Toro Toro is a Pan-Latin showcase
By Andrew Gayle
The lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel in Downtown Miami is one of the city’s great spaces, with its immense, abstract marble sculpture by British artist Henry Moore. The energy of that giant atrium spills into the adjacent Toro Toro restaurant, where it is softened by dim lighting and rows of elongated Edison-era bulbs hanging from the ceiling.
The lighting is one of several things that Toro Toro gets right. Another is the music, something which the live DJ (off in the brightly lit lobby) will tell you is called “Organic House,” a club beat blend of African, Indian, and Cuban music. It says “contemporary global,” but does so at a decibel level that lets you talk with your dinner companions.
The modern-international, design-forward feeling of Toro Toro is the deliberate styling of chef/mogul Richard Sandoval, who has now created some 45 restaurants around the world purveying his vision of Pan-Latin cuisine. His Miami outpost is another incarnation, grounded in Peruvian ceviche and pork lomo, Argentine grilled steak and chimichurri, Mexican corns and moles (including guacamole), Colombian chicharron and empanadas, etc.
For starters, we tried the crispy prawns and the crispy pork belly. The prawns ($30) are from Sandoval’s playlist, large shrimp fried in breaded panko with a coating of melcocha, a Peruvian specialty combining lemon, cane sugar, cinnamon, cloves, and peanuts to create a dense caramel sauce. These you dip in a pool of mango puree tinted with red chili. Great crunch with a sweet, tangy flavoring. The crispy pork belly ($22), meanwhile, is the creation of executive chef Armando Febles, a Miami native with Cuban roots, who has added his own dishes to the menu. This one is exceptional, with rectangles of pork belly, each edge a cicharron of crisped fat, the meat enlivened by mojo vinaigrette with mild habanero heat. Offset this with the plate’s pool of papaya sauce and you’ve got a trans-Latin taste treat.
Febles is behind another original plate, the grilled cauliflower steak on a bed of pureed mushrooms ($35). “Steaks” of cauliflower are now ubiquitous in up-scale restaurants, served with steak knives. Febles treats his cauliflower like a filet, embedded with pomegranate pearls and capped with a slathering of pesto-like poblano gremolata. The chef is proud that this dish is entirely vegan, and it just might satisfy your appetite for beef if it were not for the real thing served at Toro Toro.
A carnivore house specialty is the Wagyu beef cheeks ($56). The meat, akin in texture to brisket, is slow-cooked for eight to 12 hours before being coated with a wine reduction so that each bite melts in the mouth, with a tad of crunch added by crispy sweet potato strips atop the dish. The cheeks, with their dark, red wine coloring and flavor, are a visual (and taste) contrast to the bed of creamy polenta the meat is served on, which balances and mitigates the richness of the cheeks.
The other meat specialty: steaks grilled on open flame, Argentinian style. For the ceremony of it, we ordered a 32-ounce porterhouse (MP $100+), which easily feeds two. This is served tableside on a cart where the waiter deftly slices it, then flame-melts a disc of bone marrow to drip over the meat. The waiters who do this wear black gloves, which gives the scene a kind of James Bond feel to it. The meat is exquisite.
Not only did the flaming meat presentation give the meal the feeling of a show, so did an actual show which started at 8 pm (another follows at 10 pm, both on Friday “Fiesta” night). Their entry was heralded by a light-waving procession of the assembled waitstaff: two sequined entertainers performing a dancing-with-the-stars-stars routine to upbeat Latin salsas. Topping this came dessert: La Bomba ($28), a chocolate bowl with three large balls of ice cream inside. The waiter tosses this onto a skirt of plastic on the table (itself drizzled with chocolate) and it bursts open. The server then pours three sauces (berry, caramel, and vanilla) over the ice cream, and everyone at the table digs in at once, Caligula-style. Delicious.
While dinner at Toro Toro is not inexpensive, the food and service are both reliably excellent, the ambiance edgy but safely so, like an intergalactic hotel ride at a theme park – a good neutral place for a first date or business encounter.
