RESTAURANT NEWS | MIAMI

Kaptain Kush Returns to Save a Piece of Wynwood

Kush Wynwood will reopen inside a restored 1926 landmark with burgers, cocktails, and affordable apartments.

KUSH WYNWOOD | MAP | INSTAGRAM

By Eric Barton
6:43 a.m. ET, Sept. 23, 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.

Matt Kuscher has spent years dressing as Kaptain Kush, the caped crusader Miami never requested but, considering the state of things, probably deserves. Now he has pulled off something approaching actual superhero work: saving a nearly century-old Wynwood building from demolition, filling it with affordable apartments for hospitality workers, and reopening Kush Wynwood downstairs.

The restaurant is scheduled to return in October after a two-year absence and four years of work on the building. It will anchor Kush Korner, Kuscher’s 7,500-square-foot mixed-use project at North Miami Avenue and Northwest 20th Street. The 1926 flatiron-style property will hold the 50-seat restaurant, 10 workforce studios, bartender Erika Holtz’s Broth and Bitters cocktail bar, and artist James Moyer’s Creative Souls tattoo studio.

Matt Kuscher

That would be enough plot for most restaurateurs. Kuscher, however, bought James “Whitey” Bulger’s prison-issued ID and fork at auction and built a replica of the mobster’s jail cell inside a closet.

Bulger reportedly lived in the building during the 1950s, one chapter in a history that also includes apartments, restaurants, a pharmacy, and a brothel. Developer Samuel Dubbin, a figure in Miami’s early Jewish community, constructed the property in what was then a residential area known as Little San Juan. When the city later marked it for demolition, Kuscher began the long preservation effort.

The most consequential addition sits upstairs. Kuscher created 10 micro-units for hospitality workers after watching employees face rising rents, punishing commutes, and transportation problems. Developed with the Omni Community Redevelopment Agency and supported partly by the Public Benefit Trust Fund, the apartments carry a 50-year affordability agreement.

Kush Korner also doubles as an unofficial gallery, with more than 25 works by 20 artists. A Walter Mercado mural by Lalone watches over North Miami Avenue. SNEAK painted Kaptain Kush above the street, while an entrance installation by Camilo Rojas lists 180 artists who helped turn Wynwood into an international arts district. Inside, the oddities continue with wallpaper made from Kuscher’s first fake IDs, vintage cassettes, and a telephone that recites your horoscope. Subtlety has never worn the cape.

The menu follows a greatest-hits format, gathering dishes from more than a dozen Kush Hospitality concepts. The Johnny Utah burger piles corned beef, cheddar, and LoKal sauce onto a beef patty. The Frita by Kush adds guava jelly, bacon, Swiss cheese, and potato sticks. The Jewban layers pulled pork and corned beef with Swiss, pickles, sauerkraut, mustard, and Russian dressing on grilled rye.

Reuben croquetas, Florida alligator bites, chicken and waffles, and banana cream bread pudding will also return. Cocktails include Coming Home From Tootsies and Sana Sana Culito de Rana, while a $2 option lets diners send a beer to the kitchen staff. Dogs get their own meals and beer, because apparently even the sidekicks have a beverage program.

Kuscher calls the project “a little weird, deeply personal and authentically Miami.” That description fits his restaurants, but it also captures the best of the city: serious history, ridiculous humor, good food, loud art, and one guy in a cape refusing to let the bulldozers win.