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.
The first thing you notice walking into Maison Ostrow isn’t the food. It’s the walls—filled with loud, bright, slightly unhinged art. A floor-to-ceiling Mona Lisa blowing a bubblegum bubble. A shimmering black and gold art deco wall. Another part of the dining room covered in a wallpaper of portraits of dogs in gilded frames plastering a wall. You can imagine guests might stop mid-cocktail to debate whether a piece is genius or prank. And that, it turns out, is exactly the point. Owner and chef Olivia Ostrow has always treated art like her partner, demanding it spark conversations with the same intensity as her Tuna Tartare on brioche crowned with caviar.
That tension—between elegance and audacity, between tradition and reinvention—runs through her entire career. Maison Ostrow, her new French-Mediterranean kitchen in Miami’s North Bay Village, is both culmination and leap forward: a restaurant that proves kosher cuisine can be as glamorous, playful, and ambitious as anything else in Miami’s dining scene. Ostrow has built a stage big enough for both her food and her larger vision, one she calls “Ostrow Global.”
Ostrow grew up in Paris, in a household that felt equal parts bistro and Shabbat table. “One minute it was my grandmother’s matzo ball soup, the next it was my father introducing me to sole meunière,” she told me. Food didn’t come with borders in her childhood—it was about balance. The rituals of Jewish cooking, the polish of French cuisine, the sense that tradition and elegance could sit comfortably on the same plate.
Olivia Ostrow
At first, her obsession wasn’t even restaurants. She wanted to be a butcher. The respect for raw product, the craft of precision cuts—that’s what hooked her. But the energy of dining rooms eventually won. Restaurants gave her a stage, a chance to transform those raw instincts into experiences. By the time she landed in Miami, she was ready to flip the script on kosher food entirely.
Ostrow’s Surprise Steak
Her first big Miami project, Ostrow Brasserie, introduced the idea that kosher could be haute. Now, Maison Ostrow takes that foundation and builds it into a global vision: part restaurant, part lifestyle brand, part unapologetic declaration of intent.
Lamb Paupiette
Provençal Fish Velouté
The restaurant itself feels like a thesis statement. Three thousand five hundred square feet, 145 seats, a terrace overlooking Biscayne Bay, interiors drenched in stone, green, and gold. The food reads like a mash-up of Paris and the Riviera: Pistachio Lamb and Duck, Cod Beignets, bouillabaisse Thursdays, and, starting in November, a weekly tasting menu that pushes haute cuisine directly into the kosher world. “I don’t strip a dish down to make it kosher,” she told me. “I build it up until it’s irresistible.”
The dining room
She doesn’t do it alone. Chef Christophe Bibard—a Top Chef Europe finalis—has joined as chef de cuisine. Together, they turn out kosher plates you’d see in any brasserie in the Arrondissements.
And then there are the extras, because Ostrow doesn’t really do simple. An épicerie selling house-made butters and sauces. A two-seat Chef’s Table on the expo line. Jazz nights. Catering that promises gala-level glamour in your living room. Each piece folds into what she calls the “Ostrow Global vision,” a brand she imagines stretching from Miami to Paris, London, Dubai.
Yes, her ambitions are lofty, but the daily reality grounds her. She lives in Miami with her husband, three kids, and three dogs. On her days off, she’s cooking French comfort food at home, watching films, or sneaking in design shopping. Always food, always art, always style.
Financier
People here started calling her the “Kosher Queen” because of her obsession with it, she tells me. “I wasn’t just a French-Jewish chef doing kosher,” she said. “I was the one flipping the script and making it glamorous, playful, and sexy.”
That’s the through line of Olivia Ostrow’s career. Not just rewriting kosher, but insisting that rules are foundations for reinvention. Maison Ostrow is her house, her brand, her global stage. Maison Ostrow’s walls speak louder than any critic: Olivia Ostrow is running her own playbook, and she isn’t asking permission.
Chocolate Mousse
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