What’s it like inside the new Fox’s Lounge in South Miami? We checked it out
The doorway, the booths and the bar, lit by a slanted orange light, were packed with locals who had come to see if this was the same Fox’s Lounge they remembered.
It was a Thursday, and as in the old days, prime rib was on the menu. Led Zeppelin and the Ramones filled in conversations. And the bar was shoulder-to-shoulder, two rows deep, with a rare mix of people of different generations.
A group over 60 and a cluster under 30. Men in orange Canes polos or Hawaiian shirts, and young women in high heels. A group of women who used to meet for book club here in the ’80s — before The Fox closed in 2015 after 69 straight years — winked at men half their ages from their red leather booth.
“I had the best prime rib I’ve ever had,” one of the women, Arlene Feldman, said after dinner with three friends who remember the Fox as it was — the so-called “darkest bar in South Miami.”
“Overall, it’s a good vibe,” her friend Barbara Keyes added.
And after being re-open just a week, the bar manager already knew what would happen after 11 p.m. Lights dim. Faces are lost in the dark. And a buzz not of the bar’s making takes over.
“It gets … wild up in here,” Rodney said, his eyes wide. “Like the old Fox days, I guess.”
But it’s also a new Fox, and that took some getting used to for those who remember it as it used to be.
The dining room and old liquor store out back are swapped, the space reconfigured. A curved corner booth at the far end of the room is tucked behind a half wall. The old liquor store takeout window provides the only outside light.
“It’s not what I thought it was. It’s all young people, no one from our generation,” Lucita “Lou” Moran, 80, told a friend over the phone just inside the door. She had taken Metrorail to a nearby exit and walked to the bar, as she did in the days when she met strangers under the golden, shading light.
“I guess I expected to find things as I left them. I came for nostalgia. But life changes. Things change,” she said later. “My friends are all waiting to hear from me about the experience. … It’s just not my thing anymore.”
Randy Alonso, with co-owner Chris Hudnall, had the difficult task of bridging the old and the new — to build a new Fox in the old space.
A pay phone by the door echoes the original. The black-and-white tile floors, like the old Fox, elongate a shotgun-shack of a space. And a vintage vinyl jukebox sits along the back wall.
Even the menu calls back to the original from the last chef, Michael Vaughan, whose widow, Carol, provided the hand-written recipes.
And so a wheel of medium-rare prime rib sits on a reproduction Fox diner plate, covered in onion string curlicues.
But as Moran said, things change. The payphone is just a prop (for now). The prime rib is $34. And the vinyl jukebox is in the way — the bar, packed with newcomers and curious former patrons, already feels small.
In one short week Alonso has all but decided to blow out the wall where the unplugged jukebox sits to expand the bar into what was going to be the liquor store, doubling the size of the seating areas.
The people, he says, have spoken. They want more of the Fox — perhaps a bigger Fox — if a different one than they knew.
Fox’s Lounge
Address: 6030 South Dixie Highway, South Miami
Hours: Monday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-2 a.m. Kitchen closes at 11 p.m.
More info: FoxsLounge.com
This story was originally published August 5, 2022 at 1:39 PM.
