Hey, you know what would be fun?
If you went to a place, and that place had fried chicken and dim sum and glasses filled with rye and sarsaparilla smoke.
That’d be pretty fun.
So open up your loving arms to the Sarsaparilla Club, the triumphant dim-sum-meets-comfort-food return of Jeff McInnis and Janine Booth to South Beach, now open at the Shelborne Wyndham Grand. Here’s the slideshow and here’s the menu.
You’ll find it in the indoor/outdoor space where Morimoto once stood—with worn wood, hanging succulents and a streetside vintage VW bus leading the way in. Not at all conspicuous.
Bring some friends, settle into one of the banquettes lining the wall and start lording over dim sum carts filled with small plates like beet-and-short-rib dumplings and steamed buns filled with pork belly bacon. Or you can just go the à la carte route with some fried chicken. Because it’s Jeff. So of course there’s fried chicken.
Now, you’re probably wondering about the sarsaparilla thing. For that, look to the bar. It’s made its way into a bunch of concoctions. One of which being the Licensed to “Illa,” wherein rye and some Not Your Father’s Root Beer gets poured into a sarsaparilla-smoked glass.
So that should help address that.
