Two Chefs Restaurant is a secret place – except to its followers
Most of the chef-driven, haute-cuisine restaurants in Greater Miami occupy prime locations and frequently showcase the food in dramatic settings. That is not the case with Chef Jan Jorgensen. A native of Denmark trained in classic European cuisine, he is the soft-spoken culinary wizard behind Two Chefs, a quiet, elegant hideaway in an otherwise unremarkable pocket mall on U.S. 1, about a mile south of Coral Gables.
Jorgensen has been running Two Chefs for just over three decades, cooking what he calls American food, albeit with his own unique spin. “We don’t have Japanese or Korean or Asian variations, we don’t do ceviche. We cook with the basic classic ingredients,” says Jorgensen, who updates the menu every few weeks to reflect whatever is fresh, available, or interesting to him at the moment.
“Of course, we keep certain things on the menu that are favorites for our customers,” says Jorgensen. Those staples include flat breads cooked with his wood-burning oven, crab cakes, tuna tartar, and above all his souffles – chocolate, pistachio, and Grand Marnier – which are among the hardest desserts to perfect. But for the rest of the time, the menu follows the ingredients.
Jorgensen is constantly cooking new things, almost restlessly, simply because he loves to cook. He will prepare some dish for a couple of weeks – a pan-roasted chicken breast “au poivre” with mushroom dumplings, for instance – and then go on to the next. “Recently I threw a whole leg of lamb in my wood-burning oven – it stayed there 24 hours – to make lamb shepherd’s pie,” he says. “But I won’t do it again. We have our staples [but] the menu goes back and forth.”
The prices at Two Chefs are also surprisingly moderate for the quality of the cuisine, something he also manages by ingredient selection. “[The dish] doesn’t have to be hand-picked scallops from Martha’s Vineyard at $50 a pound. I mean, you can totally do a nice dish with something else and have fun with it,” he says.
The night we ate at Two Chefs, we tried his flatbread, his ever-so-crisp crab cakes, and a dish of escargot sautéed with cremini mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, garlic, croutons, and feta cheese, an amazing combination of tastes that balanced and bounced off each other. The same for a dish of raw tuna with caviar, feta, a drizzle of olive oil, and a sprig of basil – salty and savory, soft and chewy. The evening’s standout was the double-cut pork chop with date relish, whimsically topped with shoelace fries wrapped in bacon.
The interior of Two Chefs has a deep, golden glow, created by alabaster saucer chandeliers overhead and lamps at every table. A long curvilinear bar is separated from the dining room by glass panels, which gives it a protected feeling, a good place to duck in for a Manhattan. The kitchen is partly open, but also dimly lit and bracketed by a brick oven with a glowing fire that adds warmth to the space.
The oven is where Jorgensen makes his popular flatbread appetizers, ranging from one with caviar and salmon (which he gets only from Denmark’s Faroe Islands) and caviar to one with shitake mushrooms, goat cheese, caramelized onions, and truffle oil. We tried the latter. Delicious.
By the time you read this, the menu will have changed several times. A recent one we saw had appetizers of escargot, “pot pie,” and ginger rubbed baby back ribs, and a ‘chicken thigh chop’ entrée with mushroom risotto. Two Chefs also has an excellent selection of wines, which Jergensen is an expert at pairing with food.
The name Two Chefs stems from an erstwhile colleague long gone, but it’s once again apt with the addition of executive chef Joe Guerrero. Addition may be the wrong word, since Guerrero started working at Two Chefs some 23 years ago when he was a teenager. He has learned well from the master, serving as an old-world apprentice, something we have lost in our modern life. Chef Guerrero has learned so well that he is also a teacher in Two Chef’s adjacent cooking school.
So, if you like low-key elegance in a restaurant that is wonderfully subdued and ultimately romantic, with astonishingly good food cooked with great creative flair, then a visit to Two Chefs should be on your menu.
Two Chefs Restaurant, 8287 S. Dixie Hwy, 305-663-2100
