MIAMI
Yamashiro Miami Brings Hollywood Excess to a Downtown Miami Rooftop
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By Eric Barton | Aug. 20, 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.
Miami has never been short on spectacle. We’ve got drag brunches that feel like Broadway auditions, pool parties where champagne is sprayed more than drunk, and restaurants where a DJ is as important as the chef. Still, it’s hard not to think Yamashiro might out-Miami even Miami.
This September, the Los Angeles landmark—once an art museum, then a club for Hollywood’s elite, later an apartment building, and finally the restaurant that lords over the Hollywood Hills—lands on the ninth floor of the Gale Miami Hotel & Residences. In LA, Yamashiro is the kind of place you go for the views, the pagoda, and cocktails poured into bowls so big they look like props from a Godzilla movie. Nobody’s going for restraint.
The Miami export promises more of the same, which is to say: everything. The rooftop is a set piece, the kind of place where you arrive already rehearsing the Instagram captions. The design nods to Japanese palaces in the most Hollywood way possible, which is to say “vaguely authentic but mostly a backdrop.” That’s the point. You don’t go to Yamashiro for reverence; you go for the excess.
Chef Charbel Hayek is steering the menu, and while the dishes lean Japanese—sushi, sashimi, tempura, robata skewers—there’s a California looseness to it. If the Hollywood original is a guide, expect the food to be solid, sometimes even great, but potentially overshadowed by the setting. And maybe that’s fine. Not every restaurant needs to be temple dining. Some just need to be temples.
There will be cocktails that require two hands, lighting designed to flatter every selfie, and weekly nightlife programming that ensures you’re never just having dinner. Yamashiro Miami isn’t trying to compete with your neighborhood sushi bar. It’s gunning for the spot where skyline views, theatrics, and fried things collide into a night you’ll talk about the next day.
Miami has seen plenty of imports, but Yamashiro promises something that’ll be more, well, everything. It arrives not as a culinary brand but as a cultural artifact, a century-old oddity that survived Hollywood and decided to try Miami next.
And really, where else would it go?
