Tâm Tâm – Saigon's drinking food, behind Miami's courthouse

Tâm Tâm sits on the edge of Downtown Miami, in the shadow of the Miami-Dade County courthouse, serving what its owners call Vietnamese drinking food. Chef Tam Pham, who grew up in Saigon before moving to Seattle and then Miami, runs the kitchen with his husband Harrison Ramhofer, a sommelier who spent two years teaching in Vietnam. What began in 2019 as a sold-out underground supper club called Phamily Kitchen, cooked out of their own home, has become one of the city's most talked-about tables: a small, unglamorous room with no DJ booth and no bouncer, where wings glossed in fish-sauce caramel and tamarind-glazed ribs are built to be eaten with the hands and washed down with wine. It holds one MICHELIN Bib Gourmand, a distinction awarded in 2024 and renewed since for good quality, good value cooking, and in 2024 Pham himself received the Guide's Young Chef Award.

01The room and the setting

Tâm Tâm occupies 99 NW 1st Street, on the Government Center side of Downtown Miami, close enough to the county courthouse that lawyers and clerks pass the door on their lunch break. The MICHELIN Guide notes that the restaurant sits on the edge of downtown by the county courthouse, you won't find a glamorous room, a DJ booth, or anybody in stilettos or designer sneakers.

The space once housed Diana's Cafe, a Cuban diner, before Pham and Ramhofer took it over. Inside, the mood is deliberately unbuttoned rather than polished: loud, warm, a little chaotic, with a bar pouring wine and cocktails and, tucked away, a karaoke machine in the bathroom that regulars discover rather than get told about.

02The chef

Tam Pham was born in Saigon, moved to Seattle in 2008 and to Miami three years later. He met Ramhofer in 2017 while both were studying at Florida International University's hospitality school, and the two bonded over a shared frustration with Miami's Vietnamese food scene. Pham had no formal culinary training; his first professional kitchen job was at Over Under in Miami under chef James McNeal, whose Caribbean-leaning, Florida-ingredient cooking shaped how Pham now runs his own stoves.

Insider tip

Closed Mondays; small room, so book ahead through Resy.

Phamily Kitchen, the 24-seat supper club the couple started at home in 2019, sold out repeatedly before evolving into pop-ups at 1-800 Lucky in Wynwood, then at Over Under and at Low Key in Little River, where a four-month residency in early 2023 let Pham settle the menu ahead of opening the permanent restaurant in May 2023. In 2024 he was named the MICHELIN Guide Florida Young Chef Award winner.

03The cooking

The menu runs on the idea of quán nhậu, Vietnamese for a drinking den, a call to go out, eat and feast together. Pham describes drinking food as protein- and vegetable-led, built around single ingredients rather than rice or noodles that might slow the drinking down, which gives him room to draw on regions far beyond the postwar Vietnamese cooking most familiar in the United States.

He moves deliberately between Vietnam's regions on the plate: the sweeter, coconut-driven cooking of his native Saigon in the south, the spicier, sourer flavours of the central coast, and the dill-heavy, more delicate dishes of the north, which surface in a grilled mushroom dish modelled on a Hanoi grilled-fish plate. A steamed whole fish on the menu is, in his words, an ode to his mother's Cantonese-influenced cooking from Saigon's Chinatown district.

04What to order

The dish most associated with Pham is the scallop and pomelo crudo, hand-dived scallops dressed in coconut nuoc cham, a dish he reworked from an earlier fish crudo and now switches between Vietnamese and Florida pomelo depending on season. Alongside it come wings he has spent seven years refining, finished in fish-sauce caramel with crispy garlic, cilantro and lime.

Other staples include the lamb lettuce-wrap situation, thick-cut lamb belly served sizzling with banh hoi noodles, betel leaf and a fermented bean curd sauce; tamarind-glazed pork ribs; grilled escarole with shrimp crumbs; goat curry finished with coconut and sate oil; steak tartare with edible flowers and fire-ant salt; and a lotus root salad that Pham calls his favourite Vietnamese dish of all, served exactly as he remembers it from Sunday dinners in Saigon.

05Wine and drinks

Ramhofer, the restaurant's sommelier, built a list that leans toward low-intervention, naturally fermented bottles, favouring dry, zippy whites over the sweet Rieslings many assume pair best with Vietnamese spice. Reds, including a Bandol from the south of France, are served chilled to suit Miami's heat, and the bar also pours Korean beer and soju shots alongside a house-made vermouth that Pham steeps with pandan leaf, chrysanthemum tea and coconut oil.

06When to go and booking

Tâm Tâm serves dinner Tuesday to Thursday from 5:30pm to 10:30pm, Friday and Saturday until 11pm, and Sunday until 10pm; it is closed Mondays, as read on the restaurant's own site in November 2025. Reservations are handled through Resy and are advisable, since word of the Bib Gourmand and Pham's Young Chef Award has kept the small room busy since 2024.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.