Miami’s dessert queen took over PAMM’s restaurant. What will this mean for the menu?
Verde, the scenic restaurant at Perez Art Museum Miami, has one of Miami’s most stunning waterfront views. Now it will have a chef in the kitchen to match.
The PAMM has hired two-time James Beard award finalist Hedy Goldsmith as its new executive chef. Goldsmith has been known throughout her 30-year career in Miami as one of the country’s best pastry chefs for fusing comforting and often savory flavors into inspired desserts.
Now she will apply the lessons she’s learned alongside some of America’s top chefs to her first time leading a kitchen — at a restaurant with one of the world’s leading art collections and unrivaled Biscayne Bay views.
“This is the opportunity of a lifetime,” Goldsmith said. “Being able to walk through the museum every day is the greatest gift of all.”
Goldsmith, a Philadelphia native, started her career as an art photography graduate — “I wanted to be Annie Leibovitz, but Annie Lebovitz already had that position,” she said — when she took a job as a line cook and her life changed.
She moved to Miami in 1990 and spent the rest of her career alongside Miami restaurant trailblazers, redefining what a final bite at a restaurant should be: memorable.
It was with simple, approachable-looking sweets — cookies, brownies, pies — that she delivered depths of flavors like salted caramel that turned desserts on their heads. Three times with Michael Schwartz at Michael’s Genuine Food & Drink she was recognized by the James Beard committee.
So her predilections suit her new role at Verde, which focuses on breakfast, lunch and weekend brunch, where Goldsmith is excited to fuse sweet and savory on the plate.
“There are going to be some cool, creative changes,” Goldsmith said.
Diners will see changes slowly over the next few weeks, Goldsmith said, starting with the breakfast, where she will be baking all the pastries and breads in house. The next major change, she said, will be with brunch.
For the one night that Verde is open late, Thursdays until 9 p.m., expect the Middle Eastern flavors that Goldsmith became fascinated with. Homemade labneh, feta, Israeli salads, spicy harissa sauce, and Persian and Korean flavors will seep in from the three years she lived in Los Angeles.
“It’s the perfect venue for me,” she said.
Goldsmith has been in training for this for decades.
She was pastry chef for two Miami chefs who won a James Beard award for best in the South, Schwartz and Mark Militello, worked alongside Beard winner Michelle Bernstein and lastly was the co-executive chef at the short-lived Ad Lib in Coral Gables, with Norman Van Aken.
She was a protégé and friend of the late Maida Heatter, the cookbook author and chef who the New York Times called “the foremost food authority in Florida.” Goldsmith also mentored countless young dessert experts, including two of Miami’s current best pastry chefs, Devin Braddock of Coconut Grove’s Ariete and Dallas Wynne of South Beach’s Stubborn Seed.
She will put all that experience on the plate at Verde.
“It’s a small enough restaurant that I can wrap my arms around it,” she said. ”I’m going to explore what I do best.”
Info: Verde, 1103 Biscayne Blvd, Miami; 305-375-3000
This story was originally published December 17, 2019 at 6:00 AM.
