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 duck hit the table like a mic drop. Whole and deeply bronzed, it rolled out on a cart by a chef with a carving knife while the band eased into Motown on the stage just beyond him.
Our A5 ribeye was already resting in front of us, sliced thin and shimmering with fat, and the table went quiet as we took it in: Peking duck carved to order, a Japanese wagyu steak that nearly melted before you lifted it to your mouth. Chinese restaurant, classic steakhouse, live-soul soundtrack. It was the moment I realized Brooklyn Chophouse in Wynwood isn’t just a good idea. It’s kind of an inevitable one.
The concept started as a pop-up in the Hamptons with a simple question: what happens if you mash together an old-school chop house with a Chinese banquet hall and give it the swagger of a downtown nightclub? Restaurateur Stratis Morfogen, whose father ran the Chelsea Chop House restaurants, built the concept first in Manhattan’s Financial District, then Times Square, with partners Robert “Don Pooh” Cummins and Dave Thomas. Dim sum and steak became a calling card.
The new Miami outpost on the top floors of the Moxy Wynwood feels like the version that was always meant to exist. This is after all a city that treats dinner as the opening act for the night.
Upstairs, the place is simply gorgeous. The dining room stretches across two penthouse levels, all layered textures: wave patterns rippling across the ceiling, wood and tile underfoot, leafy plants acting as dividers between big white side chairs and tufted booths. After the sun sets, it’s dark and clubby without feeling like a cave. Later in the night, a three-piece band steps up, the singer with a smooth, low voice that makes the whole room feel like a private show someone else is paying for.
The chef is Erick Melendez, who grew up in Miami and used to lead the kitchen at Mila, the nation's highest-grossing restaurant. His menu is quite simply like two concepts ended up on one page: Chinese-American staples and steakhouse classics. We started with dumplings, because that’s part of the Brooklyn Chophouse origin story. Wagyu gyoza potstickers arrived seared and blistered, swimming in chili ponzu, rich enough that one order basically counted as a pre-game burger.
Next came prawn and scallion dumplings, multi-colored and neatly pleated, the kind of thing you could see going wrong in a hurry if the kitchen were just here for the TikToks. Instead, the filling was snappy and clean, all sweetness and scallion bite.
The A5 Kagoshima ribeye that followed was sliced thin and fanned out, with herbs, salt, and wasabi. There was a Szechuan dipping sauce on the side that the steak absolutely did not need. The meat was absurdly tender, sweet and funky in the way only real A5 can get away with, and the simplest combination—just a dab of wasabi and a pinch of salt, or nothing at all—was the one we kept going back to.
And then the duck show began. The bird was carved tableside and splayed onto a platter, the skin glossy and mostly crisp, if not quite shattering. If I am quibbling—and I am—that’s where it is: a few more minutes of rendering would have pushed it into obsession territory. Even so, the meat underneath was perfectly cooked, tender and rich, served with Mandarin pancakes, scallions, cucumber, and a traditional hoisin sauce so you could build your own little tacos. On the side, prawn fried rice showed up, big prawns laid over the top of rice that tasted like your idealized takeout, the version you wish your neighborhood joint made at midnight.
Nothing missed. That was the surprise. For a restaurant this new, and this ambitious, we kept waiting for a course that felt like filler or a dish that tasted more like concept than dinner. It never arrived. Instead, everything landed with the precision of a kitchen already in stride, not even a month into service.
Walking out, it occurred to me: Brooklyn Chophouse is the baller solution to the most common group-dinner fight in America. No more choosing between Chinese and a great steak. Here, you get both, and a band to play you through it.
