The historic ‘mini castle’ in Brickell will be home to a restaurant by this celebrated chef
Brickell helped produce one of South Florida’s best chefs — and now that chef is returning to Brickell with a new restaurant in a historic venue.
Clay Conley, who rose to stardom as the head of Azul at the Mandarin Oriental Miami, is returning to open Chateau Miami in a restored mini castle on Brickell Avenue styled after a French chateau. The restaurant is slated to open in late February or early March of 2020.
“You just see the space, and there’s so much history there,” Conley said during a phone interview Tuesday. “The physical space is amazing.”
Conley, who left the Mandarin to open his first restaurant in Palm Beach County, Buccan, in 2011, has been nominated for five James Beard awards in eight years. He has since opened three others, Imoto at Buccan, Grato in West Palm Beach and the Buccan sandwich shop next to the original restaurant. All of them have become top Palm Beach County dining destinations.
Conley has a preternatural flair for combining ingredients, cultures, textures and flavors into dishes that are constantly rotating. Think Italian, French, Peruvian, Mexican all contributing flavors to a single dish, such as Florida snapper moqueca with basmati rice, snapper ceviche “al pastor,” short rib empanadas with aji Amarillo.
He lived in Japan while working for celebrity chef Todd English and toured Peru while working at Azul, which produced a line of famous chefs, including Michelle Bernstein, before it closed.
It was a meteoric rise for a rural high school football star, who was raised on a 60-acre farm in Scarborough, Maine, in a 1700s house warmed by wood-burning stoves. He started off as a small-town pizza cook and Cheesecake Factory alum before transferring to Boston just so he could apply at Olives to be at English’s side. (“He hired me just to be a nice guy,” Conley said in a Palm Beach Post story.)
“Everything I cook is the life story of where I’ve been,” Conley said.
Open-fire cooking is Conley’s trademark at Buccan and also will be at Chateau Miami. His “progressive global cuisine,” according to a release, will include “carbonara” raviolini with quail egg, bacon and Parmesan, charred organic carrots with black hummus and harissa (a homemade hot sauce Conley often uses in his cusine). A medianoche sandwich-style ham and gruyere cheese French toast with mustard butter will highlight a brunch menu.
He said his press team struggled to encapsulate his style into a single name like world cuisine or New American. Buccan ranges from raw bar to locally grown produce and meats. All of his travel and influences — he reads extensively, particularly cookbooks — find their way into his kitchen.
“Buccan is the way that I like to eat,” Conley said. “Global is what we do.”
His unique style will make up the menu at Chateau Miami, where the setting is equally unique.
Community activists John and Ethel Murrell built their Petit Douy mansion in Brickell in 1931 after being inspired by a French chateau during their travels. Miami designated the building historic in 1983 — it was the city’s only French-style chateau — and it was recently rezoned to allow commercial use at the mouth of a residential district near the quiet urban nature preserve Simpson Park.
Mast Capital sold the building for $6.25 million to the current owners in August of 2018, according to property records, and Conley said he and his partners at Buccan have been intimately involved in the renovation.
John Murrell, a longtime Miami attorney, was a founding member of the Surf Club, the location where the godfather of American cuisine, Thomas Keller, built his first South Florida restaurant. Conley said Petit Douy’s history was important to him. Buccan is built into a historic Palm Beach building and his Grato is in a 1920 West Palm spot.
“The history is important to us,” he said.
Rather than hire for a chef to run the new restaurant, Conley has moved into the SLS Brickell condo and set up a fellow James Beard nominee, Zach Bell — a longtime star at Palm Beach’s Café Boulud — at Buccan. Conley said he will live in Miami for at least Chateau’s first year.
“I want to be full-on into it,” he said. “We feel this is the right opportunity.”
Details: Chateau Miami, 1500 Brickell Ave., Brickell
Opening: Spring 2020
This story was originally published December 10, 2019 at 11:59 AM.
