This tiny restaurant was one of Miami’s hottest. It’s making a comeback — with delivery
Miami tasted only a nibble of the flavorful cuisine Timon Balloo created when he put his Trinidadian, Indian and Chinese culture on a plate in his tiny namesake restaurant in downtown Miami.
Now he’s making that food easier to reach.
Balloo, whose restaurant lasted just five months because of coronavirus pressures but earned him recognition from the James Beard foundation in that short time, is offering a new menu of dishes available only on delivery apps.
Balloo Wallah, now available on sites like Uber Eats, offers dishes like veggie or chicken samosas with tangy cucumber yogurt sauce and entrees like saag paneer and his spin on chicken tikka masala over rice or waffle fries. Yes. Waffle fries. Balloo aims for his food to be less traditional and more a unique take on his American experience.
“After many years in the industry and witnessing so many changes I was once was very reluctant to delivery but after 2020 every chef should figure out a way to get there food into people’s hands,” Balloo wrote the Miami Herald in an email.
Balloo is just the latest well-known chef to partner with REEF Technology, which sets up kitchens in converted mobile homes in unused parking lots around the city. The chef creates the menu and the REEF staff cooks the meals, which are offered for delivery or pickup at the kitchen locations.
“With pivots in the industry, REEF allows me to share my flavors to a broader consumer base beyond a brick & mortar,” Balloo said. “With Balloo Wallah many of the curries, stews and wraps travel and hold well during delivery.”
The city of Miami recently approved a one-year pilot program for companies like REEF to expand their mobile kitchens. They have partnered with well-known chefs like Michael Schwartz and Michelle Bernstein for delivery-only concepts that took off last year as diners favored takeout to dining in.
The concept allows Balloo to return to Miami’s dining scene. His 27-seat restaurant, Balloo, which opened in late 2019, was an instant hit, though it was tucked inside a downtown office building. There, he combined Chinese, Indian and Caribbean flavors, which reflect his own background, into fresh takes on dishes like curried goat, roasted calabaza squash with labneh and homemade roti bread.
He took those flavors to The Wharf in Fort Lauderdale for a food-truck style street-food concept called Mrs. Balloo, a tribute to his wife, who has been integral to his restaurants and emerged as a talented chef. And that showed which dishes would best work for takeout, a natural fit, he said, for Balloo Wallah.
Balloo first made his name as the chef-partner at Sugarcane Raw Bar Grill in Midtown, where he earned the restaurant a James Beard award nomination. The New York Times named him one of the 16 Black chefs changing America.
He hopes that will keep him top of mind if he eventually opens a new sit-down restaurant in Miami-Dade.
“I’m still looking for the right opportunity to relaunch Balloo,” he said, “and welcome everyone home.”
This story was originally published June 1, 2021 at 11:32 AM.
