CITY GUIDES | MIAMI
Yes, You Can Eat Very Well on Miami Beach
Follow the good food from South of Fifth through Española Way and Sunset Harbour, then keep going toward Bal Harbour.
By Eric Barton
Updated Sept. 27, 2026
AVIV
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.
Miami Beach has never been short on restaurants that know how to nail an entrance. Finding one that can follow it with a great dinner takes a little more care. But eat your way from South of Fifth through Española Way and Sunset Harbour, then north toward Surfside and Bal Harbour, and the choices get good fast: stone crabs at a century-old institution, pasta worth planning a night around, Israeli salatim, sushi, and tapas. For anyone wondering where to eat in Miami Beach, these are the restaurants to book tonight.
AVIV
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At AVIV, chef Michael Solomonov has a good answer to the question of what belongs on a South Beach dinner table: plenty of hummus, hot saluf bread, and enough little salads that you’ll start moving the glasses to make room. Flowing beige curtains break up the large space, while blonde wood and stone keep it warm. The servers are friendly and know the dishes well enough to steer you toward Moroccan cigars filled with spiced beef, halloumi baklava with strawberries and pistachios, and skewers of beef and mushrooms. The smart move here is the $95 per person Tayim menu, which includes an excellent mezze spread, an appetizer, entree and dessert, which will leave even the restaurant's biggest tables quite covered in well-executed dishes.
Best for: Israeli cooking with South Beach style
Carbone Miami Beach
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There are entire pages on the internet dedicated to whether Carbone’s spicy rigatoni is worth $34. Or whether it’s as good as some other restaurant down the street. But the truth is that this New York expat built an experience as much as an Italian restaurant, where the tuxedo-clad servers and Rat Pack-era decor make any night here feel like something special. Start with the tableside Caesar, get an order of that rigatoni, and split a prime porterhouse for two. When the plates arrive, you’ll remember that Major Food Group did not build its empire by serving mediocre dishes.
Best for: A flashy night with pasta that earns it
Casa Isola Osteria
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José Mendín’s restaurant gives the Sunset Harbour neighborhood an Italian osteria that feels easy to return to. The room has just enough bustle and polish, while the menu sticks to the kind of crowd-pleasing Italian dishes people want to eat, like spicy rigatoni alla vodka, meatballs with ricotta, chicken parmigiana, and a veal chop parm that lands with the right amount of swagger. It’s a restaurant where a negroni, a panzanella salad, and a bowl of rigatoni with Sunday gravy can be one of the more satisfying dinners on the beach.
Best for: Italian comfort in Sunset Harbour
Ezio’s
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Steak is the headliner at Ezio’s, but there are lots of worthy performances before it arrives. Begin with focaccia and stracciatella, cultured butter, and Cantabrian anchovies; then there’s honey nut squash cappelletti in buffalo milk butter. A pasta course should come next: garganelli with local Everglades tomatoes and honey nut squash cappelletti with buffalo milk butter and piave vecchio. From there, servers will guide you to the in-house dry-aged ribeye, with crisp Potatoes Ezio alongside it. The olive oil on the vanilla soft serve is the sort of final touch that makes you glad you didn’t stop at the steak. Chef Carlo Mirarchi and Brandon Hoy, the partners behind Brooklyn’s Roberta’s, named this North Beach restaurant for Mirarchi’s father, a native of Calabria, and from the Venetian chandeliers to the meat course, it’s a fitting tribute.
Best for A steak dinner with a memorable pasta course
Joe’s Stone Crab
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At any time of night, Joe’s can be a madhouse. What feels like a thousand people can be waiting for a table, crowding the bar out front and jostling to get to the host. Teenagers in ball gowns. Kids in their first suits and dresses. Abuelas trying to shepherd an entire family to a table. Which might sound like a warning. But the thing about Joe’s is that it truly is a special place, always feeling like the exact spot to celebrate your uncle’s birthday or just a Tuesday where you’ve come in for the burger and fried chicken (two of the best-priced meals anywhere in Miami). Yes, there’s the stone crabs, which were invented right here, and all kinds of dishes that sound like nothing special on the menu and then are very much that. But what Joe’s is really: it’s an institution that deserves to be the spot where locals celebrate all of life’s milestones.
