MIAMI
Why Ivan Barros’ Magie Wine Bar Feels Like the Miami Upgrade We Needed
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By Eric Barton | Aug. 28, 2025
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.
Lagniappe has long been the wine bar where Miamians go to feel like the night might never end, with live music spilling into a garden full of mismatched chairs that nobody’s bothered to scrub in years. It’s beloved, and always will be, but it also feels like the city deserved an upgrade. That’s where Magie comes in—a wine bar with the same looseness and sense of fun, only more considered. The difference is simple: the chef at Magie is not just any chef but Ivan Barros.
Barros grew up in Miami with Dominican roots before leaving to cook in New Orleans, New York, L.A., and Italy. He opened his own place in Santa Monica. He won “Ciao House” on Food Network. And then he came back. “It took me leaving Miami for 10 years to realize that this is where my heart truly is,” he says.
The menu at Magie is built on what he calls “the highs and lows that make it fun for me.” There are corn dogs, potato chips topped with caviar, even dinosaur nuggets also topped with caviar. There’s also guest chef pop-ups that would cost triple anywhere else. “I try not to take myself too seriously and provide a good experience for our guests,” Barros says. “Plus, my wife always tells me not to ‘chef it up’ too much.”
It’s not fine dining—not even close—but it’s also not sloppy. From his mentors, Barros says, he learned to chase “simplicity, contrasting textures, and temperature,” lessons that show up in every bite. The playful ideas land because the execution is grounded in discipline.
The Food Network win is still surreal to him. “Winning Ciao House still seems very surreal to me,” he says. “I ended up in the hospital after one of the challenges, and at that point, I definitely thought I was done for.” He didn’t quit, and he won, but it’s clear he’d rather be defined by Magie than a TV trophy.
Ask him the one dish the world over that most feels like home and he doesn’t pause. “It would have to be Los Tres Golpes. It is a dish from the Dominican Republic that fits for any meal period.” A humble and adaptable breakfast dish, it explains more about his cooking than a dozen résumés.
Running Magie with his wife, Miami hospitality pro Caroline Strauss, Barros calls this chapter the most personal yet. “I definitely feel like I’m cooking for myself, but also everyone who comes to hang with us,” he says. When he’s not in the kitchen—which isn’t often—he’s training at Legacy Little River, baking tarts, or at home with Caroline and their two dogs.
In a city where restaurants often split between temples of excess and temples of seriousness, Magie is something else: a neighborhood party with food that matters. Miami didn’t just get another wine bar. It got Ivan Barros back home.
