Wayan Miami is the third location of this Indonesian restaurant that first opened in New York City in 2019 from Cédric Vongerichten and his wife, Ochi. The Miami location open earlier this year.

Wayan is the first “solo” venture from Vongerichten, the son of Jean-George Vongerichten. Jean-George is perhaps best known for his eponymous restaurant Jean-George and an empire of other restaurants, like Perry Street, where Cédric had previously served as chef de cuisine at Perry Street.

Cédric met Ochi Latjuba, who is Indonesian, while they were classmates at CIA. They have since become business and life partners, and two collaborated with Jean-George on Vong Kitchen and Le Burger in Jakarta in the late 2010s before opening the first Wayan in Soho.

Wayan Miami opened in the southeast corner of Wynnwood in Miami, a onetime working-class neighborhood that has exploded with high rise towers, trendy bars, and street art. Gentrification has pushed north into this neighborhood quickly, consuming empty lots and converting the old into the new. The satellite images on Google Maps can’t keep up with updates with new buildings replacing what the service shows as greenspace or single family homes.

In this regard, Wayan Miami is not unlike Jean-George’s Spice Market, which opened in the then gentrifying Meatpacking District of New York in 2004. The mega-restaurant and club closed in 2016, but not before overseeing the transformation of the city’s west side.

A quarter century into the new millennium, the High Line park now connects the flashy Hudson Yards to 14th Street through some of the city’s most luxuriously overpriced real estate. But for years, that structure had brought freight trains filled with live cattle to meat markets. The industrial past ended in 1980 with the last train on the elevated tracks.

When the trains stopped bringing in steers for slaughter, the neighborhood turned into a haven for queer life. Gay bars flourished at first, and then the HIV epidemic took a toll on the local community. By the early 2000s, the gentle hand of gentrification started transforming the neighborhood into a playground for Carrie Bradshaw and Samantha Jones where young white women drank cosmopolitans. All this happened before Google and other tech companies turned the gritty into the glitzy, the polished tech billboard the neighborhood has become today. The Apple store did to the Meatpacking District what the Disney Store did to Times Square.

At least part of that transformation was Jean-George’s Spice Market, with the restaurant impacting food culture as much as the surrounding neighborhood. Spice Market opened after Pastis but before other hallmarks of the area like the new Whitney Museum, The Standard, or even the High Line. The neighborhood was gentrifying, but not gentrified.

Spice Market was notable for its considered approach to Asian-inspired dishes and upscale approach to pedestrian street foods before everyone was serving street foods. It was both a massive nightclub and respected restaurant. Frank Bruni acknowledged it as a theme park atmosphere, but also as an “unusually classy one.” Despite closing in 2016, Spice Market left a mark on the culinary scene in New York City for its mainstreaming of southeast Asian flavors. The increasingly trendy, and upscale restaurants featuring Malaysian, Singaporean, and of course, Indonesian cuisine, at least partially can be linked back to Spice Market.

Wayan is not Spice Market, though. When the New York restaurant opened, Pete Wells critiqued the actual Spice Market spinoffs in other cities as “increasingly mindless and out of touch. Interior design that rummages through the musty old trunks of Orientalism doesn’t look as alluring as it did 15 years ago, and cooking that filters Asian flavors through a Western sensibility isn’t automatically met with gales of excitement” but praised Wayan for avoiding “both traps.” What it can’t avoid, is the sense of injecting gentrification into a rapidly evolving neighborhood.

We walked from our aging motel near the entrance to 195 through the changing Wynnwood neighborhood. Midtown Miami was buzzing on the Friday night, even if I couldn’t shake the feeling we were walking through a mall. A few blocks down we crossed into Wynnwood’s party zone where we found bars and lounges and an oddly high number of donut shops.

Approaching Wynnwood from the north was a different experience than we had the year before when we walked into the neighborhood from the last stop on the People Mover. Then, we had dinner on the south side of the neighborhood at Lira, a Lebanese restaurant, where there’s a sign declaring “Wynnwood Starts Here.” The neighborhood here feels more ad hoc, less finished, less polished.

Wayan Miami is midblock on NW 24th Street where brand new towers have sprouted faster than Streetview can keep up with. European families were walking around with a look of stunned curiosity.

