Patricia Green Cellars Blog

Notes on my time in Florida!

Miami, Tampa/St. Petersburg

I had never been to Florida before I went on this trip. We flew into Miami, stayed for a couple of nights then I flew to Tampa, stayed one night, drove to Orlando and flew back to Miami where we stayed two more nights.

We stayed at the fairly recently renovated Fontainebleau Hotel. This used to be the hotel favored by the Rat Pack back in the day. It is now one super large hotel/resort on the north end of Miami Beach. It is quite the place in many, many ways.

The hotel is giant. I have no idea how many rooms there are but it is a lot. We were clearly in the Expedia rooms area (the people next to us had also used Expedia or something like it) since, while our room was nice right outside was the power plant or cooling plant for the whole resort and it made a lot of noise when the balcony door was open. We don’t spend a ton of time in the room so we didn’t care too, too much although it was loud and you could hear it at night with the door shut. I would be if we had gone down and bitched a little they would have moved us just to get us to shut up. So that’s kind of on us. Not every room in every hotel can be the best room and if you don’t like what you have you should say something. We didn’t.

The one thing I would complain about would be the service. It’s not bad service and actually everyone is pretty friendly, more so than I expected given that we aren’t some band of superstars. However, people don’t really have the answers to fairly routine questions and/or they don’t necessarily offer up information that would make the most sense in terms of helping you out. For instance, we pulled in at around midnight. That would be fine except that there are 3 driveways for the complex. The first one is pretty much for the nightclub Liv (there are 1 or 2 other nightclubs on the property as well but Liv is definitely a scene) and is sort of a hike from where most of the hotel rooms are. We told the valet we were checking in and it would have made our life and his life (as it was super busy) a lot easier to tell us to head back out and go to the next driveway which would have put us at the main check-in desk (there are at least 3 places you can check in). We had to hike our crap over to the main desk ourselves until we ran into a bellhop. Also, the woman at the desk told us all of the 7 restaurants would be serving until 1:00 AM since it was Saturday. She was wrong. As was the guy at the first restaurant we went to who said that while they had closed the kitchen the sushi restaurant was still open. I think people were really trying to be helpful but they just didn’t know the right answers to some of the, admittedly, more detailed questions.

Miami is not cheap and Fontainebleau is super not cheap. While figuring out what to do at the sushi restaurant/nightclub we ordered up 3 cocktails. $62 with tip and tax included. Turned out that room service and the mini-bar were the way to go (honestly). 24 hour/day room service was good, quick and fairly inexpensive ($12 pizza, $14 quesidilla both of which were quite tasty). The mini-bar at least by the nightclub’s standard was a bargain and actually had splits of Billecart Brut Champagne for $40 and Row Eleven Pinot Noir for $36 which aren’t terrible prices.

The pool area is quite the scene. Well, more accurately, the 8 pools. Sitting by the pool costs bucks. Maybe the lounge chairs are free on a first-come, first-serve basis but the couches, beds and cabanas definitely require scratch to get on. There are plenty of lounge chairs a bit away from the pool in the sun that are free. I actually liked them better as it reduced the number of kids in the general vicinity greatly. The drinks are good and while the service is friendly it is pretty spotty. There is an all-adult area (topless) where at the minimum there is a charge for every spot to sit in and (maybe) a drink minimum but I could be wrong about that. Without even including the all-adult area (which I did not actually see) this, on the weekend, was one of the t&a capitals of the world. There are many, many attractive people on both sides of the coin there. Mirrored shades recommended.

A much better option though is the beach just across the boardwalk. It is one of nicest parts of the beach in the area, proportionally does not have that many people on it and has much better service that the pool area. You do have to pay for the lounge chair but the attentive service and less crowded nature of it more than makes up for it if you are okay with the ocean as opposed to the pool.

