This downtown Miami barbecue spot was a favorite for more than a decade. Now it’s closed
Sparky’s Roadside Barbecue managed the unlikely: It convinced Miami to venture downtown after dark for more than just a basketball game.
Diners dodged city traffic, cyclists and panhandlers and found themselves under the shadow of the Metrorail line, where the scent of barbecue lured them for the last 11 years. There, Kevin Kehoe and Hans Seitz rewarded them — from lunchtime office drones to longing barbecue snobs — with heaping platters of superb beef brisket and pulled pork.
But the live rockabilly with a side of baby back ribs that helped add a new dimension to downtown Miami will go silent. The restaurant announced Sept. 10 on Instagram that it has closed, six months after the death of one of its founders.
“Sparky’s is closing its doors for good. To all of our fans, friends and family, thank you for riding the wild hog with us,” the restaurant wrote on Instagram. On their website they posted a note that read, in part, “Sparky’s has closed for good. COVID 1, Sparky 0. ”
In February, Seitz posted that co-founder Kehoe had died. The Miami New Times reported he died at 56 after a long bout with cancer.
Kehoe and Seitz were New York City transplants with long roots dating to Miami’s culinary boom in the 1980s. They met while working in the kitchen at Who’s in the Grove, inside the Mayfair, where Sparky was the nickname the chefs used for each other.
“That kitchen, working with Chef Michael Moran, is where the name Sparky was born. It seems like a million years ago. Those were fun days and countless more followed,” Seitz wrote on Instagram, memorializing his friend and partner.
The two reconnected two decades later at a party at the house of Moran, a longtime Miami chef and former Florida International chef-instructor. Kehoe had become interested in barbecuing after helping grill master and James Beard Award winning author Steven Raichlen with a party at his Coconut Grove home.
“It’s funny that after not seeing each other for more than twenty years the first words out of both of our mouths were, ‘Sparky,’” Seitz wrote online. “Friendships do endure and we never missed a beat. He was a good friend and a good person.”
Seitz and Kehoe went off to experiment with barbecue, eventually buying a commercial smoker in Kansas City to power their downtown Miami operation, they told the Miami Herald in 2011.
They focused on long-smoke, dry-rub barbecue, something more than the roving roadside grills and the saucy, sticky-finger standbys like Shorty’s and Shiver’s.
And the two Sparkys set up shop at a different kind of roadside.
They tore a page from the Austin, Texas playbook, setting up diners with slabs of meat on butcher paper, pitchers of craft beer, and seating them next to one another at picnic tables — but not on a dusty lot. Time Out named Sparky’s No. 21 in their list of best barbecue restaurants in America in 2017.
Among Cuban cafeterias and wholesalers in Miami’s downtown, Sparky’s Roadside Barbecue will leave a lasting memory.
This story was originally published September 10, 2021 at 12:52 PM with the headline "This downtown Miami barbecue spot was a favorite for more than a decade. Now it’s closed."
