Smart, sexy, stripy … TIM MAGEE has found a destination that satisfies even the GREEDIEST OF TRAVELLERS in Miami, Florida …
What about New York? No, New Orleans. Well I’d prefer a break somewhere English isn’t the first language. Hello? A food trip for me! No need to put your hand up, this isn’t a classroom. Sorry, I just want my mouth to go on holidays, dawn to dusk tastings of new and exotic things. Yawn, excuse me, but I don’t want to spend too much money when I’m away? But I want to go somewhere with really great service, it is holidays after all. Ahem, all I really want is a nice city break and to plunge headfirst into a pool of culture. Culture me hoop, we can get that at home.
Tapping of glass …
Listen, I don’t care what you all want. We all need a week on a Caribbean beach with bath-warm seas, doing nothing except pondering important questions like: which is heavier, an empty wine glass or a Kindle?
Welcome to my head.
No amount of travel has lessened this head-chatter. An often-mithered holiday head that thinks less in terms of the destination and more about the prescription. Despite it being my default setting, I’m not a better holidaymaker than I was 20 odd years ago. I’m just greedier. I still treat most holidays like I did my first (a fortnight in Kos) – like they are my last.
But what can you prescribe for a needy legion in your head that wants all of the above, on one trip? The royal burbs around Lisbon, or the beach in Chicago can do almost all of it but their waters are a bit chin-chilla – told you, needy – and the sun isn’t year-round. Miami can do it. Miami can be New York, New Orleans, a Caribbean beach holiday, a sensational cheap-as-chips dining scene, a cultural expo with city civic events that would make the Scandis proud, all with five-star service and to the sound of an otherworldly Latino lilt. Miami can do it all, in a day.
Miami is misunderstood. Blame television. From Miami Vice to Dexter, Miami sells the wrong image. Sherlock and even the silly Spooks can make the most soulless towers of London town look handsome, but Miami’s money shot is usually some tool in a powerboat pelting up and down greyish rivers beside what could be anywhere’s downtown skyscraping skyline. It wouldn’t make me want to travel there.
What does make me come back again and again is the small-town feel around South Beach, the food, this big clean proper American city, the seafood, the Great American Road Trip that is just an hour’s open-top drive to the Keys, the food trucks, the miles and miles of well-managed screensaver beaches, the feeling you might get in Havana if Cuba had won the war. And the stripes. Miami is my city of stripes. Stripes everywhere. Blazing stripes of cerulean or turquoise seas, Marian skies and electric ivory sands, the natural neon luminous flamingo pink stripes of dusk over Miami beach, the stripes of the watermelon cocktail in Yardbird and the candy stripes of the Art Deco toytown around South Beach, constructed from a giant packet of Love Hearts.
For first-timers, ignore what this column has been saying for the last three years and don’t avoid the tourist traps, not in SoBe – no, sail right at them. For first-timers head to Collins Avenue, not the part by the Fontainebleau which has all the atmosphere of a shopping mall’s food court, but near Lincoln Drive and the National Hotel. The National is an Art Deco movie set that isn’t as precious as its precocious neighbour The Raleigh, but has that all-important back gate by the pool that is steps away from the never-ending sands of Miami Beach. When I stayed there they were just finishing a make-over but, unlike the Vegas-like Fontainebleau, the sensitive natives of The National have gone rightly backwards to go forwards and opted for restoration ahead of reinvention. The National’s style is Havana, 1959, except the hotel looks like it just opened.
A hotel that was just about to open the first time I was in Miami is as close to the madding crowd as you want to get. Sitting on the roof of it is now my favourite perch in Miami, maybe in America. The rooftop bar in the Betsy is like being on a sailing ship. Any slip of wind rustles up rattling ropes and canvas. With a well-made cocktail it’s heaven, and sitting up there on that colonial rooftop looking up at the Floridian sky, from the heavens to the Betsy, my feeling is there wasn’t much between.
Even if you aren’t able to stay there, dine at the Betsy. Laurent Tourondel’s BLT Steak has been in residence since opening and tucking into his famous cheese popovers on the patio outside the hotel is a first class front row to the 365-day Mardi Gras that is Ocean Drive. Tourondel’s empire of beef and delicious cheesy Yorkshire puddings is really New York though. Miami’s heart belongs to the yogi of taste, chef Michael Schwartz. Some towns you don’t need to know where to eat, you just need someone’s name to dine really well. In New York it is a small Brummy lady called April Bloomfield – she will lead you to the Spotted Pig, the Breslin, Salvation Taco and John Dory. All delicious, all different.
In Miami it is zen-like Michael Schwartz. When he first opened Michael’s Genuine in the Design District, I was sold on the best casual dining experience I had ever had. He’s been busy since and, proving that you can build a neighbourhood one dish at a time, his food has attracted more than just diners, so what was warehouseville is now Miami’s Rodeo Drive. No need to even go there now though for his irresistible chips and onion dip (trust me), as he has come to SoBe too – some clever person decided to marry Schwartz’s food to the setting by the pool in The Raleigh, probably my favourite pool in the world.
My first evening on this trip I had just come from the painful purgatory that is Orlando. It was my first proper taste of sun after our Game of Thrones-like Irish winter. On my way back to the hotel from the lively and enjoyable Yardbird, I stopped by the Miami Beach SoundScape, the soaring new 7,000-square-foot projection wall on Frank Gehry’s New World Center, where they were showing Titanic. About a thousand locals, all sitting on the grass, on blankets and deck chairs, immaculate, so well-behaved, with picnic baskets, sushi trays, Cuban take-out, with coolers and glasses, watching the start of the movie. They looked tanned, chilled, were civilised and seemed really happy. Like a crowd from an ad for what an outdoor movie audience should be.
Years ago Crockett and Tubbs may have put me off Miami, but as extras that crowd had me completely sold. Not even James Cameron could put them off. Now that’s an ad for the real Miami.
This article appeared in a previous issue, for more features like this, don’t miss our May issue, out Thursday May 5.
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