Best for: A classic Miami dinner that always feels celebratory
The Joyce
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The Joyce sits on Española Way behind a doorman and inside a tiny, dark room that feels very much like you’ve been let into an underground restaurant for oligarchs (the first time I ate there, an original Picasso hung over our table). That whole setup would be useless if the place didn’t deliver, but chef James Taylor’s kitchen does, with a serious martini program, a ribeye that people keep talking about for a reason, and a level of polish that makes you forget, at least for an hour or two, what street you’re actually on. They even run a more casual sidewalk setup outside for nights when the main room is impossible, which is a smart bit of flexibility for a place this intent on feeling exclusive.
Best for: A swanky dinner with martinis
Macchialina
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Macchialina opened in 2012 as a small, confident restaurant built around handmade pasta, sharp hospitality, and a wine program with real point of view. A 2024 expansion gave it a space to match, with a handsome dining room, glamorous bar and charming garden patio—adjectives I don’t throw around very often. Even with the expansion, the place is still built around the cooking of chef Michael Pirolo, like cavatelli Macchialina with little meatballs and pecorino, the tagliolini ai funghi, and that rich, absurdly good polenta with sausage and shiitakes. Cocktails are some of the best on the island, and Jacqueline Pirolo’s all-Italian wine list giving the restaurant the kind of confidence most places spend years pretending to have.
Best for: Pasta and wine in a handsome restaurant space
Makoto
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Makoto has been the smartest place to eat in Bal Harbour since Stephen Starr and chef Makoto Okuwa teamed up way back in 2011. The room got a glamorous overhaul when it moved upstairs four years ago, but what still matters is the food: pristine sushi and sashimi, robata skewers, wagyu, that spicy tuna crispy rice everybody orders for a reason. There’s polish to the whole thing, obviously, but it doesn’t feel stiff or fussy, which is a nice trick for a restaurant sitting in one of America’s most posh shopping centers.
Best for: Sushi that fits its Bal Harbour surroundings
Orilla
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Inside the Urbanica hotel and created by Argentine chef Fernando Trocca, Orilla’s leafy, indoor-outdoor space feels a thousand miles from the South Beach commotion just beyond the planters. The food leans into Trocca’s live-fire Argentine sensibility without turning heavy or macho about it, with empanadas, provoleta, grilled octopus, steaks from the Josper, and a burger that has quietly become one of the better moves on the Beach.
Best for: Escaping the noise without leaving Miami Beach
The Surf Club
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Thomas Keller’s restaurant was built like a love letter to midcentury glamour, but to me what he created was the Miami benchmark for hospitality. The space still lands the way it should, all polished old-money elegance and practiced ease, while the kitchen, now led day to day by chef de cuisine Daniel Donado, keeps the menu trained on the classics done with almost absurd precision: French onion dip, tableside Caesar, oysters Rockefeller, and lobster thermidor. I’ve been to celebrate many birthdays and anniversaries, and they’ve yet to miss a beat with service, plating, and execution of everything coming out of the kitchen.
Best for: When you need a restaurant where everything always goes right
Queen
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Queen spent a reported $40 million to renovate the Paris Theater and then added dancers rising and falling from the ceiling, light kits to set the mood, and little stairways so diners could ascend to tabletops for dancing. All of that would suggest a place more interested in spectacle than dinner, except the kitchen keeps turning out food that is far better than it has to be, from sushi and steaks to the kinds of big, glossy dishes that actually hold their own in a room this theatrical. And then there’s the upstairs omakase counter, which gives the whole thing an extra twist, like Queen decided it wanted to be both a full-blown Miami Beach circus and a serious dinner reservation at the same time.
Best for: Dinner with a show that actually backs it up
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