insists his best cooking happens at home on his days off, cooking for his kids and wife Rebekah Brooks, the baker of downright extraordinary cakes. “She’d love it if I could stay out of the kitchen,” he joked. But that’s not who he is. Brooks doesn’t step away from the fire—he leans into it, and Miami is better for it.
Banana toffee cheesecake
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