Zitz Sum – dumplings and Colombian memory behind an office-tower facade

On the ground floor of an office tower on Alhambra Circle, inside what regulars call the FIFA building, sits one of Coral Gables' most inventive kitchens. Zitz Sum seats just thirty, built around seasonality, and run by chef Pablo Zitzmann, a Colombian cook whose menu reads as an autobiography written in Japanese ingredients and technique, folded through his Latin American heritage. It holds a MICHELIN Bib Gourmand, a distinction it has carried every year since 2022, marking it out as serious cooking at a moderate price rather than a formal, high-ceremony dining room. The restaurant was also named a James Beard Foundation semifinalist for Best New Restaurant and placed on the New York Times' list of America's 50 Best Restaurants, both in 2022. What began as a pandemic side project delivering dumplings by hand has become one of the more closely watched addresses in Miami's dining map, precisely because it refuses to sit still.

01The room and the setting

Open the door and the lobby of an office building gives way to something unexpected. The lighting is dim, a string of red Chinese lanterns frames the bar at the back, the side walls are hung with dark, underlit curtains, and a mural of deep red abstractions and a Chinese crane covers the final wall, the whole effect closer to a room found off a side street in Shanghai or Tokyo than to the glass tower outside it.

The restaurant occupies the ground floor at 396 Alhambra Circle, Suite 155 — a building known locally as the FIFA building — with both indoor seating and a courtyard, across a space of roughly 2,000 square feet when it first converted from pop-up to permanent address. With only thirty seats, the room stays intimate whichever side of the curtain you sit on.

02The chef

Pablo Zitzmann grew up in Colombia and built his culinary education in stints in Hong Kong, Hawaii and Japan, before cooking in the Miami kitchens of Michelle Bernstein and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. He later ran No Name Chinese in South Miami, a restaurant that closed in 2019 after two years.

Insider tip

Dinner only, Tuesday–Saturday; 30 seats; tasting menu changes weekly.

Zitz Sum itself began as an Instagram dumpling business that Zitzmann and his wife, Natalia Restrepo, launched in 2020, offering hand-rolled dumplings for pickup during lockdown. Every day the couple carried trays of dumplings down from the seventh floor of their apartment to a waiting van, a routine that ran from May 2020 until April 2021, while they built the brick-and-mortar restaurant at night. Restrepo remains the pastry chef and Zitzmann's partner in the business, and Guido Parodi, promoted to chef de cuisine, has helped shape dishes such as the kitchen's spicy crab noodle.

03The cooking

The kitchen offers an à la carte menu that changes with the seasons alongside a seven-course tasting menu that changes weekly — opening with playful snacks and bites before moving into an array of the kitchen's signature and current dishes, part of it served family style for sharing. It is a personal cuisine rather than a strictly regional one: Japanese technique and ingredient sensibility run through everything, but the accents are Zitzmann's own — Colombian roots, Italian touches, whatever ingredient currently holds his attention.

The kitchen is particular about where things come from, working with suppliers including Niman Ranch, Natoora, Trigger Seafood and Tiny Farms, and cooking with seed-free oil supplied by Zero Acre Farms.

04What to order

The menu rotates, but a recent snapshot of the kitchen's own listings gives a sense of its range: Bing, a Chinese-style sourdough pancake with miso and honey butter; grilled peaches with cucumber, stracciatella, chilli jam and a nut furikake; a wagyu beef tartare dressed with gochujang, Japanese egg salad, tobiko, nori and cabbage; bao filled with braised wagyu oxtail sofrito, house labneh and lao gan ma shawarma spices; and potstickers finished with green apple amazu and kohlrabi sauerkraut.

OpenTable's own editors have singled out a potato dumpling packed with Florida pink shrimp and house-cured salmon roe as one of the small plates that explains the Bib Gourmand recognition.

05When to go and booking

Zitz Sum serves dinner Tuesday to Thursday from 6pm to 9.30pm and Friday and Saturday from 6pm to 10pm; it is closed Sunday and Monday. With only thirty seats split between the dining room and a courtyard, and a tasting menu that changes every week, booking ahead through the restaurant is the sensible approach, particularly for the tasting menu, which draws repeat visitors keen to see where the kitchen has moved on to next.

06The neighbourhood

Coral Gables runs on Mediterranean Revival architecture and a walkable grid, a more composed counterpoint to Miami proper's higher-flash energy, and pan-Asian cooking has historically been thin on the ground here. Zitz Sum sits in that gap on Alhambra Circle, within reach of the neighbourhood's other notable tables, from Shingo, the area's MICHELIN-starred address, to Thomas Keller's Bouchon Bistro inside the 1924 La Palma building — a short walk that covers a surprising amount of culinary ground for one Coral Gables street.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.