Miami’s Design District: Best Restaurants and Shops
The best places to eat and shop in Miami’s up-and-coming Design District.
Plus
Chef Michael Schwartz’s Design District Bistro
Shops
1. Y-3 Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto merges athletic wear and high-end fashion in this debut U.S. store, a collaboration with Adidas.
2. Driade The sleek Italian design emporium has 3,500 square feet filled with housewares and furniture. Its restaurant, Fratelli Lyon, serves terrific salads and pizzas.
3. Genius Jones This eclectic store sells quirky fashion, toys and books for kids. 49 NE 39th St.; 305-571-2000.
4. Niba Rug Collections Hand-knotted designs are inspired by Miami’s tropical landscape.
Restaurants
5. Brosia The Design District’s best alfresco dining space offers a great Mediterranean menu.
6. Michael’s Genuine Food & Drink Michael Schwartz’s American bistro is the neighborhood go-to spot.
7. Pacific Time Jonathan Eismann’s renowned California-American restaurant recently relocated here.
Miami History is Made Here
A hundred years ago, the Design District had the fanciful name of Buena Vista, where farmers cultivated peppers, tomatoes and citrus. By the mid-1920s, Theodore Vivian Moore, better known as the Pineapple King, had switched his efforts from growing fruit to creating a neighborhood: He launched a furniture company to serve the rich newcomers who were buying homes near the waterfront. The area had become rundown by the ’80s, when the young Miami developer Craig Robins, who’d helped revive the South Beach district, saw its potential as an art and design center. In the late ’90s, Knoll, the modern furniture company, became one of the District’s first major design stores to open to the public. Others followed—eventually—including Niba Rug Collections and the Italian housewares and furniture shop Driade. Now the still-gentrifying district is evolving again, attract-ing fashion innovators like Y-3, a boutique selling Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto’s athletic-wear designs with Adidas. The success of Michael’s Genuine Food & Drink has also brought new restaurants to the vicinity, including the cozy Mediterranean bistro Brosia and the just-reopened California-American Pacific Time.
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