On a thick, balmy evening in Miami, the crowd at Sunny’s Steakhouse sprawled out around a beast of a Banyan tree twinkling with lights. Servers maneuvered down stairs, around corners. At the last second, they tossed ice from chilling glasses onto the patio bricks so the drinks they poured at the table might stay cold a bit longer.
I was already charmed when a server told us how much he liked the hanger steak, a relatively inexpensive and wispy muscle I happen to like, too. At so many steakhouses, it’s framed as a concession for diners who have neither the appetite nor the capital for occasion cuts like the porterhouse or rib-eye, if it’s mentioned at all.
I braced myself for the upsell, but it never came. Steakhouses are plentiful lately, but no upsell? That’s rare, and it felt like trust in the diner as well as the kitchen.
Aaron Brooks, an Australian chef who has worked in the United States for years, runs that kitchen, a sliver of which you can see through a window. Larger cuts start and end on two charcoal grills, glazed as they cook, taking long, luxurious rests between steps. (The hangar, along with the filet, begin in sous vide baths of tallow rendered from the scraps left after butchering, before they meet the high heat of the charcoal.)
On a recent visit, I did have the rib-eye, which had been dry-aged on site for about 35 days. The meat was neatly sliced, even and rosy all the way through to its crisp, burnished edges, deeply seasoned and unexpectedly rich with the flavor of smoke. It showed a lavish, expressive, almost haunting depth and for a moment my table was quiet, lost in it.
Will Thompson, who was a partner at Jaguar Sun, started Sunny’s as a tiny pop-up during the pandemic’s marathon shutdowns. At picnic tables in this same space, around this same tree, staff worked with a portable grill and an improvised bar made out of plywood.
They served tacos at first, then steaks and “a lot of martinis.” Eventually, Mr. Thompson found investors and hired Studio Butchko, the same firm that worked on Le Veau d’Or in New York, to design the 220-seat restaurant.
While there’s a shrimp cocktail on the menu, a wedge salad and a side of creamed spinach, Sunny’s isn’t a historical re-enactment of the classic New York steakhouse. It isn’t a dark, gilded man cave. There’s a softness here, an effervescence and even an abundance of natural light, if you arrive before the sun goes down.
The sumptuous South Florida aesthetic has the lived-in feel of a party that started before you arrived and will still be going long after you’re tucked into bed.
The raw bar shimmers with heat and acidity — lean amberjack smeared with charred serranos, razor clams sparkling with both pickled and green mango, and a marvelous, almost soupy octopus ceviche made with grapefruit and peanuts. Local middleneck clams, oysters and grouper all make appearances.
Still, a steakhouse is a steakhouse is a steakhouse. Alongside the bright salsa verde and pineapple hot sauce, there is of course a requisite fat cloud of Bearnaise and a Périgourdine that the kitchen makes from a demi-glace of duck backs and wings.
The “potato butter” reminded me of the first (and last) time I overworked mashed potatoes in a blender, when I couldn’t find a ricer. The starches bound themselves into an inexorably sticky mass. Looking back at that night, I wish I’d been audacious enough to spoon it into a gravy boat and rebrand my failure as a sauce.
As a steakhouse, the menu at Sunny’s is unexpectedly expansive, even overachieving. The kitchen makes fresh pasta, a fine duck terrine and a smoked pork sausage studded with aged comté. It also handles fish like dorade and local grouper with the same level of expertise and care as its steaks, which means cobbling together a good meal here without ever seeing red meat is weirdly easy.
A few vegetable dishes could have used the same level of attention: Potatoes, steamed, fried and then finished in chicken fat, should have been thoroughly crisp and more generously seasoned. They made me regret not ordering French fries. And a side of maitake, charred at its edges, arrived withered and disintegrating.
You’ll notice the enormous silver animals holding wine bottles on a few tables, and the odd, cute serving piece with an alligator on it. “We love nonsense!” said Mr. Thompson, when I called him. In other words, these bring a sense of frivolity and delight to the tables, as needed.
Sunny’s seems to understand that luxury is relative, especially right now, and that the role of a good steakhouse is to deliver the feeling of it, regardless of how much you’re spending.
Certainly, you can get a round of Ko eggs — the soft, wobbly egg split and loaded with caviar and potato chips, once served at Momofuku Ko in New York — along with a Wagyu porterhouse and a big bottle of red and quickly lose track of the bill.
But the beauty of Sunny’s is that you can also walk in without a reservation and concentrate on the pleasures of a martini and superb steak frites, and this means the dining room isn’t ruled entirely by expense accounts.
Around 9 o’clock, I saw a father holding a smiling baby in the courtyard, speaking to her in Spanish as he adjusted her hat. There were babies here, and somehow, even the babies were having a good time.
No one seemed in a rush to go home. Not the puffy millionaires, not the local book club, not the freshly manicured microinfluencers, and not the group of friends in their 20s I met by the entrance, one of whom, in a very specific stage of fresh heartbreak, had just cut off all her hair.
If you were out to dinner tonight, it meant you’d found something to celebrate, even if it was just the breeze finding you under a tree, finishing your drink before it could get warm.
Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.
Tejal Rao is a chief restaurant critic for The Times.
The post This Hot Miami Steakhouse Is No Meaty Man Cave appeared first on New York Times.
