Celebrity chefs, foodies remember Robbin Haas as South Florida’s ‘Captain Fantastic’
Robbin Haas, the chef the Miami Herald called the “creative force behind such memorable hot spots as Turnberry, Colony Bistro, Bang, Red Square and Baleen,” has died.
“The Mango Gang guy” died Friday, his friend and one-time competitor in the South Florida celebrity chef demimonde, Norman Van Aken, said in an affectionate tribute on his website Saturday.
Haas was 66.
He became renowned in the South Florida cuisine community starting in 1989, when he arrived from a stint in Dallas, for about 20 years.
For the last decade or so, he had run restaurants in Baltimore, Maryland — some hot, like Birroteca, his Italian-influenced spot with “a Tim Burton aesthetic.” Some not so hot, like The Nickel Taphouse and Encantada, which closed within the last year, Baltimore Magazine reported.
Hot or not, they were always distinctively Haas-graced. He had an eye on opening more and better restaurants, much as he had done in Miami-Dade earlier.
“I’m excited about being in Baltimore—and I’m going to open more restaurants. I’m not done. I’m just glad to be moving in a forward direction,” Haas told Baltimore Magazine in January.
The optimism was befitting, as it was a trademark of the once rowdy young celeb chef in South Beach and Coconut Grove.
A ‘rock star’ young chef
“When I met Robbin we were both young firebrands working on our individual paths from outposts on Ocean Drive,” Van Aken wrote. “He was at The Colony Hotel and I was at the Betsy Ross doing the restaurant, ‘a mano’. We hit it off immediately. Everyone who knows Robbin knew his laugh. It was wide open, unchecked, joyous, raucous and one you wanted to be a part of. He was old school in ways.”
Haas was the chef at Baleen, a restaurant on Grove Isle, from the late 1990s to the time when, in 2007, the Miami New Times named Haas “the best chef to go away” in a Best of Miami tribute. The honor came after Haas left for Costa Rica and Guatemala, with his third wife, Tanya, and later to run restaurants in his adopted Baltimore.
The New Times writer rhapsodized over Haas’ tenure at The Colony on Ocean Drive in the early ‘90s — “the hottest restaurant in town” — and then when Haas took over at Bang, that became “the hottest restaurant in town.” And then Baleen.
“Mr. Haas was a wild one all right. .... But he was talented, and the flavors of his food jumped off the plate like a frog from a frying pan,” the New Times writer said.
Baleen at Grove Isle was the Miami restaurant,” a writer for the Miami Herald also opined earlier that year, dubbing Haas a “New World OG.”
“Original gangsta,” indeed.
“The caution to not smoke and to drink in moderation were not ones that Robbin would ever adopt,” Van Aken wrote in his tribute. “He worked hard and he played hard. But what joy he found in both. South Florida was just becoming a place where the food community of chefs was finding its own first voice. There were, of course, famous and important restaurants before the late 1980s and early 1990s. But it was not then a celebration of our cultural diversity.”
The Mango Gang
Along with “rock star” local chefs like Cindy Hutson, Allen Susser, Mark Militello, Douglas Rodriguez and Van Aken, Haas was part of the “Mango Gang,” the group that helped stamp the bright, sweet and spicy flavors of South Florida on the national scene.
“I ran kind of a large life, knew all the club owners, all the doormen, all the strippers,” Haas told the Miami Herald in 2001. “When people came to town I just made sure everyone had a good time.”
Before he arrived as South Beach was beginning to pivot away from its retirement community era to its post-”Miami Vice” hipness in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the peripatetic Haas had done cooking stints in Monterey, St. Louis, Knoxville, New York, Chicago, D.C., Houston and Buffalo, his hometown.
He realized he wanted a chef’s lifestyle at age 8, when he helped his mom out at the Buffalo restaurant where she had worked, the Herald reported. He’d call himself “a hard-core businessman in a rock-and-roller’s body.”
Honors and a mellowing
People noticed.
Food & Wine magazine called him “one of the nation’s top chefs” when he was at Colony Bistro in 1994. Gourmet, Esquire, The James Beard Foundation, they all rained hosannas on the hotshot chef.
He’d mellow, a bit, in Baltimore.
According to a 2015 profile in Baltimore Magazine, his employees call him “the Old Man” or simply “Dad.”
“He comes through you like a force,” Jon Hicks, Haas’s then-executive chef at The Nickel Taphouse, told the magazine. “It’s like a father force. He makes you pay attention to things you might not have paid attention to before. He walks in the room and it’s like Dad came home. Better straighten up.”
Miami foodies’ reaction
His South Florida colleagues reacted with fond memories over the last couple days.
Terry Zarikian, a food editor at Selecta Magazine and culinary director at the Food Network and Cooking Channel South Beach Wine & Food Festival, was Haas’ publicist in his Baleen days.
Zarikian echoed Van Aken’s tribute.
“Norman could not have described better the void we all felt when we heard that Robbin had passed,” Zarikian said on Facebook.
“I knew Robbin for as long as he was in Miami and always thought he was meant to bring joy, culinary-wise and otherwise, with (most of the time) uncontrolled joie de vivre, that made life a continuous event. He lived his life at his fullest and I will never forget how he supported the first Taste of the Nation event I co-shared with Barbara Seldin, Lucy Cooper and Ron Sampierro, back in 1987. Ten years later, I convinced him to take over the reign of Jeffrey Chodorow’s Red Square, and it was there and then Red Square was named one of America’s best new restaurants by John Mariani at Esquire Magazine. He was the most loyal and truthful friend.”
Carole Kotkin, who has written about food for the Miami Herald and as manager at The Cooking School at The Ocean Reef Club, agreed with Zarikian and Van Aken.
“We all had a wonderful time putting South Florida on the culinary map. Robbin was pivotal in the success of this endeavor. You are right, his laugh was joyful and so memorable. I used to feel so good when he laughed at something I said.”
Luis Pous, corporate executive chef at Timbers Resorts in Winter Park, was a sous chef at Turnberry all those years ago alongside Haas. He called Haas “an inspiration for all of us” on a Facebook post.
Van Aken summed it up in his tribute essay when he called Haas “Captain Fantastic,” borrowing the nickname famously coined for Elton John by his lyricist Bernie Taupin.
Van Aken did so because of all the things he said Haas accomplished in his South Florida heyday: providing Hurricane Andrew relief; cooking for no less than Julia Child, who knew a thing or two about food; mentoring up-and-comers, and helping to put South Florida on the culinary map.
“Like new music there was no quick way to describe what we were doing,” Van Aken wrote. “It was an exciting, revelatory era of discovery, of energy, of rock and roll joy. Robbin was one of our great trailblazers. We will miss him. But we will not forget him. Raise a glass my friends. It is what Robbin would want us to do.”
Survivors’ names and information on services have yet to be made public.
This story was originally published November 16, 2019 at 4:33 PM.
