City orders La Placita restaurant to paint over its Puerto Rican flag mural — again
From the moment a three-story mural of the Puerto Rican flag went up at a Miami restaurant two years ago, it was painted in controversy.
Now the city of Miami has ordered the owners to paint over it — again.
Despite a year-old agreement that the painting at La Placita Puerto Rican restaurant could stay, the city has slapped the business with a violation this week, threatening to take away the restaurant’s license unless they paint over the mural.
“Here we go again,” La Placita’s co-owner, chef José Mendín, wrote in an Instagram post with a photo of the violation notice. “The city of Miami and MiMo District in the middle of the pandemic have nothing better to do than to tell us again after everything we have been through already to remove our flag. This is ridiculous. Maybe MiMo don’t deserve my flag here. Tired of being targeted by code compliance, police every day for minimal and normal restaurant music. We won’t give up that easily, but this is just plain stupid.”
The celebrity owners of La Placita Puerto Rican restaurant — Mendín, a five-time James Beard award nominee for best chef in the South and Argentinean television actor Julián Gil — commissioned a famous muralist to paint their three-story building like the red, white and blue flag when the restaurant opened in December 2018. But it was painted without first presenting the plan to Miami’s historic preservation board, which oversees any changes in the protected MiMo District. The board rejected a permit after the fact.
After more than two years of haggling, city of Miami commissioners voted in January 2020 that the restaurant could keep the mural, with one major caveat: La Placita would have to paint over the mural when a neighboring business, which the commission also allowed to keep its murals, painted over theirs.
The pandemic sped up the process.
Organic Bites, which was allowed to keep its four murals after an August 2019 lawsuit settlement, closed because of the coronavirus outbreak. And that, according to the city commission’s vote, means La Placita’s right to keep its mural has ended.
“The mural at Organic Bites was taken down, thus triggering the requirement for La Placita to remove their mural, which is also nonconforming,” city spokesman John Heffernan wrote the Miami Herald Wednesday. “Note that someone at the Organic Bites building has now put up another illegal mural and they have been cited by code compliance for that violation.”
Mendín declined to comment beyond his social media statement.
He and Gil, both raised in Puerto Rico, teamed to create the chef-inspired Puerto Rican restaurant in 2018 at 6789 Biscayne Blvd. And they hired island-born artist Hector Collazo Hernández to create the mural, entitled “Plantando Bandera (Staking Your Flag),” on Dec. 27, 2018.
But without the correct approval, the city cited the restaurant, denied it a permit after the fact, and fined the owners $250 a day — reaching $65,500 in fees.
The city commission eventually voted to waive the fines and let La Placita keep the painting — for a specified amount of time. Commissioner Joe Carollo was the one to float the compromise, and the commission voted 3-2 in its favor.
“The Puerto Rican people have suffered so much. They really needed this victory,” Miami Mayor Francis Suarez said the night of the vote. “I just felt it was the right thing to do.”
This story was originally published February 9, 2021 at 5:12 PM.
