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 original Fooq’s belonged to the food-obsessed, back when Miami’s recent restaurant boom was still something nobody predicted. In a fairly unloved corner of downtown, Fooq’s 1.0 was no bigger than a Brickell walk-in closet, the kind of place where you could accidentally join the conversation at the next table because, functionally, it was the same table. It was also one of the city’s most reliable tells: if someone I just met said Fooq’s was their favorite restaurant, I understood they knew good food.
The new Fooq’s, now open in Little River near Sunny’s, is the opposite in scale: huge, glamorous, and built for a party that must might go until dawn. And yet it still feels as welcoming as ever, putting out dishes that are simply some of the best in the city. After dinner last night, it is my new favorite restaurant in Miami.
The main dining room
Fooq’s first opened downtown in 2015 as restaurateur David Foulquier’s personal expression of the way he likes to host: feed people well, keep the lights dim, make it easy to linger. It closed in 2021, and Miami moved on to the era of New York expat restaurants. The return of Fooq’s lands as both a homecoming and an escalation: a 14,000-square-foot, two-story project designed with Joyn Studio. Jacqueline Cecil runs the front of the house, after serving as the director of food and beverage for the Scott Conant Restaurant Group. Chef Andrew Bazzini runs a kitchen that pulls Persian influence through an American restaurant lens, shaped by months of tastings and development with Foulquier.
The room is the kind of beautiful that’s clear a whole lot of thought went into themes and concepts. Long white curtains hang along the outer wall, echoing the linen tablecloths and white booths, which reminded me of thawb robes and bedouin tents. Overhead, huge light fixtures bloom like golden rose petals. The walls read as gold brick, glossy and warm, and a long rectangular window runs into a kitchen that seems to stretch the length of the building—an unusually confident move in a city that often prefers its kitchen work hidden. There is a large covered outdoor space, plus an outdoor bar anchored by a massive banyan tree. Then a stairwell leads up to Lion’s Den, a second-floor lounge where DJs play until 3 in the morning, turning dinner into a runway for whatever happens next.
Jacqueline Cecil, David Foulquier, and Andrew Bazzini
After taking a table with views of the kitchen, my friend and I ordered the “Fooq’s feast,” a $95-per-person set menu for two to eight people that behaves less like a tasting menu and more like a highlight reel of full-sized dishes. It started with za’atar-spiced bread, pita-adjacent but fluffier, nuttier, and quietly perfect, arriving with two dips that immediately set the tone. The smoky burnt eggplant was the brooding one, all depth and char. The o’kiar, by contrast, was a standout: buttermilk and dill and herbed oil working together, cool and bright and addictive.
Za’atar-spiced bread, eggplant, and o'kiar
Salad verte
A salad verte—cucumber and fresh greens with a simple sumac vinaigrette—was stunning in its restraint, a sharp, clean contrast to the richness of the dips, highlighting greens that I’ve just simply never seen before.
Whole Florida snapper
Then came the main event: a whole Florida red snapper, butterflied and topped with a tapenade of olives, capers, and onions that would have been enough to make the dish memorable on its own. Underneath, though, sat a rich brown butter that turned the fish into something both coastal and indulgent.
Potato tahdig
On the side was potato tahdig, a simple rice dish that’s fluffy inside, as crispy as hashbrowns along the edges. Crispy potatoes arrived in a bowl, and we smashed them with a fork to sop up the brown-butter sauce.
There was also ghormeh sabzi: a thin, savory mix of braised lamb, kidney beans, and spinach that tasted great by itself, then better when it started mingling, first with rice, then with fish, then with everything at once. The sampler barely scraped the surface of a large menu, which was the point. It made the return visit feel like an inevitability.
Crispy potatoes
Dessert landed as a bowl of chocolate mousse and whipped cream topped with crunchy toasted hazelnuts—rich, decadent, and bluntly satisfying, the kind of ending that makes conversation slow down as we discussed the layers.
Chocolate mousse with hazelnuts
The Lion’s Den Lounge
For a while, Fooq’s was gone, and Miami filled the gap with louder rooms and shinier openings, as it tends to do. Now it is back, , and Fooq’s 2.0 feels like an old friend returning with a makeover: more glamorous, better dressed, and still unmistakably the same lovable person once the night settles in.
Yamashiro: A Rooftop Zen Garden Where the Weather Has Plot Twists
This Hollywood expat boasts one of the finest views in Miami from its ninth-floor perch, but does the food hold up to the glamor?
Baltimore Michelin Guide: The Star-Worthy Restaurants in Charm City
If the Michelin Guide covered Baltimore, these are the restaurants that would earn stars and Bib Gourmands.
