Double Luck – Shorecrest's Cantonese reinvention, one bridge from the bay

At the foot of the 79th Street Causeway bridge, where Miami's Upper Eastside tips toward Biscayne Bay, Double Luck occupies a neighbourhood fixture once known as New Schnitzel House, in a stretch of the city that is reinventing itself. It began as a weekly pop-up tucked inside Tâm Tâm, the downtown Vietnamese restaurant that itself carries a MICHELIN Bib Gourmand, before chef Adrian Ochoa and Tâm Tâm's founders, the husband-and-husband team of Tam Pham and sommelier Harrison Ramhofer, turned it into a permanent address of its own inside the former New Schnitzel House space. The cooking reads as Chinese-American classics run through a sharper, more personal lens, built around dishes such as crab leg rangoon and Hennessy orange chicken alongside less familiar plates like cloud ear mushrooms. It holds a Bib Gourmand, the MICHELIN Guide's mark for good quality, good value cooking, in the 2026 edition.

01The room and the setting

Double Luck sits across NE 79th Street from the Shoe Gallery sneaker shop, its bright orange-and-black signage making the corner impossible to miss despite the building's unglamorous former life as a schnitzel house. Inside, the restaurant kept the old floor plan but changed everything else, hanging red lanterns and new artwork over a room built for noise, steam and sharing. It is a dining room designed to feel like the Chinese-American restaurants its creators grew up in, rather than a polished reinvention of one.

02The chef

Adrian Ochoa calls himself a Miami boy, raised in Kendall to a Cuban father and a Guatemalan mother. His route into Chinese cooking began at seventeen, over a meal of Sichuan food at Empire Szechuan near Oleta River State Park in North Miami Beach, an evening he has described as the moment dining first struck him as a serious art form. He worked his way up from a bus boy's job at Eating House to sous chef at Ghee, kitchens that mixed Nikkei and regional Indian technique, before helping open Low Key, where he first met Tam Pham during Tâm Tâm's early pop-up nights. That friendship led him into the Tâm Tâm kitchen as sous chef, and eventually into co-creating Double Luck's menu and direction.

Insider tip

Open Wednesday–Sunday from 5.30pm; BYOB allowed with corkage.

03The cooking

The project's roots trace back further than Shorecrest. Ochoa had originally been asked by a friend who'd bought a fast-food Chinese-American restaurant on Miami Beach to rework its menu with more traditional Chinese and Taiwanese dishes, only to find the restaurant's longtime customers resistant to the change. Double Luck became the place to strike that balance properly: a menu that keeps the familiar comfort-food architecture of Cantonese-American cooking, but lets a handful of plates wander into territory most Miami diners wouldn't otherwise order. Portions throughout are generous and built for the table rather than the individual plate.

04What to order

The restaurant's own description points to its signature versions of familiar dishes: crab leg rangoon made with a whole crab leg rather than filler, and Hennessy orange chicken, a boozier, more theatrical take on a takeout standard. Beyond the classics, cloud ear mushrooms and double cooked pork belly are the dishes Double Luck singles out for diners willing to stray from the usual order. During Miami Spice, the kitchen has built a three-course menu around char siu ribs, walnut shrimp, soy-braised short rib and tea-smoked duck buns, offered alongside the Hennessy orange chicken.

05Wine and drinks

The early drinks list was built around a beer and wine selection chosen by Harrison Ramhofer, with plans from the outset to widen into Chinese wines and sake as the restaurant found its feet, and eventually full spirits and cocktails built around Chinese ingredients. The bar programme has drawn on outside expertise too, with Brian Griffiths of Over Under lending his cocktail know-how to the wider Double Luck team, alongside pastry chef and front-of-house manager Callie Pumo. Diners can also bring their own bottle for a corkage fee of roughly twenty-five dollars.

06The neighbourhood

Double Luck sits in Shorecrest, at the Miami-side foot of the 79th Street Causeway that carries traffic out toward North Bay Village, in a corner of the Upper Eastside still very much in the middle of reinventing itself. It is a short walk from the bay and a short drive from the Vietnamese restaurant that started the whole project, making a night that pairs both Tâm Tâm and Double Luck an easy, logical crawl across two of Miami's Bib Gourmand addresses.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.