The eating room at Kyu in Wynwood
Choose away the progressive, prize-successful chef and the visionary restaurateur that designed Wynwood’s Kyu Asian barbecue cafe a strike — and what do you have left?
Miami is about to uncover out.
Chef Michael Lewis and partner Steven Haigh, who still left Zuma to get started Kyu, regularly named a single of the ideal dining establishments in the state, have been acquired out by their initial Wynwood partners. Lewis likened the takeover to dropping a member of his household.
“I would be lying if I mentioned there was not emotion concerned in it,” he mentioned.
Lewis and Haigh will keep ownership of a recently opened Kyu cafe in Mexico City. And the two are not abandoning Miami. They possess and oversee Buya Izakaya + Yakitori in Wynwood and will run their breakfast and chicken sandwich location, Laid Fresh, as a ghost kitchen with the every-expanding REEF Technologies until they sense secure reopening a bodily restaurant, Lewis claimed.
They both also approach to open up a new Miami cafe in the following 12-18 months, Haigh said.
“We are organizing on keeping a quite powerful existence in Miami with another, model-new brick-and-mortar restaurant really quickly,” Lewis reported.
But what of Kyu — named a James Beard award semifinalist for ideal new cafe in 2017, among the OpenTable’s 2018 record of greatest new locations when it opened? The idea was wholly conceived by Lewis, who analyzed below learn chefs Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Eric Ripert.
Lewis has still left it in the palms of head chef Raheem Sealey, his appropriate-hand guy for the past three years. Sealey labored at Zuma with Lewis, trained at his facet understanding barbecue, and even opened The Drinking Pig, a roadside Caribbean barbecue pop-up in northeast Miami-Dade that has turn out to be 1 of the bright places for Miami restaurants through the pandemic. He, his lover, Mark Wint, and his spouse, Yohanir Sandoval, also get the job done alongside 1 an additional at Kyu.
Sealey has strategies to open up The Ingesting Pig as a standalone place and if that transpires, the long run of Kyu is still left unsure. For now, Haigh said the restaurant they still left driving remains sturdy. Phone calls to the cafe, at 251 NW 25th St., were not returned.
“We left the cafe in very good hands, with a crew that has been with us considering that the beginning,” Haigh explained. “We hope all the things proceeds to run the exact same.”
Miami Herald foods editor Carlos Frías gained the 2018 James Beard award for excellence in covering the food items business. A Miami native, he’s also the writer of the memoir “Take Me With You: A Solution Search for Spouse and children in a Forbidden Cuba.”