Adios, Cracker Barrel: This Miami Springs restaurant does Southern food Miami’s way
Two of Miami’s burger experts had decided they wanted to open a restaurant together when they found themselves munching on surprisingly tasty Southern fare beneath a breezy chickee hut at Crackers Casual Dining in Miami Springs.
Sef Gonzalez, a Miami comfort food historian and writer who blogs under the name Burger Beast, wanted Pincho restaurant co-founder Nedal Ahmad to see this unassuming restaurant on the banks of the waterway that leads to the Miami River.
“I fell in love with it instantly,” Ahmad said.
He saw Gonzalez’s vision. Now he didn’t want to just come back. He wanted to buy it. He wanted to make it even better. And he wanted to do it with the people he trusted the most.
Gonzalez recruited Ahmad and his brother, Nizar, co-founders of the Pincho restaurant franchise, and their close friend Andrew Gonzalez, founder of Night Owl Cookies, to buy Crackers Casual Dining and make it something uniquely their own — and uniquely Southern in Miami.
They took over the restaurant Sept. 15, kept the entire staff, and have started tweaking and elevating the menu and look of the 9-year-old restaurant, which remains open as they complete the changes by Oct. 29.
“Everyone’s bringing different skill sets,” Sef Gonzalez said.
Ahmad had been looking for exactly this kind of new challenge.
In 2018, he sold all but minority shares in Pincho, which grew to 10 locations in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, and went back to just running a restaurant.
He opened a Pincho in Doral late in 2019 and at the same time had an idea for a doll inspired by Elf on the Shelf — Eid with Saeed, to celebrate the Islamic holidays. The doll was to be built in Wuhan, China in 2020.
The global pandemic had other plans. The restaurant struggled and closed and the doll never made it to market. Even a healthy meal-delivery service he started based on a diet that helped Ahmad lose 70 pounds, sputtered.
“Everything I did post-Pincho got wiped out by COVID,” Nedal Ahmad said.
Sef Gonzalez, a collector of Miami restaurant memorabilia, had been looking to turn his expertise highlighting local restaurants into starting one himself after closing his quirky Burger Museum at the Magic City Casino.
In Crackers, they found exactly the project that intrigued them both — a comfortable, nostalgia-laden restaurant with Southern and South Florida vibes that could serve a variety of comfort food.
Sef Gonzalez contacted all the local chefs, bakers and artisans he’d evangelized on his food blog about using their skills at Crackers to take it a step further. He wanted the restaurant to reflect a love of great ingredients used in food he had eaten in his travels throughout the South.
That meant adding flavors like pimento cheese and fried green tomatoes to burgers. Using Native Guy Nick Bofill’s local honey for dishes like a hot honey chicken and waffles. Arbetter’s Hot Dog’s house chili to top dishes. Hiring Alissa Frice, co-owner of the luxurious Frice Ice Cream at The Citadel food hall, to make desserts like Southern chess pie, apple pies (complete with a slice of cheddar as they do in the Midwest), floats and shakes. And he’ll even be making his own Burger Beast burgers as specials.
“It’s not going to be a burger restaurant but it will have great burgers,” Gonzalez said.
Plus Crackers will have a sundry store, where diners can buy products like craft colas, Empanada Harry’s barbecue sauces from its upcoming Smoke & Dough restaurant in Kendall, Native Guy honey, Miami native Taylor Hicks’ hot sauces and homemade moon pies to go.
“With the relationships that we built, we want to make this even more ‘Miami’ than it is,” Gonzalez said.
For the look of the restaurant, they turned to Nizar Ahmad and Andrew Gonzalez, both Forbes magazine 30 Under 30 honorees, who turned Night Owl Cookies into a pink paradise with four locations and more on the way.
At Crackers, Andrew Gonzalez will play up the chickee hut as the center of a fun outdoor garden area — especially for weekend champagne brunches — complete with a jet cooling system to contend with Miami’s swelter. Inside, there is whitewashed clapboard siding, using some of Sef Gonzalez’s museum kitsch.
They hope to highlight the outdoors as an unexpected hangout away from the Miami frenzy, with natural wine and craft beers from nearby breweries such as Beat Culture, J. Wakefield, The Tank and Doral’s Miami Beer Co.
“It’s nostalgic. It’s family,” Andrew Gonzalez said. “When you step in there, you no longer feel like you’re in Miami.”
The partners are already looking for other unique spaces that might house future Crackers restaurants, but nothing like the growth Pincho experienced when it was opening a new store every six weeks at its height.
“It’s got to have the charm that this does,” Nedal Ahmad said.
Crackers Casual Dining
Address: 78 Canal St., Miami Springs
Hours: Tuesday-Thursday, 11 a.m. to 8:45 p.m. Friday until 9:30 p.m. Saturday brunch 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., dinner 4-9:30 p.m. Sunday brunch 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.
More info: EatAtCrackers.com, 786-518-3268
This story was originally published September 30, 2021 at 11:37 AM.
