Kosh: Four Restaurants Sharing One Harding Avenue Room

A tray goes past carrying three duck tacos, a riceless roll wrapped in soy paper, and a ribeye finished with cowboy butter and smoked salt. That is one table's order at Kosh, and it describes the place better than the menu headings do. The dining room sits behind a modest storefront on Harding Avenue, two blocks inland from the Atlantic in a Miami-Dade town barely a square mile across. Inside there are velvet chairs, chandeliers hung against modern pendant lighting, and a purple cast to the light that has outlasted every change of management since the doors opened in February 2013. It is Saturday night in Surfside, an hour after Shabbat has ended, and the room is full of families who walked here. Kosh has fed this street for thirteen years, and on this one night of the week you can watch the whole neighbourhood arrive at once.

Kosh opened as a French brasserie with a sushi bar bolted on, and the current kitchen has kept the habit of running several restaurants at the same time. The grill section is the anchor. Steaks come in five preparations: a ribeye under cowboy butter and smoked salt, a Reserve cut finished with black truffle, a center cut topped with crispy onion, a Hawaiian ribeye with pineapple, sweet chili and sesame butter, and a Peruvian New York strip served with Lima sauce and sweet potato puree. Above them sits the lamb chop, packed in a pistachio crust and served with chimichurri and mashed potato, which is the most expensive plate in the building and the one the room orders for birthdays.