Spike Mendelsohn's Sunny's Gets One Star; Alex Guarnaschelli's Driftwood Room Fails to Impress

While celebrity chefs are seemingly a dime a dozen in Miami nowadays, they certainly aren’t having the best start to 2016. First up is Top Chef alum Spike Mendelsohn’s newest endeavor, Sunny’s, where the Miami Herald critic Victoria Pesce Elliott begins the review with a quote from Woody Allen about bad dining — a strong precursor to the rest of the review.

Elliott describes the Sunny's menu as being the menu filled with "more fried things than I would voluntarily eat sober," the execution of the dishes "terrible," and the restaurant smelling "of cleaning chemicals and mildew reminiscent of hospitals I remember in Dubrovnik one hot summer." The only dish Elliott remotely liked was the restaurant’s burger, which she describes as "worth coming back for." Overall? One star for the restaurant that she says made her "feel like a punchline in a joke that isn’t particularly funny."

At the Miami New Times, it reviewed Alex Guarnaschelli’s latest restaurant, Driftwood Room. Reviewer Valeria Nekhim Lease seemed to be a fan of the Iron Chef winner as a person, but her cuisine, not so much. Saying the grilled artichokes left "plenty to be desired," the mushrooms and brussel sprouts as overly acidic, and the cauliflower an "unsightly mess," noting that "in photos, at least, the presentation is far better than the one at Driftwood Room." The one of the few things Lease did seem to like however is the restaurant seemed to lack the least amount of "celebrity vibe" on the beach.