This Miami chef harvests his backyard farm for his new Coral Gables restaurant
Three weeks before Niven Patel was set to open the new Coral Gables restaurant he’d delayed for nearly a year, he hired one final person: The farmer that grows food specifically for his restaurants.
For Patel, it’s a sign things are moving in the right direction toward normal.
Patel, chosen one of Food & Wine’s best new chefs in 2020, will open Orno on Oct. 14 in the Thesis Hotel in Coral Gables. The feature of the restaurant is a wood-fire oven where he can again highlight the fresh crops he grows in acreage behind his Homestead house, which he playfully nicknamed Rancho Patel.
“We needed to get the farm back because it’s such an integral part of what we do,” he said.
Orno joins his stable of restaurants: 4-year-old Ghee Indian Kitchen, and Mamey, which opened in the Thesis in August of last year.
But between that last opening and now — during the heart of the pandemic, with cases spiking and no coronavirus vaccine yet in sight — the landscape changed for Patel, literally.
Patel had set himself apart by growing key produce on the half acre behind his house and on the 1.5 nearby acres that the husband-and-wife team of Brendan and Laura Sutton farm.
But with restaurants struggling, he had to lay off most of his staff (though he says he still paid for their health insurance) — including the Suttons. His carefully manicured backyard quickly went to seed.
“The farm was a casualty at that point,” he said. “It became weeds and grass. But I knew underneath was six years of love and labor.”
But Mamey flourished in its first year, Ghee remained a Kendall favorite despite coronavirus restrictions, and Patel pushed ahead to open the long-planned Orno with his partner in the project, Mohamed Alkassar.
He put Laura Sutton back on the payroll and asked her to start farming half of his acreage, hoping to eventually build back up to farming both properties for his three restaurants with her husband.
“I told her, ‘Let’s not bite off more than we can chew,’” he said.
That means the taro root, Romano beans, okra, kale and Japanese eggplant they grow will show up in different ways on his menus, including at Orno. There, about half the 36 dishes on the menu are vegetarian, including vadouvan curry cauliflower, wood-roasted summer squash, grilled okra with preserved lemon and sunchokes charred in the oven.
“You can have a completely vegetarian meal and be completely satisfied,” he said.
Of course, there’s still a wide selection of meat dishes on the menu, from Ora King Salmon (an Australian farm-raised fish nicknamed the wagyu of salmon for its finely marbled meat) to actual A5 Japanese wagyu.
But the most interesting of the non-veggies is the bucatini with Sunray Venus clams, a meaty variety of clams grown in a Sebastian Inlet hatchery. The farmer there has raised 100,000 clams for harvesting and Patel says he has already spoken for all of them.
“It’s a unique flavor you can’t get from other clams,” he said.
That’s in line with Patel’s commitment to using local ingredients, such as greens from Roberto Grossman’s Tiny Farm in Homestead. It’s something he learned from one of his mentors, Michael Schwartz, who was among the first in South Florida restaurants to work with farmers to grow ingredients specifically for his restaurant, Michael’s Genuine.
Now Patel continues pushing that local edge at Orno.
“It’s going to be constantly evolving based on the seasons,” Patel said. “That’s what keeps me excited and hopefully what keeps the guest interested.”
Orno
Opening: Oct. 14
Address: 1350 S Dixie Hwy., Coral Gables in the Thesis Hotel
Hours: 5:30-10 p.m., Tuesday-Thursday and Sunday. Until 11 p.m. Friday-Saturday.
More info: 305-667-5611, OrnoMiami.com
This story was originally published October 8, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
