Here’s why a beloved Gables Caribbean restaurant just closed after 21 years
“Gone but not forgotten” reads the chalkboard sign outside the restaurant Ortanique on the Mile — ensuring that after 21 years, this stretch of Miracle Mile will never be the same.
The owners, chef Cindy Hutson and partner Delius Shirley, announced on Instagram that their pan-Caribbean restaurant, which cultivated a dedicated following, international acclaim and a distinctly South Florida flavor in Coral Gables, has closed and will not reopen after the coronavirus pandemic.
“It’s not exactly the way we want to go out,” Shirley said.
The restaurant had been struggling to regain traction after a controversial streetscape project closed its sidewalks and affected its walk-up business for nearly two years, Shirley said. And after dining rooms were ordered shut in March to control the spread of COVID-19 cases, rent piled up, and the owners say they could not reach a compromise with their landlord, the city of Coral Gables.
“We were trying to catch up, but we just couldn’t,” Hutson said.
The announcement comes three months after another longtime spot across the street, JohnMartins Irish Pub & Restaurant, closed after more than 30 years, hastened by the coronavirus shutdown.
Ortanique arrived in Coral Gables at a time when the flavors of the Caribbean — from Jamaica to Haiti, from Cuba to the Dominican — were finally being afforded the respect they deserved at white-plate South Florida restaurants.
“Ortanique told the story of different ethnic stories of Miami,” Hutson said.
Hutson, a self-taught chef of Irish descent who grew up cooking Italian-American food in New Jersey’s Berkeley Heights, learned to love Jamaican food when she moved to Jamaica. There, she married a local and had three children she dubbed her Jamericans.
She experimented with cooking Jamaican flavors after meeting Shirley, her life partner for more than 26 years. His mother, the late Norma Shirley, was another self-taught chef who was dubbed the Julia Child of the Caribbean and owned Norma’s restaurants from New York to Kingston.
Together, Delius Shirley and Hutson traded on his mother’s name but with Hutson’s talent at Norma’s on the Beach, which drew wide acclaim from national critics.
Her plates were beautifully styled — learned from Norma Shirley, who was a food stylist and photographer for top culinary publications.
And the flavors were a taste of Miami. A jerked chicken penne pasta with sundried tomatoes. A double pork chop with guava-rum sauce and “drunken raisins” fruit flambé. A West Indian bouillabaisse in coconut curry broth.
She called this her “cuisine of the sun.”
City of Coral Gables staffers tasted her food and recruited the couple to bring those dishes to a spot next to the Miracle Theater — including dishes that remained on the menu for 21 years.
Out of deference to James Beard Award-winning chef Norman Van Aken, whose Coral Gables spot Norman’s had earned wide acclaim, they named the new spot Ortanique after a hybrid orange that grows in the Caribbean instead of Norma’s on the Mile.
Hutson became a star. She was folded into the so-called Mango Gang, a group of top South Florida restaurateurs who melded pan-Latin and pan-Caribbean flavors with French techniques.
“You’re born with a palate. It’s like being a painter. You either have it or you don’t, and Cindy has it,” Shirley said.
The couple would go on to open Ortaniques in Las Vegas, Washington, D.C., and the Caribbean. But its home was Coral Gables at a restaurant that outlasted all the other Mango Gang chefs’, and it did so by remaining a weeknight family spot for longtime residents.
But those residents thinned during the Coral Gables streetscape project, when Shirley said revenue fell 30 percent or more during the 20 months of the renovation. One Christmas, he recalled, a bulldozer was parked out front and remained there to welcome the New Year.
The city allowed them to carry rent payments in arrears over, paying a little at a time, but Shirley said diners never fully returned.
It only got worse after dining rooms closed March 16 and he had a meeting with staff.
“I’m the biggest optimist in the world and I told them, ‘Guys, this is going to be bad,’ ” he recalled.
He, Hutson and Hutson’s daughter ran the restaurant as takeout and delivery for months until dining rooms were allowed to reopen at 50 percent capacity. But their dining room was too tight to reach even that number. Older diners stayed away in the face of a pervasive virus as did younger diners who didn’t want to take the infection home, Shirley said.
Shirley could not work out a deal with the city, which owns the property, that would allow him to pay employees and Ortanique’s mounting bills.
“I crunched the numbers and it just didn’t make sense,” he said. “No restaurant can survive right now paying 100 percent of its overhead.”
Hutson and Shirley remain in business at their downtown Zest Market, next door to their former Zest restaurant which closed during an ongoing renovation of the building. Hutson said she will continue consulting on restaurants, as with the upcoming La Tropical brewery in Wynwood.
“It has been a long ride. It’s been a great ride,” Shirley said. “There will be another chapter in our book.”
This story was originally published July 20, 2020 at 3:17 PM.
