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.
There are restaurant comebacks that feel nostalgic, and then there are the ones that feel ambitious. La Traila Barbecue, which made a lot of noise in Miami during the pandemic and then in Miami Lakes, is in the second category. It’s not simply that the brisket is back. It is that pitmaster Mel Rodriguez has spent the past few years sharpening the whole idea.
Rodriguez, the Austin-born pitmaster behind La Traila, is reopening the restaurant with Erik Velasquez and Jerry Pasantes of Redemption Hospitality. The new version has 160 indoor and outdoor seats, an open kitchen, two M&M smokers, picnic-style tables, and a full bar. This is not a modest little smokehouse trying to win over a few neighborhood regulars.
That tracks with La Traila’s history. The concept first caught fire in 2020 as a pandemic pop-up, then opened a brick-and-mortar in Miami Lakes in 2021. It quickly turned into one of those places people in Miami talked about as if they’d discovered a secret. ESPN covered the original opening when Buffalo Bills receiver Isaiah McKenzie, a Miami native and Rodriguez’s business partner in that first version, helped put money behind the project. And a whole lot of food writers covered it, not just because of that brisket but because of the uncommon places Rodriguez took Texas barbecue.
The new menu leans hard into what made the original work. There is smoked beef cheek barbacoa, a smoked Tejano churrasco skillet, and a Tejano Trinity platter loaded with brisket ribs, turkey, and sausage. There is also an Off the Block section with a Smoke Ring Scrap Burger, Tejas tacos, and brisket burnt ends queso fundido. In the morning there’s breakfast tacos on house-made flour tortillas.
There’s live music on weekends, late-night food for the South Miami and college crowd, and cocktails including a sweet tea old fashioned and a Mexican martini. All of which suggests Rodriguez is not just reopening La Traila. He is trying to turn it into a place Miami builds plans around.
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