MIAMI | FLORIDA

Here’s How Chef Andrew Bazzini Turned Fooq’s Into Miami’s Best New Restaurant

By Eric Barton | Feb. 19, 2026

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.

Andrew Bazzini does not talk like someone who just landed one of the more watched kitchen jobs in Miami. He talks like a guy who still measures his week in services, not headlines, like the work is the point, and the rest is just background noise you try not to spill stock on.

That makes sense for a chef whose formative memories aren’t of culinary school fantasies or the ego of TV chefs. Instead it’s of Sunday dinner at an actual table, an actual family, and the knowledge that food can be the one reliable truth in a busy household.

That’s also the idea that glues everything together at Fooq’s, where big platters are the norm, the kind that’ll be shared just the way his family did back in the day. Bazzini is the chef leading the comeback of Fooq’s, the Mediterranean-leaning restaurant from restaurateur David Foulquier that reopened in Little River after a four-year hiatus.

This time it’s in a huge, two-story space with a vinyl lounge upstairs and an ambition level that’s plainly not interested in staying small. It’s dinner and nightlife and neighborhood living room all at once, and Bazzini is the one responsible for making sure the food holds up its end of the bargain. I went shortly after the reopening and came away convinced: it’s the best new restaurant in Miami right now.

Andrew Bazzini

Bazzini grew up in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, in a family where cooking wasn’t a lifestyle accessory; it was lineage. “My father is a chef, as well as my great-grandfather. My dad worked a lot when I was a kid, but Sunday dinner was sacred in our household. It was the only day we would all be together. Chicken cutlets, roasted tenderloin, vegetables from the local farms, homemade pastas. Food was what brought us all together.”

Then life did what it does. All four of his grandparents passed away within six months of each other. “I was extremely close with my nana on my mom's side and my grandfather on my dad's side. It was a hard time for me,” Bazzini says. “I couldn't even really grieve because I just threw myself into work.” He remembers the speed of it—the way grief shows up whenever it wants. He remembers the instinct to go back to the kitchen, to keep moving. “I went to my grandfather's funeral and was back in the kitchen that same night.” And he carries a physical reminder of that era, something that becomes less superstition than anchor. “I still have my grandfather's dog tag from the Korean War. I never take it off. It's almost become my good luck charm.”

Herbed rice tahdig

Chef Andrew Bazzini Fooq's Restaurant Little River Miami

Cooking came from his father first, the way it often does in restaurant families: not as romance, but as labor that still feels fun when you’re young. He worked in his dad’s restaurant and catering company in middle and high school—washing dishes, rolling pasta, bussing tables, making deliveries—and he loved the speed of it, the intensity, the sense that everyone is moving toward the same outcome.

Heirloom tomatoes with olive oil jam

Little gem caesar

What he didn’t think he wanted was the title. “I never really saw myself as wanting to be a chef. I wanted to be a musician.” Then, in that messy late-teen window when life turns you into an adult, something clicked. “It was just like something inside me told me this is what I needed to do, and I've never looked back.”

Andrew Bazzini Chef Fooq's Restaurant Little River Miami

Persian pepper pasta

New York sharpened him, working at places like Olmsted and Laurent Tourondel’s LT Bar & Grill. The lessons were physical, nightly, and occasionally brutal. “Olmsted was a hard kitchen, and I mean hard. You were doing techniques from three Michelin star and World's 50 best restaurants in a kitchen the size of a closet and three cooks during service.” He tells one story about a disastrous service. “The pastry chef tore me apart. But after service that night at like 2 in the morning, the pastry chef pulls me aside, hands me a beer, slaps me on the back and goes, ‘Tomorrow I'll help you.’ That shit hit me like a ton of bricks.” He still thinks about that gesture on tough days. It’s a very chef way of saying: the job is difficult, but the team is the whole point.

Andrew Bazzini Fooq's Restaurant Little River Miami

Now he’s at Fooq’s, with a menu that’s share-forward, wood-fired, and Persian-influenced without trying to cosplay as “Persian food.” Bazzini says the dish that explains the approach is actually a pasta. He builds the sauce from fire-roasted local peppers, onions, roasted garlic, a hint of chili, tossed with house-made chitarra, pistachios to finish. “I think what makes this dish the best representation is that nothing screams out at you Persian or wood fire, but the influence of both is there.”

The dish Bazzini says captures the concept

Andrew Bazzini Fooq's Restaurant Little River Miami Florida.

That’s the throughline from Woodcliff Lake to Little River: food as a way of holding people in the same place for a little longer than they planned. Sunday dinner becomes an event; grief becomes a dog tag you never take off; a terrible service becomes what makes you. In a city like Miami that loves the big reveal, Bazzini’s most persuasive move is subtle. He’s building a restaurant that doesn’t demand attention so much as it earns repeat visits—one shared plate, one steady service, one familiar table at a time.

Heritage young chicken