Los Fuegos by Francis Mallmann – asado theatre on Collins Avenue

On the courtyard of the Faena Hotel on Collins Avenue, Los Fuegos by Francis Mallmann has turned a corner of Miami Beach into an outpost of Patagonia since it opened in 2016. It is Francis Mallmann's only restaurant in North America, a 188-seat room built around a fire kitchen designed specifically for him, where asado stops being a backyard ritual and becomes the entire point of dinner. The Argentine grill master who learned to cook over flame as a child on the cliffs above Lago Moreno now presides, through his kitchen team, over a menu of hanging rib-eye, wood-oven empanadas and vegetables buried in embers. It is Selected in the MICHELIN Guide, the distinction given to restaurants the inspectors judge worth a detour even without a star. What matters here is technique: every dish passes through one of several fire stations before it reaches the leopard-print booths and gold-flecked dining room that Faena built around it.

01The room and the setting

Los Fuegos sits inside the Faena Hotel Miami Beach, which Alan Faena and Len Blavatnik opened on the site of the former Saxony Hotel in December 2015, with Baz Luhrmann and his Oscar-winning costume-designer wife Catherine Martin brought in as creative consultants. The restaurant occupies the hotel's courtyard, where its fire kitchen was conceived as the first of its kind built into an urban restaurant rather than a remote Patagonian estancia.

Reviewers have described the dining room as a crimson-and-leopard-print set piece, with steaks, whole chickens and blistering cast-iron pans whipping around the tables. Earlier accounts of the room note rich red-and-gold tapestries and glowing pineapple-shaped lanterns, with an airy veranda that opens onto the pool for guests who prefer to eat under the Miami sky.

02The chef

Francis Mallmann opened his first restaurant in Bariloche at the age of nineteen, long before training under French chefs Alain Senderens, Roger Vergé and Raymond Oliver, an apprenticeship that eventually sent him back to Patagonia and the open-fire techniques of his childhood. He is a James Beard Award-winning chef and the subject of a Netflix Chef's Table episode, credentials that travelled with him when Los Fuegos became his first restaurant in the United States.

Insider tip

Elegant chic dress code; dinner 6:30–10:30/11pm; Sunday Parrillada noon–4pm; valet parking.

Day-to-day, the fire is run by chef de cuisine Sebastián Benítez, a Buenos Aires native who worked at Faena's original Buenos Aires hotel almost from its inception before taking on the Miami Beach kitchen as his own project. Benítez has described the Los Fuegos kitchen's defining rule simply: no gas, every dish cooked over wood-fired flames.

03The cooking

The fire kitchen that greets guests on arrival was custom-designed by Mallmann to combine his various cooking methods in a single rig: a large wood oven nicknamed the "piano", a grand-scale grill built in Texas, planchas, hooks for hanging whole fish and meat, and a station dedicated purely to cooking in ashes.

That ash station drives rescoldo, the technique of burying ingredients such as beets directly in glowing embers until they soften and char. On Sundays the kitchen moves to a six-foot iron dome, where cuts like bife de lomo, vacío and bife de chorizo are hung on hooks to slow-roast over the coals alongside whole pineapples and cabbages dangling from wires in the same heat.

04What to order

The dinner menu centres on Mallmann's Beef Tenderloin 'Milanesa', served with an endive and radicchio salad and Dijon mustard, alongside a Prime Ribeye Steak and a Prime Angus Skirt Steak, both plated with domino potatoes, criolla sauce and chimichurri; a wood-fire-grilled cauliflower with crispy rice and almond-caper vinaigrette covers the vegetable-forward end of the table.

Wood-oven empanadas are the standard way to start, and the beets al rescoldo carpaccio, built on the embers technique and finished with pistachio yogurt, remains one of the dishes regulars ask for by name. On Sundays the kitchen shifts to a parrillada format, with skirt steak, rib-eye, lamb, chorizo and domino potatoes carried to the table family-style between noon and 4pm.

05Wine and drinks

The wine list was shaped with Marcelo Pelleriti, the first Argentine winemaker to receive a perfect 100-point score from Robert Parker, and runs to roughly 400 labels drawn largely from Argentina's best vineyards – a list built to match the smoke and char of the kitchen rather than compete with it.

06When to go and booking

Los Fuegos serves breakfast from 7 to 11am, lunch from noon to 4pm, and dinner from 6:30 to 10:30pm Sunday through Thursday and until 11pm on Fridays and Saturdays. The dress code is described as elegant chic, ruling out shorts, open-toe sandals and beachwear, and valet parking is available for drivers arriving directly at the hotel. Tables can be booked by phone on +1 786-655-5600.

07The neighbourhood

The restaurant sits inside the Faena District, an eight-block stretch of oceanfront Miami Beach running between 32nd and 36th streets, bounded by the Atlantic and Indian Creek, conceived by Alan Faena as an arts and culture quarter around his hotel. Guests crossing the hotel's courtyard pass Damien Hirst's gilded, ten-foot woolly mammoth skeleton on the terrace, one of several major artworks worked into the property rather than kept behind gallery glass, before they reach the fire kitchen itself.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.