GATSBY’S
MIAMI
At The Betsy Hotel, jazz on the piano and Americanos at the bar feel like Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel reimagined under the South Beach sun.
By Eric Barton | Aug. 19, 2025
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 lowering sun poured itself through The Betsy’s front windows like golden champagne.
Tourists sprawled across the lobby couches in their sundresses, linen shirts, and chinos that had surrendered their starched pressing hours ago to humidity. The hotel had a late-afternoon buzz, new arrivals at the counter, day drinkers fighting off a nap, plates clinking from late lunches.
In the corner, Jonathan Plutzik, The Betsy Hotel’s owner, occupied a café table with the kind of calm authority you’d expect of someone presiding over an eclectic, extravagant place. A white-faced golden retriever slept unknowingly at his feet, a confidant to a beachfront empire. Plutzik is the son of a poet, husband to a financier-turned-art-collector, and an unwitting hotelier, having stumbled into the project to rehab this property nearly two decades ago, when he had no plans to do such things.
We shook hands, and Plutzik walked me through The Betsy’s labyrinth. Through an orb suspended in midair, connecting two buildings like some futuristic bauble. Around the rooftop pool perched above a courtyard, a feat of engineering and imagination. Past endless walls crowded with photos, each hallway a gallery, the whole hotel less like a business than the drawing room of an art collector. It was, in Fitzgerald’s words, “a world complete in itself, with its own standards and its own great figures, second to nothing.”
I had come to see if The Betsy might be a place to live like the characters from The Great Gatsby, a novel that in April turned a hundred years old. Or at least I should say, I came to live as if in the parties from the beginning of the novel, heady and decadent, joyous and carefree, and not, as I was reminded reading it again on this trip, from where the story goes. No, this would be a weekend in art, extravagance, and thousand-dollar martinis (with tip), the Gatsby that’s only possible in Miami.
The next morning, the whiskey hangover took its inevitable toll. My plans to take a rental bike up to Haulover Beach dissolved like demerara in whiskey. Instead, I dragged myself to yoga on The Betsy’s pool deck. Luckily, it was less workout and more glorious, much-needed stretch. As the sun rose over the aquamarine horizon, I bent into vinyasas and thought: this is the Gatsby reset. To drink like a party guest one night, to rebalance at dawn the next.
Unwitting hotelier Jonathan Plutzik
The Betsy’s shelves hold actual books
Intimate Large Parties
Our first night at The Betsy, I headed north to a speakeasy within a speakeasy. It’s behind the upscale steakhouse Daniel’s, where I continued through the back bar called D’s, and behind a heavy curtain, where some old friends and I had booked the room. We drank $30 old fashioneds made from a special Angels Envy cask and ate wagyu French dips designed for excess. I thought of Gatsby in that room, although it was Jordan Baker who said: “And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy.”
That evening, my wife and I sought out the most decadent drink in Miami: the $850 martini at COTE in Wynwood. It began as a sommelier wheeled a cart to our table and held out a rare $3,000 bottle of Chopin Vodka as if it were a newborn babe. The Polish company distilled this vodka in 1993, nearly three decades ago. Now it’s being sold as “rested,” since vodka doesn’t age.
She stirred with theatrical calm. Practiced and self-assured. No vermouth, no garnish. Just vodka in chilled glass, served, of course, with a side of fine caviar. When I asked if her trained palate might discern the difference of a rested vodka, she admitted with a grin that while subtle, there’ something special about it, a smoothness and simplicity. It tasted exactly like vodka. Albeit the most expensive drink of my life.
That martini was a momentary indulgence, priced like a night in a hotel suite. As I finished it, I remembered Fitzgerald’s words, of Gatsby’s parties where “floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter.” It was a Gatsby moment reimagined on Miami’s sweltering streets. The drink was less about taste than performance—pure theater of wealth.
The Carillon’s Thermal Finnish Sauna
Escapes and inventions
Saturday my wife and I drove up to one of her favorite places in this glamorous city, the Carillon Miami Wellness Resort, for a day of spa indulgence—saunas, poke bowls by the pool, an hour in a room where they turn Himalayan salt into an aerosol to clear your lungs and your mind and leave you with a crusty film like after a beach day. Fitzgerald never wrote of infrared saunas, but he might have if they’d existed then. This place felt like modern equivalent of Gatsby’s yellow Rolls and marble staircases.
The Betsy’s rooftop pool
Back at The Betsy that afternoon, we ran into a woman from Germany who’d been at yoga. She was posted under a striped umbrella, looking like she’d stepped out of an Eileen Gray ad. She told me she was there for three weeks, long enough to know the staff by name, long enough to fold herself into the rituals of the place. She didn’t reveal her schedule, but I imagined morning yoga, mint julep afternoons, quiet-but-meaningful conversations in the library. It was a holiday that seemed conjured by Fitzgerald himself, a life of reinvention in the glow of a luxury hotel.
Gatsby surely would’ve gone medium-rare
That night we closed our experiment with dinner at LT Steak & Seafood, The Betsy’s marquee restaurant. We began with a crab cake capped in a crown of phyllo, the sort of flourish meant to impress a finicky art teacher. A salad followed, dotted with radishes and hearts of palm so perfectly arranged it seemed less tossed than curated. Then came the wagyu strip, sourced from Allen Brothers in Chicago, who have been dry-aging beef since 1893—a steak with more lineage than most aristocrats.
We lingered long after dinner. I’d begun the night with a martini, three cheese-stuffed olives and a reasonable two-figure price tag, then Cabernet with the steak, and later at the bar an Americano as the pianist improvised jazz standards into an endless flow of keys.
Fitzgerald described such nights as “men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” You could hear it in the Québécois accent of the bartender, see it in the guests sprawled out in the striped cushioned couches between the lobby’s palm trees, feel it in the energy of the couple drinking espresso martinis at bedtime.
The Betsy lobby, Credit: Rey Lopez
The Betsy is not West Egg, and Miami Beach is not Long Island, but both are playgrounds for wealth and longing. Fitzgerald knew that paradise always comes with a bill, that the brightness of the party fades when dawn hits the blinds. But for a weekend, with sunsets through tall windows, with vodka martinis and wagyu dinners, with jazz spilling into the lobby, The Betsy made me feel the possibility of living inside those first few chapters of Gatsby.
To paraphrase Fitzgerald, we will run faster tomorrow, as boats against the current, and in the end, isn’t that all we need?
