FEATURES | MIAMI
Nicole Berrie Thinks Your Diet Has Too Many Rules
The Bonberi founder built a wellness empire around a radical idea: Food should make you feel good, without making you sad
By Eric Barton | June 9, 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.
Nicole Berrie grew up in New Jersey, which is a useful place to learn that no single cuisine has all the answers. One meal could come from a Jewish deli that had been slicing pastrami since before your parents had that first tade at Rutt’s Hut. The next could be red-sauce Italian, followed by legit sushi, an old-school steakhouse, and then Korean BBQ with enough banchan to make the table disappear.
“The amazing thing about New Jersey is it's a melting pot of so many cultures and cuisines,” Berrie said. “The mix was incredibly influential on my perspective on global food.”
In other words, food was varied, generous, and meant to be enjoyed. Then wellness culture came along with a clipboard.
Mario Carbone, Nicole Berrie, and Jeff Zalaznick
Berrie, the founder of Bonberi and Bonberi Mart, has spent more than a decade pushing back against the idea that eating well requires a complicated rulebook, a kitchen scale, and the emotional temperament of an air-traffic controller. Her latest project, a partnership with Major Food Group that begins with matcha drinks, smoothies, and frozen yogurt at Sadelle’s Coconut Grove, is the newest expression of that argument. The larger point of her work is simpler: Just maybe food can make you feel good without making you miserable first.
Plenty of people seem interested in hearing more. Berrie has built an Instagram audience of more than 112,000, while her Bonberi Bulletin newsletter reaches more than 5,800 subscribers. Her 2022 cookbook, Body Harmony, contains more than 100 recipes, and Bonberi has grown from a website she launched around 2012 into a West Village market, an online community, and now a collaboration with one of the country’s largest hospitality groups.
None of this began as a business plan. In her 20s, Berrie told me that she “hit a wall” and started looking for a way to take better care of herself without turning every meal into a negotiation. “I knew there had to be a better way in taking care of myself that also felt joyful and sustainable,” she said.
Iced Strawberry Matcha Latte
The Friendly
She began experimenting in her kitchen, remaking dishes she already loved with simple, health-minded ingredients. Bonberi.com followed as a place to share recipes and interviews about how other people found their own version of feeling well. “It started as a hobby just to share my passion with friends and others,” she said.
The timing was useful. Wellness was becoming an industry built largely around telling people they had been eating breakfast incorrectly. Carbs were out, then back, then apparently dependent on the carb. Fat was bad until it became the thing people stirred into coffee. Every few months brought another ingredient to fear and another person confidently explaining why everyone else had been poisoning themselves with tomatoes.
Berrie
Berrie had already learned where that kind of thinking could lead. She has written openly about healing her relationship with food and moving away from diets designed by someone who had never met her, seen her life, or known what she wanted for lunch.
“Tapping into my intuition instead of other people's arbitrary diets and principles felt so liberating,” she said. “Food freedom is not just about quitting diets; it's about empowering yourself to follow your gut in all areas of life.”
That doesn’t mean Berrie doesn’t have rules of her own. Bonberi is highly considered, from ingredients to presentation. But the judgment is aimed at the food, not the person eating it, she says. Her previous career in fashion and magazines helped sharpen that approach. Before Bonberi, Berrie worked at Elle and Vanity Fair, where she learned to edit, curate, and decide what belonged. “I always apply an editorial eye to everything I do whether it's curating the selection at Bonberi Mart or writing Instagram captions,” she said.
The Protein One
Bonberi Mart became the physical version of that editorial sensibility. Berrie wanted it to feel like “the kitchen-slash-pantry they've always wanted to create at home to feel healthy and nourished.” The West Village shop offers plant-forward prepared foods and a tightly chosen selection of products, minus the atmosphere of a place where someone might silently judge the granola bar in your purse.
The Junior
Iced Matcha Lattes
At Sadelle’s Coconut Grove, Berrie’s ideas get a more decadent stage. A salty caramel matcha combines miso-date milk, maple-miso caramel, vanilla-oat foam, and flaky sea salt. One frozen yogurt sundae comes with tahini, olive oil, halva, pistachios, and salt. Another adds brownie bites, peanut butter, and chocolate.
The menu contains no refined sugar, synthetic gums, artificial dyes, or seed oils. It does, however, contain dessert.
“One of the core ideas behind this collaboration is that wellness and indulgence don’t have to exist on opposite ends of the spectrum,” Berrie said. “I’ve always loved blurring those lines.”
That may be the most subversive part of Berrie’s message. She isn’t asking people to stop caring about what they eat. She’s asking whether caring has to involve so much self-surveillance.
Major Food Group could eventually carry her approach into restaurants, private clubs, hotels, and residences around the world. But whether the setting is a polished Miami restaurant or someone standing in front of the refrigerator at home, Berrie’s advice remains essentially the same: Pay attention to how food makes you feel, trust yourself a little more, and maybe stop accepting dietary instructions from every stranger with a podcast.
“I wanted to show that healthy living can be expressed through indulgence and imagination,” she said, “and that nourishing food can feel every bit as exciting as it tastes.”
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