StarChefs Announces Miami Rising Stars Restaurant Week Featuring Special Menu Items
Estefania Andrade of Trippy Kitchen at Tripping Animals Brewing Co.
StarChefs has announced its 2025 Miami Rising Stars Award winners and to celebrate these incredible talents they will be launching the Miami Rising Stars Restaurant Week. During this two-week promotion that will take place from May 7 to 21, the Rising Star chefs from various restaurants will feature special menu items that are aimed to highlight their award-winning greatness.
The 2025 class of Rising Stars includes 24 food and beverage professionals. These hospitality stars are being recognized not only for their exceptional food and drink, but also for their ability to lead, inspire, and support the local Miami community and the restaurant industry at large.
The Rising Stars Award winners are chosen by the StarChefs editorial team. The process involves in-person tastings and interviews. In each market, they meet with over 100 chefs, pastry chefs, bartenders, sommeliers, restaurateurs, and artisans, ultimately selecting a group of professionals who best represent the future of American hospitality.
Creativity, ambition, presentation, philosophy, and, of course, delicious food and drink are all highly important when it comes to the selection where they are awarded locally, but evaluated on a national level.
Estefania Andrade of Trippy Kitchen at Tripping Animals Brewing Co. will be featuring a churrasco steak sandwich with caramelized onions, cilantro aïoli, corn-ají amarillo cream, chimichurri, potato sticks on a Cantabrian loaf.
Ivan Barros formerly of Amara at Paraiso - These days he's overseeing the kitchen at Magie, a neighborhood wine bar with locations in Little River and Coconut Grove.
Javier Cussato and Carmen Ibarra of Atomica will feature El Tigre made with wahoo, scallops, red onions, rocoto leche de tigre, choclo, corn nuts, burnt oil, and cilantro.
Maria Teresa Gallina and Nicolas Martinez of Recoveco will serve a spiced golden chicken with green mango, smoked gouda, koji-roasted potato, and hoja santa oil.
Juan Camilo Liscano of Palma is being honored for his outstanding chef's tasting menu.
Tam Pham of Tâm Tâm
Tam Pham of Tâm Tâm will feature a Massaman goat curry with egg noodles, garlic oil, watermelon radish, fresh herbs, and lime.
Juan Manuel Umbert of PASTA is showcasing his tagliatelle with American lamb ragú, Parmigiano Reggiano and Pecorino Romano.
Ana De Sa Martins formerly of Stubborn Seed was presented with the Rising Star Pastry Chef award — catch her announcing an exciting new project soon.
Christian Julien and Oscar Lastra of Façade will serve a caramelized onion danish, parmesan, and scallions.
Christian Julien and Oscar Lastra of Façade's amazing pastry skills will be on display
Rensel Cabrera of The Sylvester will spotlight a Homestead Americano made with Campari, vermouth, strawberry Greek yogurt, strawberry-peach cordial, and frozen peach as he's recognized for his bartending skills.
Gabriela Ospina of Boia De is being awarded as an outstanding sommelier and will be featuring a Sangiovese, Azienda Agricola Casale, Tuscany, Italy, 2015.
Matt Whitney of Sunny's Steakhouse is receiving the same honor and will showcase a Pinot Noir, Tyler Winery, 'La Rinconada,' Santa Barbara, California, 2021.
This award recognizes industry professionals whose leadership is boldly advancing the restaurant industry, whether through boundary-pushing cuisine, an innovative dining format, or a revolutionary business idea.
Evan Burgess and Osmel Gonzalez of EntreNos who will be serving a fish schnitzel, tomme foam, pickled ají dulce, black mustard seed-curry oil, and fried curry leaves.
The StarChefs Community award recognizes an industry professional who has deep roots to their local community, dedicates their space and time to charity work and/or community outreach, and acts as a catalyst for getting other members of the culinary community involved in local or national events and initiatives.
Karla Hoyos of Tacotomia and she will be serving oyster mushrooms, refried beans, Mole Xiqueno, and corn tortillas.
This award goes to a restaurateur who is shaping their city's hospitality scene through their concepts.
Josh Hackler, Pili Restrepo, and Sebastián Vargas of Grassfed Culture Hospitality have received this honor and will be serving al pastor tacos using Niman Ranch Iberian duroc pork butt, chiles, lacto-fermented berries, pineapple, onions, cilantro, and heirloom corn tortillas.
This award goes to an industry professional who operates a chef-driven concept that has met with success in the local market and could be successfully expanded, either locally or nationally.
Kavan Burke, Wayne Sharpe, and Harrison Soffer of Jrk!
