Beauty & the Butcher – Complementary Contradictions

At Chef Ford’s Beauty & the Butcher, It’s All About the Combinations

A few weeks ago, Superblue, the wonderfully peculiar art museum in Allapattah, put on a virtual reality food exhibit. Participants donned goggles that visually immersed them in interactive worlds ranging from an ethereal Greek garden in the clouds to a Picasso-like city where violins and tubas rained from the sky. In each setting, there was a small bite of food, each completely unique and promising such odd tastes as “the first time you bit your lip.” Naturally, I went. The exhibit was interesting but overall underwhelming, quickly shoved to the back of my mind until, that is, I was forcibly reminded of it during a visit to Beauty & The Butcher, where “interesting” is an understatement.

The restaurant is Chef Jeremy Ford’s newest in Miami and his first in the Gables. You may know him from Stubborn Seed, a sexy South Beach hotspot that earned him a Michelin Star last year, or from “Top Chef,” the competitive cooking show that he won in 2015. Beauty & The Butcher, however, is a separate concept, one that begs the Superblue-esque question: Can you taste a contradiction?

Ford’s dishes say emphatically, “Yes, of course you can.” Take, for example, the Local Lettuce salad ($16), which combines yogurt with radish, fruit, and turmeric vinaigrette. The leaves aren’t actually lettuce but Castelfranco Radicchio, an Italian heirloom vegetable with an acidic taste that lingers in the hard palate at the front of the mouth and is made even more bitter by the vinegar-based dressing. This is all offset, however, by the sweetness of the fruit and yogurt; a perfect bite encapsulates all the ingredients, each blending without overpowering the others.

Then there’s the sourdough focaccia ($9), which comes with ‘Nduja butter and Koji honey from a local farm in Homestead. The butter is made from ‘Nduja, an Italian sausage, as well as a combination of other meats and spices that give it an unmistakably tangy pork flavor. Juxtaposed with the syrupy honey, it’s a perfect spread for another seemingly incongruous item: the inwardly soft yet outwardly crisp sourdough bread from Sullivan St. Bakery, which lies on the eastern edge of Little Haiti.

“We’re very much based off the idea of community,” lead server Christopher de Piazza said. “Chef Jeremy is a southern Floridian himself, [so] we source as much as we can from local farmers and purveyors to give back to the community that he grew up with.”

But throw all this out the window for the real highlight on Ford’s menu, the Wagyu beef tenderloin ($69), made from grade eight Australian meat (the Australian Wagyu grading scores top out at nine) and accompanied by a side of crispy fried polenta and a sour cherry mustard sauce. It’s somehow smooth and savory while also being salty and tangy, with Chef Ford’s famous sauce (built from red wine vinegar, ruby port, cherries, and mustard powder) drizzled warmly over the most tender cut of meat I believe I’ve ever had. The polenta tots are the perfect side, adding in a contrasting crunch. This right here is what makes Ford “the butcher” – and maybe the “beauty” too.