We showed up early and had a drink across the street at an outpost of Ghee, an Indian restaurant from Niven Patel. I sipped a Spice Route Old Fashioned, and my wife ordered a bright green concoction flavored with Pandan. Ghee was packed when we finished our cocktails and headed to our table at Wayan, which was busy but not full.

We considered the menu, debated our drinks. After considering the wine list – unremarkable and expensive – we looked through the cocktails. They were thematic, but to be honest I thought the drinks at Ghee were better. I’ll also note here that the cocktails certainly took their sweet time to arrive – after our first plates showed up. Our intent was to sip cocktails and then move to beers, but we never got around to the beer.

And that’s another concern. The pacing of the meal felt off, hurried at times, and then also delayed at others. I have to wonder if this is a new restaurant working out the kinks in its logistical supply line, or an intentional service choice, a way of turning tables.

The first dish to arrive was the Avocado gado gado. Think of this as an unmixed avocado salad. It was strong with acid and a bit messy to mix. The components looked pretty in the bowl, perfect for instagram, but it might have been easier to eat had it already been mixed.

The salad has a good variety of flavor and texture, but was uneven. Again, this might simply have been because we mixed it badly. The jammy egg was absolutely spot on.

Next came the Wahoo Tartare. On my menu it was listed as a Wahoo ceviche, while it was tartare on my wife’s. The waitress said it was the same dish with a new name.

It might not sell as well, but ceviche was more accurate. It had some nice texture, but was missing something until the kerupuk arrived.

We added the kerupuk as the menu suggests. These were absolutely fun, crispy crackers, and while they did go well with the ceviche, an entire order of them was too many.

Overall the ceviche / tartare feels incomplete without them. However, as a full side dish, there simply wasn’t enough ceviche to for all the Keurpuk. It was an odd upsell for a component that should have been part of the dish, especially one rechristened as tartare.

The crackers came with their own dipping sauce, though it wasn’t something that I was craving. They worked much better in the Wahoo.

The citrus salad was an absolute highlight. It was crispy and fresh and full of big bold flavors. I wanted more of this, and I’ll consider recreating something similar myself at home.

We went with the satay sampler. The lamb was superb, tender and delicate. The chicken was fine, but not memorable. The shrimp was fine, with a spicy and delicate flavor, but I could have taken more heat.

At this point we received new plates. It was an odd moment to clear the table setting, but I suppose the crispy ribs were intended as an entree.

The crispy pork ribs fell off the bone. The texture didn’t quite melt in the mouth, but almost. I could have had more intense flavor with the meat and the flavor reminded me of the meat in Bonnie’s BkRib, a riff on the McRib. Bonnie’s dish has the advantage of layering other flavors in a sandwich, but at Wayan, the crispy rib mostly is intended to stand on its own.

Perhaps the stand out favorite of the evening was the corn fritter. This arrived alongside the rib, but I didn’t really see the connection.

The fritter has the look and feel of a carnival funnel cake — this is how the waitress described it, and it turned out to be oddly accurate — with bits of corn embedded inside. The flavor was sweet and savory with a crunchy crispiness. Despite the fact that was clearly fried, it was light to the touch. It was absolutely delicious and I would eat again.

At this point I was well filled up, but my wife wanted something sweet to tie things together.

She ordered the Pandan Custard, topped with passion fruit seeds. It was the second pandan flavored dish of the night, after her cocktail at Ghee.

We had to look it up afterward. Pandan is a unique South Asian flavor, a tropical plant that creates a sweet floral taste. The leaves of the plant are used creating a green color.

We wrapped things up at the restaurant and headed out back to our hotel. The night was full of the sound of life, of young people wandering around looking for a party and talking about their fake IDs. We walked past a few lots of food trucks preparing for the eventual onslaught of late night revelers.

Wayan delivered on a tasty meal with unique flavors, but some of those dishes still feel imperfect. The focus on Indonesian inspired cuisine draws on the legacy created by the Vongerichten family, but I have to wonder if they are actually pushing things forward or simply riding on the trend they created.

Wayan Miami

50 NW 24th St STE 101
Miami, FL 33127
Website

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