Kavan Burke, Wayne Sharpe, and Harrison Soffer of Jrk! will be serving a jerk mac and cheese made with jerk chicken thighs, cavatappi, cheddar, mozzarella, pepper jack, and green seasoning.
Victor Rosado of AHU|MAR at Dua Miami will serve seared scallops, miso-yuzu kosho cream, achiote oil, and shiso oil.
In each market, StarChefs partners with local restaurants to help support the community. For every featured dish sold, StarChefs will donate $3 to Rethink Food in Miami head to:
Aitor Garate Berasaluze of Edan Bistro will feature a grilled Scottish salmon with burnt eggplant purée, green gazpacho, and sunchoke chips.
Andrew Gonzalez of Night Owl Cookies Wynwood is baking up a storm of The Hannah Montana: glazed donut-stuffed chocolate chip cookie, TCHO chocolate glaze, and sprinkles.
Additionally, Diego Oka of La Mar by Gastón Acurio is being honored with the mentor award as an individual who is supportive of young cooks in their city and instrumental in aiding their career, both in and out of the kitchen. This Award is voted on by the 2025 class of Miami Rising Stars through an anonymous ballot.
The Miami Rising Stars Restaurant Week will take place from May 7 to 21 at all the above restaurants.
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Clifton had commissioned an early prototype of the rubboard in the 1940s from a metalworker in Port Arthur, Texas, where he illustrated his vision by drawing the design in the dirt, creating one of a handful of instruments native to the United States and forever changing the percussive sound of Creole music. Within a few years, the brothers were performing at impromptu house dances in Louisiana living rooms. They'd begin playing on the porch until a crowd assembled, then go inside, pushing furniture against the walls to create a makeshift dance hall. Eventually, they worked their way through the chitlin circuit, a network of venues for Black performers and audiences. They played Louisiana dance halls where the ceilings hung so low that Cleveland could push his left hand flat to the ceiling to stretch his back out without ever breaking the rhythm of what he was playing with his right. 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He died in 1987, at age 62. This fall, the Smithsonian's preservation-focused Folkways Recordings will release the definitive collection of Chenier's work: a sprawling box set, 67 tracks in all. And in June, to mark the centennial of Chenier's birth, the Louisiana-based Valcour Records released a compilation on which musicians who were inspired by Chenier contributed covers of his songs. These include the blues artist Taj Mahal, the singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, the folk troubadour Steve Earle, and the rock band the Rolling Stones. In 1978, Jagger met Chenier, thanks to a musician and visual artist named Richard Landry. Landry grew up on a pecan farm in Cecilia, Louisiana, not far from Opelousas. In 1969, he moved to New York and met Philip Glass, becoming a founding member of the Philip Glass Ensemble, in which he played saxophone. To pay the bills between performances, the two men also started a plumbing business. Eventually, the ensemble was booking enough gigs that they gave up plumbing. Landry also embarked on a successful visual-art career, photographing contemporaries such as Richard Serra and William S. Burroughs and premiering his work at the Leo Castelli Gallery. He still got back to Louisiana, though, and he'd occasionally sit in with Chenier and his band. (After Landry proved his chops the first time they played together, Chenier affectionately described him as 'that white boy from Cecilia who can play the zydeco.') Landry became a kind of cultural conduit—a link between the avant-garde scene of the North and the Cajun and Creole cultures of the South. From the July 1987 issue: Cajun and Creole bands are conserving native music Landry is an old friend; we met more than a decade ago in New Orleans. Sitting in his apartment in Lafayette recently, he told me the story of the night he introduced Jagger to Chenier. 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The previous year, Rolling Stone had published a feature on the Stones' guitarist Ronnie Wood. In one scene, Wood and Keith Richards convene a 3 a.m. jam session at the New York studios of Atlantic Records. On equipment borrowed from Bruce Springsteen, they play 'Don't You Lie to Me'—first the Chuck Berry version, then 'Clifton Chenier's Zydeco interpretation,' as the article described it. Chenier was in Los Angeles playing what had become an annual show for the Creole community living in the city. The stage was set at the Verbum Dei Jesuit High School gymnasium, by the edge of the basketball court. Jagger was struck by the audience. 'They weren't dressing as other people of their age group,' he told me. 'The fashion was completely different. And of course, the dancing was different than you'd normally see in a big city.' The band was already performing by the time he and Landry arrived. When they walked in, one woman squinted in Jagger's direction, pausing in a moment of possible recognition, before changing her mind and turning away. Chenier was at center stage, thick gold rings lining his fingers as they moved across the black and white keys of his accordion, his name embossed in bold block type on its side. Cleveland stood beside him on the rubboard. Robert St. Julien was set up in the back behind a three-piece drum kit—just a bass drum, a snare, and a single cymbal, cracked from the hole in the center out to the very edge. Jagger took it all in, watching the crowd dance a two-step and thinking, ' Oh God, I'm going to have to dance. How am I going to do this dance that they're all doing? ' he recalled. 