Florida Cookery: Every Dish Tells a Story (Photos)

All photos by Laine Doss

Florida Cookery -- Don Draper goes native.

Most people seek restaurants that feature a city's unique cuisine. New Orleans has restaurants known for their gumbo and po'boys, Rome has cafés where you can get a fresh bowl of pasta, Texas has barbecue joints, and Maine has seafood shacks shilling lobster right off the boat. But how many restaurants feature Florida cuisine? And what exactly is Florida cuisine?

Read also: "Kris Wessel: Florida Cookery Is Personal"

Kris Wessel wants to answer that question at his new restaurant, Florida Cookery, at the James Royal Palm Hotel in South Beach. The restaurant is true to its name, featuring local produce and fruits, fresh seafood caught from Florida waters, and many recipes adapted from vintage cookbooks. Don't call this cuisine Floribbean, though. "Of course there are Caribbean influences to the menu, but there's more to it than that. True South Florida cuisine marries the South, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Northeast," Wessel says.

The menu says "handcrafted by Kris Wessel" in small print at the bottom, but it looks as if his grandmother's spirit also guides the chef's hand. The dining room screams Mad Men-era Miami, and several dishes are served on vintage glassware and in colorful Pyrex bowls. Guests are given a recipe card for Wessel's grandmother's ambrosia salad as a keepsake. And every dish tells the story of generations of one Miami family -- and every Miami family.

For instance, the chicken and lemon soup ($9) is inspired by the fact that his grandmother always had a pot of chicken soup on the stove -- even in Miami summers. "My grandmother had nine children to feed, and someone was always getting sick, even in summer. She always had a pot of soup on the stove." Breadfruit chips are a welcome substitution for croutons.

The conch chowder ($14), accompanied by a meaty fritter for dipping, comes directly from his grandmother's 1948 women's club cookbook, Florida Cookery, which is also the source of the restaurant's name, with one modern twist: "I've floated a fresh corn foam on top to give the chowder some balance," Wessel says. The spiciness surprises. "That's from the original recipe. Sure, there are bland Jell-O molds in these old cookbooks, but there's also a surprising amount of depth and flavor."