There’s a whole lot of nostalgia getting served up at The Gibson Room. First off, just consider the concept, a lounge with dishes worthy of a fine restaurant, the kind of combination your grandparents’ parents found from a place that they ducked into during Prohibition. It’s a whole lot of nostalgia, even if none of us going there actually were alive during Prohibition.
Then there’s the team in the kitchen. The chef/owner is Michael Beltran, who opened The Gibson Room just about the time he was hanging a Michelin star at Ariete. When he was thinking about who could help at the Coral Way restaurant, he called an old friend, a chef who gave up kitchen life for a job in his family’s sneaker store. Kris Huseby worked for Beltran back in the days when they ran Cypress Room, a place that, after it closed, left a whole lot of people feeling nostalgic.
If you were a fan of what was here before, The Mighty, you might also feel nostalgic for the loss. But Beltran’s team gave The Gibson Room a makeover that feels like a West Village hangout, a simple design really, dominated by a back-lit bar that takes up most of one wall and the elevated stage up by the windows. Rows of speakers run up high, above the mounted deer heads. Nearly everything is black, making a happy hour feel like a long night is about to begin. A few low tables and high-tops will be pushed to the side late at night. The soundtrack is jazz and then blues and then Don Henley and something else entirely unexpected—the same soundtrack, Beltran says, that plays at his home, which is just around the corner.
After sitting down, bartender Tom Lasher-Walker will hopefully drop by to recommend the house drink. A Gibson is a kind of cocktail you can make at home—gin, dry vermouth, pickled onions on a stick. But like everything else Lasher-Walker puts in a shaker, he’s rethought it all, adding sherry for just a bit of brightness and then reworking every part of the process to get the thing ridiculously cold, keeping everything in the freezer until the last second, including the shaker that arrives tableside encrusted in ice. He spikes a Mexican Firing Squad with pomegranate grenadine, does his 19th Century with white cacao, and then shakes the hell out of raspberries to make his Philadelphia Deluxe as frothy as a Slurpee. Once he’s through, he’ll explain the recipes in his cockney brogue or, hell, even hand-write them on a sheet of receipt paper.
When the place first opened, folks from the neighborhood thought it was just a cocktail bar, and in those early days, they had to send just-drinks people to the bar. But Beltran says people started figuring out it’s also about the food, and really, it’s a menu like no place else in town. That starts with the nuggets, which come out in a paper box totally inspired by that chain restaurant with the arches. What’s waiting inside looks the same too, super-sweet BBQ sauce on the side and fried-crisp little nuggets. But here they’re filled with eel, shrimp and pork head cheese. That last ingredient might scare the pants off many people, but these nuggets are soft and creamy inside like a croqueta with deep umami flavors. It’s a good starter before heading on to the charcuterie, headlined by the chicken liver mousse and head cheese. Rainbow trout, an ingredient you don’t see much in Miami, lands on two stellar dishes, a tartare with pickled fennel and potato, and then on one of the four mains, a crunchy-skin filet above Abuela-level black beans.
Every dish at The Gibson Room, it seems, is a bit different, one aspect of it rethought or an ingredient subbed out for something you wouldn’t expect. It’s most evident with the flan, a dish served the exact way at one thousand Miami restaurants, and then here, it comes spiked with foie gras—earthy and weird and something suddenly you can’t stop eating for reasons you might not be able to explain. It’s because it’s good, in the end; rethought but also delicious.
That’s maybe the point of it all at The Gibson Room. It’s a cocktail bar, it’s a restaurant, and it’s probably not something you’ve ever seen before.
