The Harbour Grill: What a Lyon Butcher Built on Harding Avenue

The charcuterie board lands first, and it is the reason to come. Dried chorizo, Italian coppa, beef prosciutto, all of it cured in this building, arranged around a mousse of chicken liver bound with cognac, cornichons and crostinis pushed to the rim of the plate. None of it exists commercially. Every slice had to be invented here, because the man who opened this room could not buy what he wanted and could not import it either. It is a little after seven on a Tuesday in Surfside, two blocks inland from the Atlantic, and the dining room is filling with the particular mix Harding Avenue produces: families from the surrounding streets, a table of Bal Harbour shoppers still carrying bags, two men talking business over a bottle of red.

Gilbert Amsellem came to Miami from Lyon, which is not a detail you can skip when reading this menu. He opened The Harbour Grill in 2006 to fill what he called a kosher and French culinary gap, then hit the wall every kosher cook of his ambition hits: the charcuterie tradition he grew up inside has no kosher supply chain. Nothing to buy, nothing to import. So he learned to make it. Saucissons, pastramis, terrines, sausages, smoked meats. The menu still carries a line in capitals along the bottom of the page stating that the charcuterie and sausages are handmade and smoked on the premises using only natural ingredients, which reads less like marketing than like a note pinned up in a workshop.