'But I managed somehow to fake it.' At intermission, a cluster of fans, speaking in excited bursts of Creole French, started moving toward the stage, holding out papers to be autographed. Landry and Jagger were standing nearby. Jagger braced himself, assuming that some of the fans might descend on him. But the crowd moved quickly past them, pressing toward Clifton and Cleveland Chenier. Before the night was over, Jagger himself had the chance to meet Clifton, but only said a quick hello. 'I just didn't want to hassle him or anything,' he told me. 'And I was just enjoying myself being one of the audience.' The next time Mick Jagger and Richard Landry crossed paths was May 3, 2024: the day after the Rolling Stones performed at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. During their set, the Stones had asked the accordion player Dwayne Dopsie, a son of another zydeco artist, Rockin' Dopsie, to accompany the band on 'Let It Bleed.' A meal was set up at Antoine's, in the French Quarter, by a mutual friend, the musician and producer C. C. Adcock. Adcock had been working on plans for the Clifton Chenier centennial record for months and was well aware of Jagger's affection for zydeco. He waited until the meal was over, when everyone was saying their goodbyes, to mention the project to Jagger. 'And without hesitation,' Landry recalled, 'Mick said, 'I want to sing something.' ' As the final addition to the album lineup, the Stones were the last to choose which of Chenier's songs to record. Looking at the track listing, Jagger noticed that 'Zydeco Sont Pas Salé' hadn't been taken. 'Isn't that, like, the one?' Adcock recalls him saying. 'The one the whole genre is named after? If the Stones are gonna do one, shouldn't we do the one ?' The word zydeco is widely believed to have originated in the French phrase les haricots sont pas salés, which translates to 'The snap beans aren't salty.' Zydeco, according to this theory, is a Creole French pronunciation of les haricots. (The lyrical fragment likely comes from juré, the call-and-response music of Louisiana that predates zydeco; it shows up as early as 1934, on a recording of the singer Wilbur Shaw made in New Iberia, Louisiana.) Many interpretations of the phrase have been offered over the years. The most straightforward is that it's a metaphorical way of saying 'Times are tough.' When money ran short, people couldn't afford the salt meat that was traditionally cooked with snap beans to season them. The Stones' version of 'Zydeco Sont Pas Salé' opens with St. Julien, Chenier's longtime drummer, playing a backbeat with brushes. He's 77 now, no longer the young man Jagger saw in Watts in 1978. 'I quit playing music about 10 years ago, to tell the truth,' he said when we spoke this spring, but you wouldn't know it by how he sounds on the track. Keith Richards's guitar part, guttural and revving, meets St. Julien in the intro and builds steadily. The melody is introduced by the accordionist Steve Riley, of the Mamou Playboys, who told me he'd tried to 'play it like Clifton—you know, free-form, just from feel.' It's strange that it doesn't feel stranger when Jagger breaks into his vocal, sung in Creole French. His imitation of Chenier is at once spot-on yet unmistakably Jagger. From the May 1971 issue: Mick Jagger shoots birds I asked him how he'd honed his French pronunciation. 'I've actually tried to write songs in Cajun French before,' he said. 'But I've never really gotten anywhere.' To get 'Zydeco Sont Pas Salé' right, he became a student of the song. 'You just listen to what's been done before you,' he told me. 'See how they pronounce it, you know? I mean, yeah, of course it's different. And West Indian English is different from what they speak in London. I tried to do a job and I tried to do it in the way it was traditionally done—it would sound a bit silly in perfect French.' Zydeco united musical traditions from around the globe to become a defining sound for one of the most distinct cultures in America. Chenier, the accordionist in the velvet crown, then introduced zydeco to the world, influencing artists across genres. When I asked Jagger why, at age 81, he had decided to make this recording, he said, 'I think the music deserves to be known and the music deserves to be heard.' If the song helps new listeners discover Chenier—to have something like the experience Jagger had when he first dropped the needle on Bon Ton Roulet! —that would be a welcome result. But Jagger stressed that this wasn't the primary reason he'd covered 'Zydeco Sont Pas Salé.' Singing to St. Julien's beat, Jagger the rock star once again becomes Jagger the Clifton Chenier fan. 'My main thing is just that I personally like it. You know what I mean? That's my attraction,' he said. 'I think that I just did this for the love of it, really.'
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