Palma – Little Havana's candlelit laboratory of flavour

Palma sits in a narrow storefront on Northwest 8th Avenue in Little Havana, a room stripped down to bare concrete and lit mostly by candles that drip onto the counter where the cooking happens in full view. Chef Juan Camilo Liscano and a crew of fewer than five cook, plate and clear the room themselves, turning out a tasting menu that changes with real frequency rather than seasonal pretence. It holds a Selected listing in the MICHELIN Guide, and in 2025 Liscano himself was named the Guide's Florida Young Chef Award winner, recognition for a kitchen built on ambition and whatever is freshest that week. Palma is, by design, small and unpolished-looking against a grand culinary ambition – a place that treats an eight-course dinner as something worth constantly rewriting, in a building that, from the sidewalk, could pass for nothing at all.

01The room and the setting

Little Havana is not where Miami's fine dining usually gathers, and Palma makes no attempt to disguise that. The restaurant opened in January 2024 inside a strip mall on NW 8th Avenue, just south of the Miami River, with a bodega next door where men pass the evening on lawn chairs. Inside, the room is almost entirely concrete, grey and spare, built around an open kitchen where a line of barstools faces the chef and his sous directly.

That counter is the best seat in the house: diners watch ingredients prepped inches away, with the chefs narrating dishes as they serve them and still finding time to run plates to the handful of tables behind. The effect is intimate rather than theatrical, the room's austerity thrown into relief by candlelight and little else.

02The chef

Juan Camilo Liscano was born in Miami to Colombian parents and grew up moving constantly, a consequence of his father's work in the airline industry, which gave him an early appetite for travel that would later shape how he cooks. His path into kitchens ran through Los Angeles and Miami before widening into a genuinely international education: stints at Quintonil in Mexico City, Maison by Sota Atsumi in Paris, Momofuku Ko in New York and Ikoyi in London all sit on his résumé.

Insider tip

Open Wednesday–Saturday, 6–10pm; tasting menu and à la carte both served.

He returned to Miami determined to fold that experience back into the city that raised him, opening Palma as founder and chef. In 2025 the MICHELIN Guide named him Florida's Young Chef of the Year, citing cooking built on ambition and care, drawn from whatever is freshest at the moment it is served.

03The cooking

Liscano runs his kitchen on roughly a six-week horizon, planning around the exact point at which an ingredient hits its peak rather than around a fixed seasonal calendar, which is why the tasting menu rarely sits still for long. A recent nine-course line-up moved from a Local Line Caught Crudo dressed with pluot leche de tigre and black lime through a Tartelette of Confit Squid Tentacle, Squid and Kohlrabi Noodles finished with a hazelnut "tantanmen", and grilled Florida medai with potato skin XO and seven-peppercorn sauce.

The one constant is the bread course: a sweet plantain brioche served with coconut-caramel butter and dried plantain leaf, a dish the chef has described as a direct, personal link between his Miami childhood and the techniques he picked up abroad. About two years after opening, Palma added an à la carte menu alongside the tasting format, partly so guests could drop in more casually without committing to the full sitting.

04What to order

On the current à la carte list, the Everglades Oyster arrives with a ginger and white soy mignonette, and the Crispy Potato Rosti comes under a parmesan cheese sauce with the option of ten grams of kaluga hybrid caviar on top. The 12oz Delmonico Ribeye is finished with a pickled mushroom chimichurri, while the 32oz Vaca Vieja Txuleton is sourced specifically from Happy Valley Farms in Pennsylvania.

A newer addition, the 45-Day Dry-Aged Striploin, is brushed with brown butter, koji powder, dried porcini and burnt garlic as it grills over charcoal, then finished with smoked salt; parts of the cut are served separately as small, hand-held nuggets the kitchen likens to beef wings. To finish, there are Triple Chocolate Cookies with barley miso and malted milk, and a Mamey Ice Cream with matcha milk jam and butterscotch.

05The neighbourhood

Little Havana rewards wandering before or after dinner: Palma's own address sits a short walk from the ventanitas and record shops that give the district its unhurried, lived-in character, the same streets the restaurant's own writing credits for "rekindling love for the Magic City." It is a deliberately unglamorous setting for a restaurant with this much ambition, and that contrast is part of the point.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.