This hidden dim sum speakeasy in Coral Gables is a pandemic success worth finding
Pablo Zitzmann is in no hurry to put up a sign at his 7-month-old restaurant hidden namelessly inside a Coral Gables bank building.
The 43 seats inside are full every night of the week as diners eager for his particular take on Chinese dim sum gather in a tropically decorated speakeasy that feels like a secret between friends. A year ago, many of these same diners snaked out of the parking garage of Zitzmann’s Kendall apartment building, where he served homemade orders placed on Instagram out of his trunk.
But it’s because of that pandemic pop-up, which he hastily named after himself, Zitz Sum, that this restaurant quietly has become one of Miami’s most special new hideaways. Starting next week, it opens for lunch as word has steadily spread.
“To me it was more important to use the money to buy more chicken than to spend $300 on a sign,” he said.
Here, Zitzmann, 33, combines the story of his background into two-bite portions made to be shared among friends. His dim sum is expertly made by a chef influenced by everyone from his Mexican grandmother to the white linen dining room at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s.
It’s not traditional Chinese dim sum. It’s inspired by the nights his father took him to the hidden Chinese dim sum counters and Japanese teppanyaki spots tucked in alleyways in his hometown of Bogotá, Colombia, where they bonded.
The flavors are a diary, from the shrimp har gow dumplings bathed in a version of his grandmother’s piquant Mexican salsa veracruzana to the Shanghai-inspired bao that’s large enough for a main course, stuffed with brisket and seared to a crunch on both sides to recall the arepas of his youth. The chicken, brushed with panela and finished with fish sauce and lemongrass that he skillfully learned to use studying in Hong Kong, is his story on a plate.
“It’s authentic to me,” he said. “I grab a lot from my background, from my childhood, from the things I love.”
He’s used to being the chef with no name — he got his first head chef job at South Miami’s gone-but-not-forgotten No Name Chinese, a restaurant with no sign out front. There he was asked to create classic Chinese dishes with his particular fine-dining touch.
The restaurant closed , but it caught the attention of James Beard award-nominated chef Niven Patel, who came in for dinner on its last day and hired Zitzmann to help open his first restaurant at the Thesis Hotel, Mamey.
Then the pandemic hit. Zitzmann was furloughed in April of 2020 as restaurants braced for the unknown. But Zitzmann, who was a married father of a pre-schooler and a toddler, couldn’t just live off unemployment.
He still had the No Name Chinese Instagram account, which had thousands of followers but had been dormant for two years, when he posted three words, “We’re coming back.”
“I had no plan. It was the most impulsive thing I’ve ever done.”
Zitzmann decided to start making simple dumplings at home, with the help of his wife, Natalia Restrepo, the former pastry chef at No Name who also sold cakes and cookies from home.
They turned their three-bedroom Downtown Dadeland apartment into a production kitchen. Folding tables covered in rice flour stretched across their living room. Three coolers filled with handmade pork and vegetable dumplings were stacked in the closet. And in between, their son, then in kindergarten, attended Zoom classes in one bedroom while their daughter ran between tables in the living room.
“It was a restaurant, a pastry shop, a school and a home,” Restrepo said. “I had to be a teacher, mom, chef — all in the same space.”
The couple set up the production every morning at 6 a.m., broke it down in the afternoon, and did it all over again the next day, five days a week — for most of a year — so the kids could have a sense of a normal home for at least a few hours a day, Restrepo said. Their parents tumbled into bed exhausted at midnight.
“The pandemic could have been something that tore us apart,” Restrepo said. “Instead, it made us stronger. We had to be. For each other and for our children.”
At 6 p.m. sharp, Instagram customers, who paid two days in advance so Zitzmann could buy ingredients, lined up to pick up their orders in the parking garage. (Yes, security guards had questions.)
One of those customers, a former No Name fan and real estate agent, lured Zitzmann to a hidden spot in an office building with two banks that had been empty for months. With “$2,000 and a couple of trips to Home Depot,” Zitzmann said he transformed the space: spray-painting chairs sage green in the adjoining patio, reupholstering seats with IKEA fabric, hanging wallpaper bought on Etsy, learning how to epoxy the bar top, framing a poster of Hong Kong he salvaged from No Name.
Guido Parodi, a former No Name colleague hired away from his job as sous chef at Joel Robuchon’s Le Jardinier, showed up with four boxes of plates he had been saving for his own restaurant.
“I was crying,” Zitzmann said. “This is not the story of a multimillion-dollar company opening a restaurant.”
A year to the month after he was laid off, Zitzmann opened the doors to Zitz Sum, with a staff made up almost entirely of former No Name employees. Diana Fernandez mixes cocktails like the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Guava (vermouth rosso with hibiscus and sake) that pair delicately with dishes like Zitzmann’s perfectly pinched pork dumplings in Calabrian chili vinaigrette with toasted shallots. Elsa Lopez, 62, whom Zitzmann has worked with for more than 10 years, rolls most of the dumplings by hand. And Paola Enamorado, the former No Name sous chef, waits on guests who find surprise new dishes every week, depending on what new, fresh ingredients Zitzmann has found.
And the diners that have followed him for more than two years finally took a seat again. There may not be an empty chair for a long time to come.
Zitz Sum
Address: 396 Alhambra Cir., Coral Gables
Hours: Tuesday-Thursday, 6-10 p.m. Friday-Saturday, until 11 p.m. Lunch 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. starting Nov. 22
More info: The unmarked restaurant is beyond the golden metal doors of the 396 building, past the atrium and the first hallway on the right.
Contact: 786-409-6920, Zitzsum.com
This story was originally published November 15, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
