UPdate: Spotlight 240924 Food Scene

In the Spotlight,

Grove restaurants thrive and struggle
Coastal Cleanup sets records.
A path to Playhouse compromise?

What makes Grove restaurant’s tick, or not? The Spotlight examines this engine of the Grove economy and village life. Record-setting numbers of volunteers spread across the Bay to collect tons of trash. A possible pathway to a Playhouse solution is proposed. The full archive of Spotlight stories, opinions and letters are always available on our website, where the Spotlight search tool excels at finding the news that matters to you.

The Grove’s Changing Food Scene

Two recent restaurant closings may signal a shift in the Grove’s dining scene, and a tougher road ahead for local entrepreneurs and homegrown talent.

by Carlos Frías

Big out-of-state restaurant groups like Major Food Group of New York have landed in Coconut Grove with restaurants like Sadelle’s on Mary Street and a new restaurant planned for Rice Street at Mayfair in the Grove. (Don Finefrock for the Spotlight)

Minty Z planned for the best-case scenario before it all went wrong.

The Chinese-inspired vegan restaurant opened on Grand Avenue near Commodore Plaza as throngs were moving to South Florida to escape COVID restrictions.

Owners Huimin “Minty” Zhu and her husband Alex Falco, a trained chef, had left New York amid rising rents in 2019 and found an eager audience of fellow transplants in the summer of 2020 as they sold homemade food in the Coconut Grove Organic Market.

Pollution Solution: In the Grove and Beyond, Thousands Turn Out to Cleanup Miami-Dade Coastlines.

With more than 70 sites countywide – including four in Coconut Grove – the annual event set a record for most participants and most trash collected.

by Jenny Jacoby

Florida International University Law student Lauren Amos deposits trash collected from Coconut Grove’s Clarington Island. (Jenny Jacobi for the Spotlight).

Knee-deep in a mangrove forest, Len Scinto worked for an hour to untangle an inflatable life raft and several feet of rope – the type of debris known to kill large marine animals – that was caught in a complex web of mangrove roots.

Nearby, on the shore of Clarington Island, just off Coconut Grove’s Dinner Key, community members of all ages sifted through the sand to remove thousands of pieces of plastic, clearing out a total of 496 pounds of trash in just two hours.