Mark Birnbaum's Catch Miami Heating Up South Beach

In case you missed it, Mark Birnbaum's Catch Miami restaurant has been heating up South Beach since January of this year at the James Royal Palm hotel. The Miami New Times recently took some time to catch up with Catch Miami manager, Hardy Hill to get an inside look at the restaurant.

Here are a few highlights from the stand out article:

The dining room at Catch is studded with familiar faces. There are those you might recognize from television, such as Martha Stewart, and others you may know from movies, like Leonardo DiCaprio, Zoe Saldana, and Camilla Belle. Mostly, though, the posh SoBe restaurant swarms with people whose names you cannot recall. You know they are somebody — but that's only because everyone else looks up from their sushi and cocktails as these people walk into the room.

This restaurant offers many things that other South Beach restaurants lack. It has a local area code for its reservations line that connects to a call center in Manhattan. It has an automated phone system that includes a voicemail box exclusively for lost and found. 

The restaurant's epicurean ethos is resoundingly uncomplicated: Combine miso or soy with a bit of crunch and then add some fish, fat, sugar, and spice. Take for instance the crunchy rice cakes. Fried baton-shaped rice patties are topped with bigeye tuna tartare and wasabi tobiko — flying fish roe infused with the piquant green Japanese plant. There is also a dish called crispy shrimp, whose fried crustaceans come doused in a cloyingly sweet-and-spicy dressing and served alongside spicy aioli.

Mark Birnbaum and the EMM Group knew exactly what they were doing when they brought their Manhattan-style powerhouse dining center to South Beach. Only open for a few months, the restaurant already seems to be a staple of Miami.

For more information about Catch Miami, visit EMM Group's website and take a look around.