- 1700 James Ave, Miami Beach
- Opened 2002 by Miky and Leticia Grendene
- Restaurant open to all · club by membership
- Also in Aspen, Paris and New York
Casa Tua is the address that taught Miami Beach the format everyone now copies. Miky and Leticia Grendene opened it in 2002 as an extension of their own home — a 1920s Mediterranean-revival villa set behind a hedge on James Avenue, so unlike the Art Deco around it that most people walk past without seeing it. Downstairs, an Italian dining room and a garden courtyard. Upstairs, a members club and a few hotel rooms. Twenty-odd years on, it has taken the model to Aspen, Paris and now New York.
What holds up is the discretion and the consistency: the same tagliolini, the same hedge, the same refusal to become a scene. The garden at eight on a February evening is one of the quietest good tables in the city. The restaurant takes reservations from anyone — the club does not, and that distinction is the whole business.
If it is full, or if you want the room rather than the villa. Casa Tua trades on intimacy; the counter-proposition in Miami Beach is MILA on Meridian, ten minutes north — a rooftop rather than a garden, a MediterrAsian kitchen rather than an Italian one, and a members lounge above the dining room that works on the same logic Casa Tua established. Different evening, same instinct.
The villa that wrote the rulebook — and still keeps to it.