All in all the Fontainebleau is an interesting hotel. It’s not a 5 star hotel in the sense that I and probably a lot of people think about 5 star hotels. It is simply way too large to ever provide the level of service that hotels at that level offer. That being said it is a really nice hotel with tons of amenities, lots of nightlife actions, a wide variety of restaurant choices and a pretty sweet section of Miami Beach. If you end of paying the full bore rate you better have a room in a nicer part of the hotel. (As an aside I would add that in the part of the hotel we were in security from one’s balcony could be a real issue. The balconies are adjacent and by that I mean the only thing separating adjoining room’s balconies are the small walls that make up the balconies themselves. One could easily go from balcony to balcony). If you are looking for something more mellow in a hotel there are other hotels for sure.

In Miami we ate at Sardinia which is a locals Italian joint down in South Beach which was quite nice, Meat Market which is a truly popular steak house-y sort of operation not incredibly far from Sardinia. The food was good and the service was excellent, the wine list was a bit of a jumble other than Bordeaux however. I had lunch at Ortanique in Coral Gables which was sublime Caribbean food coupled with a fantastic wine list and a really good wine by the glass program. We had later night tapas at Senora Martinez in the Design District. Extremely well prepared tapas, excellent drinks, good service and a very nice atmosphere both inside and outside. Creek 28 in the Indian Creek Hotel served as a wonderful counterpoint to where we were staying. The hotel is a wonderful old-Miami place, the restaurant has a wonderful courtyard setting, the bar is super cozy and the food was fresh, uncomplicated and delicious. The wine list is also smart and filled with really good picks. The consensus “Best Place We Dined” however was The River Oyster House in Downtown. The oysters, of course, are wonderful and diverse but the full range of food was excellent, the wine list quite pleasing and smart (hey, they carry Patricia Green) and the service is dynamite. While I did not eat at this last place I really, really wanted to and that is Michael Mina’s Bourbon Steak House in Aventura. The setting is gorgeous, really gorgeous that is. No doubt the food is top caliber (it’s Michael Mina) and the wine list is excellent. They also are doing a bar burger thing that looks fantastic. I did a retrospective tasting of some Patricia Green Cellars stuff dating back to 2001 at Wolfe’s Wine Shop in Coral Gables (there is one now in Miami as well). A truly terrific wine shop with great selections on a wide variety of wines. Super knowledgeable staff to boot.

In Tampa/St. Pete I bopped around to a few places of note that you should check out if in the area. Going from the Fontainebleau to Tampa is a little funny. Tampa has a reputation for, well, being old and certainly that age bracket is well represented but I saw a lot of pretty cool and laid back stuff there that I thought was pretty flipping nice. Started at Mazzaro Coffee and Italian Market. Outrageously great place for food, sandwiches, coffee, wine and just the smell of the place. I had a huge grinder for $5 and the coffee was superb. Terrific wine selection, mostly Italian, but fairly comprehensive. Stopped in Clearwater at The Island Way which just oozes confidence with fresh seafood and has a kick ass wine program. Wound down the day at Mise En Place in Tampa which is a highly welcoming establishment with great aesthetics, a relaxed, confident vibe, a very nice wine program and, from what I experienced (some fish that is a cousin of piranha done ribs style-excellent), terrific food. And I finished up at the legendary Bern’s Steakhouse. The food is wonderful, the atmosphere is all at once so old school it blows your mind, over-the-top, funky/funny and the wine list is, well, of course I would have to kill you if I told you what we had. That’s the way with Bern’s.

All in all, the trip to Florida was very interesting. I had never been to Florida before so that was a nice life experience. The weather was warm while back in Oregon it was bitterly cold so it was very nice to miss that in this long winter we are experiencing. People were, in general, quite friendly in all the places we went. Service at nearly all places was well above average and Portland could learn quite a bit (generally speaking) from the level of service provided at the restaurants I encountered. I was expecting less of a food and wine culture than I found and that was surprising in a very good way. I am looking forward to making this as annual a trip as is possible.

Comments? If anyone has questions or would like further information about the tasting or the notes I am always happy to answer them. I can be contacted at the winery or by my personal e-mail which is pgcwinery@netzero.com.