MIAMI
Yamashiro Brings Hollywood Glamour to a Miami Rooftop
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By Eric Barton | Oct. 9, 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.
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—opens Oct. 29 on the ninth floor of the Gale Miami Hotel & Residences. The space is a stunner that drifts from golden wood inside to a retractable roof outdoor area with stellar views of the skyline rising up overhead. Just like the LA outpost, this is clearly a place you go for the spectacle of it all—meaning it’ll fit right in here in Miami.
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 running the kitchen, and his menu, as oversized as the views above, is broken down into sections that run from small starters to big plates with even bigger drama: hamachi collar with ponzu, sashimi pizza with anchovy aioli, poached salmon with a miso glaze. Yes, there's crowd-pleasers for those who came for Instagram background shots, like edamame with chili crisp, but also dishes you don't find elsewhere in town, like soft agedashi tofu with kizami nori. Unless you've spent your days eating around Tokyo, you'll be Googling a whole lot of this menu.
The cocktail menu is equally large and full of ingredients in need of Siri’s help. Martinis are mixed from a rolling cart that arrives at your table smoking and adorned with flowers. If you weren’t a food influencer before uploading a video of it, you are now.
Miami has seen plenty of imports, but Yamashiro is something that’s more of, well, everything. It arrives not as a culinary brand but as a cultural artifact, a century-old spectacle that survived Hollywood and decided to try Miami next.
And really, where else would it go?
