Miami: Mr. Chow

For dinner, Michelle made reservations at the Setai Hotel – we walked over from The Shore Club but noticed that both restaurants inside the hotel were completely empty. Since it wasn’t exactly a place to celebrate a bachelorette party, we cancelled our original reservation and I emailed my coworkers from Miami to see where we should eat dinner. He suggested The Dutch at the W Hotel, which happened to be down the street from the Setai. We walked over and ended up seeing Mr. Chow before we saw The Dutch and ended up making a reservation for Mr. Chow instead. We waited at the bar while they got our table ready – the atmosphere at Mr. Chow was the complete opposite of the Setai; very lively, lots of beautiful people and the restaurant seemed like it was at capacity.

I’ve never eaten at Mr. Chow’s in New York but I did used to live above Philippe Chow when I first moved to New York and I always swore to myself that I’d never eat there because I saw the food conditions in the back of the kitchen (mostly just the amount of mice that were running around their kitchen was pretty disgusting). Since there weren’t that many food options in the area, we decided to eat there anyway. The menu is set up so you almost have to get the pre-fixe menu, so that’s what we went with. Everyone ordered one appetizer and one main course, plus one side. The restaurant determines how much food to prepare based on the size of the group. As we were ordering, the waiter told us that we should be aware that we were ordering a lot of fried foods and carbs…1. as if we didn’t know and 2. who’s he to tell us what we should and shouldn’t get based on the way the food is prepared?! Only in Miami where it’s swimsuit season all year round, I suppose.

For our appetizers, we had fried squid:

Beef tongue:

Duck egg rolls:

And squid ink noodles:

The duck eggs rolls and the fried calamari were my two least favorites because there was too much batter and not enough meat. I wasn’t a huge fan of the squid ink noodles, either, because they didn’t have any flavor and the squid was too chewy. The beef tongue was well flavored and was on a bed of thinly sliced cucumbers.

For our main courses, we ordered shrimp with chilies:

Lobster with ginger sauce:

Egg custard with dungeness crab:

And fish, which came out much later! Three of the four dishes:

I had really high hopes for the dungeness crab but it tasted like an egg white dish with salt and pepper (and no dungeness crab!!) The lobster was good but had too much corn starch before the actual lobster and it wasn’t seasoned well, the shrimp was too sweet (it tasted like it was fast food Chinese from a freezer meal or something) and the fish was a little to plain, but probably the best dish of our main courses.

All of us right after dinner:

The atmosphere was really fun but I thought the meal was too pricey for the quality of food we received. After eating at Mr. Chow, we went to the Fountainbleau hotel bar and then went to the other bar in the hotel, Liv, where we stayed until 3 or 4 in the morning. Saturday was an interesting day, which I’ll post about next week!