Roast: The Spit Turns, and Surfside Eats

The fire is the first thing. Not the menu, not the room, not the maitre d moving toward the door: the flame behind the counter, and the birds turning slowly in front of it, skin tightening and browning through a rotation that has been going on since noon. Fat drips, hits heat, and sends up the particular smell that has pulled people toward cooked poultry for as long as there have been people. It is a little after six on Harding Avenue, the afternoon sun still coming hard through the front window, and a young family is working through a burger at the next table while the spit keeps turning behind them.

Roast opened here in March 2023 with a single technical premise: cook the protein on a spit, in front of live flame, and do not do anything clever to it afterwards. This is the French rotisserie tradition, the one that fills shopfront windows across Paris on a Sunday morning, and it survives translation to Surfside intact. The house calls itself an authentic French traditional flame rotisserie, and the operator claims a concept lineage running back to 1998, which is the kind of claim a restaurant makes about itself and which nobody outside the business has documented.