Maison Ostrow: The Causeway Room Where Kosher Stopped Apologizing
The Wagyu steak tartare is built at the table, and that is the first thing that tells you where you are. A cart arrives, the beef comes hand cut rather than ground, and the herbs, Dijon, cornichons and shallots go in one at a time while you watch. Thirty six dollars. Behind the cart, deep green walls carry an oversized Mona Lisa blowing bubble gum, a gilded dog portrait, art deco panels that catch the light off Biscayne Bay through the terrace doors. This is North Bay Village, on a causeway most of Miami crosses without stopping. Olivia Ostrow opened Maison Ostrow here on 17 August 2025, in the room that Osteria del Teatro left behind after a 37 year run, and she has spent the time since proving a single proposition: that a kosher kitchen can cook French food without flinching.
Read the menu closely and you find quotation marks doing heavy lifting. "Parmesan cheese" on the smoked trout Caesar. "Feta cheese" espuma under the beet carpaccio. "Blue cheese" in the endive salad and again in the dates, which come wrapped in house "bacon". The Chicken Cordon Bleu, fifty six dollars, is stuffed with "bacon," "cheese" and creamy bechamel, then breaded and fried and set on pomme purée. Every one of those punctuation marks is a pareve construction built in house, because the ORB certificate for this address says all food is considered meat, and so there is no dairy in the building at all. Most kosher kitchens treat that as a subtraction. This one treats it as a commission.