verde restaurant at pamm
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verde at PAMM is only open for dinner on Thursday nights. Luckily, the museum is also open late on Thursdays, so you can visit the museum after-hours and have some post Ai Wei Wei cocktails while you can.
They're open every day for lunch. So, if you work Downtown you can hop on the MetroMover and hop off at the Museum Park stop and it will drop you right in front of the museum for a squash blossom pizza lunch.
As far as I'm concerned, and if you've been following my near-obsessive coverage of the new museum, I think it's the standard for what Miami design should look like. The Herzog and de Meuron building is inspired by Stiltsville and feels like a very honest, creative take on the Miami aesthetic. The flooring right outside the restaurant that wraps around the museum is reminiscent of a marina flooring, made of dark concrete planks.The plants are like large hanging seaweed installations.
The restaurant had linen director's chairs when we peeked inside during the museum's Basel opening. Today, they were replaced with a more industrial Carlisle chair. The restaurant isn't huge, so we made a reservation, but it turned out that we didn't need it. Turns out the word on the squash blossom pizza hasn't spread yet.
More about the food, you may have noticed that I've mentioned that squash blossom pizza a few times? It was delicious. A goat cheese and squash blossom pizza where the blossoms weren't fried as they usually are but seemingly delicately roasted and placed atop a pizza with a perfectly crunchy crust. I miss squash blossoms. I was just recently complaining that I can't find them on enough Miami menus, so I was very pleased to find this pizza and for it to be as tasty as it was.
We also had the french fries with a curry mustard sauce. Good fries are good fries. They were thin and crispy and the sauce was something akin to the Chicken Kitchen curry sauce (sorry for my low-brow reference but ya'll know what I'm talkin' bout) but with a much, much heavier curry ratio and no mayonnaise. It was pungent and delicious for a curry lover like myself.
Our waitress talked us into the mushrooms and I was glad she did. When a huge bowl of mixed variety mushrooms and what I think was seaweed on top shows up at any table I'm at, well, I'm a happy gal. They came in all shapes and sizes and, if you like mushrooms, you'll like them.
The cocktails can use some work. My spicy yuzu gin drink wasn't quite spicy enough and the mojito (pink drink featured below) didn't taste like much either. So, just go with a beer or wine.
The museum is open till ten, so you can get a post-work beer/wine and then head out and explore, work up an appetite and then come back for a meal at Verde. Stay nice PAMM.
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