PALM BEACH | MIAMI | FLORIDA

Palm Beach Chef Clay Conley Brings a Trio of Restaurants to Coral Gables

By Eric Barton | Feb. 3, 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.

Miracle Mile has always served as Coral Gables’ showroom strip: wide sidewalks, polished storefronts, and the steady hum of people who like their cities walkable and their dinner plans strategic. It also has that particular South Florida talent for reinvention, where a familiar block can feel brand-new next year simply because a major restaurant arrived.

It’ll happen again thanks to Palm Beach chef Clay Conley, who’s bringing three restaurant concepts to Coral Gables: Buccan Miracle Mile, a second location of his Palm Beach flagship; Imoto, his sushi-and-small-plates “little sister”; and a Buccan Sandwich Shop for daytime, baguette-based life improvement. The trio is expected to be serving the public by the end of spring 2026, turning one address, 100 Miracle Mile, into a compact version of what Conley built in Palm Beach over 15 years.

Chef Clay Conley

This is the same chef whose next chapter recently involved 80 acres, open fire, and a barn in Gainesville. In Coral Gables, though, the play is urban, polished, and very intentional. Buccan Miracle Mile is the anchor, and it is designed to look like a restaurant that expects a full dining room on day one. The plans call for an exhibition kitchen, a chef’s table, a spacious bar with high-top seating, plus a lounge and a semi-private dining area. Buccan has always been small plates with ambition and restraint, the kind of food that reads as simple until the flavors start landing in layers. Conley describes the Coral Gables gameplan in plain terms: “The vision for Miami is the same as in Palm Beach: a warm, welcoming, neighborhood place,” he says.

That “casually sophisticated” line is doing real work here, because Buccan’s reputation can intimidate on paper. In Palm Beach, it has long been framed as the reservation that helped kick open the door for chef-driven dining on the island, and his restaurant firm, Ember Group, has stacked a mountain of attention over the years, including multiple James Beard Award Foundation nominations and a parade of national mentions. The Coral Gables version is clearly meant to keep the electricity while widening the doorway, which is exactly what Miracle Mile rewards when it is done right.

Corn agnolotti at Buccan

Imoto Coral Gables Chef Clay Conley Bluefin toro

Next door will be Imoto, Conley’s more intimate, Tokyo-inflected counterpoint. “Imoto is really special to me, as the concept was inspired my time living and cooking in Tokyo,” Conley says. The Coral Gables menu is expected to lean into sashimi, sushi, crudo, and wood-fired grill items, with the kind of tight, late-night energy that makes a dining room feel like it is sharing a secret. The design details suggest a space built for that mood: plush banquette seating, a sushi bar, and a cocktail bar, with interiors by Peter Niemitz Design and architecture by Spina O’Rourke + Partners. Conley puts it in human terms: “Buccan is lively and energetic, Imoto is sexy and intimate.”

Bluefin toro at Imoto

Buccan Coral Gables Chef Clay Conley Turkey club

Buccan Sandwich Shop turkey club

Then there is the Buccan Sandwich Shop. I’ve been one of the faithful standing in line outside the original, essentially just a window counter attached to the back of Buccan Palm Beach, where I’ve had seriously some of the best sandwiches of my life. Conley says the sandwich shops matter because they connect with people “in ways that formal dining doesn’t.” The Coral Gables shop will offer the same cult-followed mix of hot and cold sandwiches, salads, house-made chips, bottled cocktails, and those chocolate chip cookies that somehow always end up in the bag. Among the signature moves: the beef carpaccio, the beef steak bomb, the Cubano 2.0, and the smoked yellowfin tuna salad, although I’m personally partial to the falafel.

Imoto Coral Gables Chef Clay Conley Sashimi platter

Imoto’s sashimi platter

Put the three together and the point becomes obvious. Buccan is the night out, Imoto is the late-hour second act, and Buccan Sandwich Shop is the daylight proof that the whole thing is meant to live like a neighborhood does.