This laid-off chef turned his Instagram sandwich sales into three new Miami restaurants
Every time Michael Kaplan opened Instagram in the early days of the pandemic, he found his culinary school friend Benjamin Murray making delicious-looking banh mi sandwiches and hustling.
Murray, a North Miami Johnson and Wales grad with Kaplan, had been furloughed from his job as a chef at Paul Qui’s Pao at the Faena and was selling sandwiches through Instagram as a way to pay bills.
Kaplan, who was quarantining in a locked-down New York City with a childhood friend, had an idea: Partner with Murray to open new restaurants in Miami, which managed to stay open during most of the pandemic.
On June 3, Murray and Kaplan will open the first of three planned restaurants together, Benh Mi, a sandwich shop that puts a Miami spin on the Vietnamese-French classic.
“It’s just the perfect sandwich,” said Murray, also a past chef at Azul at the Mandarin Oriental. “They’ve seen me do it on Instagram for months. They know there’s a lot of love put into them.”
Fortunately, Kaplan was quarantined with the right person. His lifelong friend, Jared Chassen, is a principal at Arch Companies, a New York-based investment firm that owns more than $600 million in properties around the world — including Miami.
They are among the slew of New York-based restaurant groups opening locations throughout South Florida.
The first of their restaurants will be Benh Mi, which will remain open all day and into the late night as it connects with the lobby of the Esmé Miami Beach boutique hotel at the corner of Española Way and Washington Avenue on South Beach.
There Murray will build on his Instagram hustle, filling his banh mi sandwiches with everything from lemongrass meatballs to herb-roasted pork and marinated mushrooms. They will be served on baguettes baked by the nearby Bettant Bakery, run by Matthieu Bettant, a fourth-generation French baker who helped open Sullivan Street bakery in Little Haiti.
Smaller bites include spring rolls, green papaya salad with mango and crispy chicken tenders with housemade sauces like yuzu-kosho ranch, roasted banana ketchup or tamarind barbecue.
Murray and Kaplan’s other two restaurants will share a space at the former Latin Café 2000 at 2501 Biscayne Blvd. in Edgewater, with complementing personalities.
By day, it will be Mimi’s, a casual bistro that will focus on sandwiches and salads, with a menu that leans heavily on vegetables farmed locally at French Farms and Paradise Farms “with Ben’s culinary twist,” Kaplan said.
At night from Thursday to Sunday, starting in July, it will open as Twenty Five Oaks barbecue, something wholly different: a classic American barbecue spot that will also apply slow-roasting techniques to those locally farmed veggies.
That nightly pop up takes inspiration from Kaplan’s own Two Forks in New York City, which focuses on slow-roasted meats. Think smoked brisket, overnight-smoked ribs, short rib on the bone but also ember-roasted carrots, sweet potatoes and cold-smoked potatoes for leveled-up potato salads.
“It’s a way to lighten up the food so you can indulge a bit more and not feel bad about it,” Murray said.
Kaplan imagines the location as a future incubator for other restaurant concepts to change over quickly.
“We asked ourselves, ‘How do we give chefs like Ben a place to succeed and it’s doing these kinds of concepts,’” Kaplan said.
And they won’t stop there. The chefs have put together a network of local chefs who shifted gears during the pandemic to become private chefs for Miami’s moneyed. Through their New Wave Hospitality Group, they place chefs into part-time and full-time gigs and for one-off dinners.
“All of these chefs were out of work and all of these clients who didn’t want to go into a restaurant instead brought the restaurant experience into their homes,” Kaplan said.
Benh Mi
Address: 1436 Washington Ave., Miami Beach (Española Way)
More info: Benhmi.com
Mimi’s/Twenty-Five Oaks Barbecue
Address: 2501 Biscayne Blvd., Edgewater
Opening: July 2021
This story was originally published June 3, 2021 at 11:24 AM.
