Popular Canadian Vegetarian Eatery, Planta, Debuts on South Beach

With plant-based sushi and a mega-club owner as a backer 

by Olee Fowler@oleefowler  Feb 26, 2018, 11:00am EST

Photo Credit: Facebook/Planta Miami

David Grutman – the man behind LIV, Story, Komodo and OTL – has officially brought Toronto-based Planta to Miami. The “plant-based” restaurant serves an array of vegetarian and vegan dishes along with vegetarian sushi with it opening its doors March 1 at 850 Commerce Street. 

Leading the kitchen is chef David Lee, who’s creating dishes like coconut ceviche, Korean fried lettuce wraps, and truffle and cashew mozzarella pizza, while the sushi bar is serving up a variety of hand rolls, wraps, sushi and nigari — all sans meat or fish. In addition, cold-press cocktails, juices and shots are also on hand to wash back the cuisine. 

The 200-seat restaurant features two indoor dining rooms and outdoor terrace seating. The dining room that houses the sushi bar and cocktail bar features black and white flooring, ceiling skylight cutouts, hexagonal-tiled walls along with green accent walls. The second dining room features a barn-like structure lined with windows and made of white-washed oak reclaimed from a house built in the 1920s.

The restaurant will be open daily for dinner beginning at 5 p.m. For more information call 305-397-8513.

Picasso’s grandson buys condo in Miami Beach’s South-of-Fifth

Olivier Widmaier-Ruiz Picasso paid $3.6M for a unit at Icon South Beach

 

 

 

 

By Ina Cordle | February 15, 2018 05:00PM

Olivier Widmaier-Ruiz Picasso and the unit (Credit: Getty Images, Redfin)

UPDATED Feb. 15, 6:15 p.m.:This is sure to be an art-filled abode.

Pablo Picasso’s grandson just bought a condo in Miami Beach’s South-of-Fifth neighborhood.

Olivier Widmaier-Ruiz Picasso paid $3.6 million for unit 3701 at Icon South Beach at 450 Alton Road, records show. The 2,145-square-foot unit traded for $1,686 per square foot. That’s the highest price per square foot for a non-penthouse unit, according to the brokers, Iconic Properties co-owners Arshan Borhan and Brian Kulju, who represented both the buyer and seller.

Picasso, an author, television and music producer, is the son of Maya Widmaier-Ruiz, who is one of Pablo Picasso’s five surviving heirs, according to a 2016 Vanity Fair article. Her mother, Marie-Thérèse Walter, met Picasso when she was leaving the Paris Métro, and he said, “You have an interesting face. I would like to do a portrait of you,” according to the article. They lived together for many years and she was his muse.

The custom-built condo was designed by architect Rene Gonzalez, using glass and geometric forms, which reminded Picasso of his grandfather’s Cubism art, according to the brokers.

Picasso, who lives in Paris, has friends at Icon South Beach, and wanted to buy a unit as a retreat for the winter months, Borhan said. “He’s excited to put his touch on it in terms of furnishings and art, which he will do,” added Kulju.

Records show the unit’s seller is Ion Varouxakis of Greece. It was listed in May for $4.1 million, which means it sold for 12 percent below the listing price.

Icon South Beach was completed in 2004 by the Related Group.

The True Story of the Versace Mansion

Built by a possibly closeted oil heir, and almost owned by Donald Trump, the Casa Casuarina has a history nearly as colorful as that of the man who made it famous.by 

KATEY RICH

  JANUARY 17, 2018 

Gianni Versace sits at his home in Miami Beach, 1993; An aerial view of Casa Casuarina.

Left, by Marice Cohn Band; Right, by Al Diaz, both from Miami Herald/MCT/Getty Images.

Even before its owner, Gianni Versace, was shot on its front steps, Casa Casuarina was a tourist attraction in Miami Beach. One of very few privately owned homes on glitzy Ocean Drive, it was an attention-grabber even for those who did not know who lived there: black iron gates trimmed in gold framed the Mediterranean-style mansion outfitted with elaborate balconies, and just enough visible glitz to promise even more inside.

But for all the historic importance implied by the name and the classic style, 1116 Ocean Drive was famous because of Versace—and may become even more so, now that the FX series The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, which filmed in part in the actual Casa Casuarina, is premiering Wednesday. Notorious for its over-the-top style and the horrifying death that happened at its gates, Casa Casuarina has a fascinating backstory all its own—one that begins with a possibly closeted oil heir, comes dangerously close to Donald Trump, and ends with the opportunity for you, yes you, to sleep in Gianni Versace’s old bedroom.

The mansion was originally commissioned by Standard Oil heir Alden Freeman in 1930, and was named for the only tree on the property, as Maureen Orth writes in her book about Andrew Cunanan, Vulgar Favors—or possibly, as the Miami Herald speculated last year, for the W. Somerset Maugham collection of stories The Casuarina Tree. Freeman, who had retired at 27 to travel the world, designed the house as a copy of the Dominican Republic home built for Christopher Columbus’s son Diego in the early 16th century. Freeman only lived in the mansion for a short time, in the company of his adopted son, Charles Boulton; according to Miami Beach historian Carolyn Klepser, interviewed by the Miami Herald, Boulton may have in fact been Freeman’s lover.

After Freeman’s death in 1937, Boulton sold the mansion for $100,000 to Jacques Amsterdam. He turned it into the Amsterdam Palace, a 24-room apartment building that, by the 80s, mostly rented by the month to artists and anyone else willing to live in what was, by then, a rundown South Beach. The Art Deco buildings that had defined the resort town’s heyday in the 30s and 40s were crumbling; preservationists struggled to convince city officials they were worth protecting at all. “Until recently, the city had the idea that nothing was worth saving in the Art Deco District,” Miami Beach redevelopment director Stuart Rogel told the Herald in 1987. “It looked old, it looked bad and we wanted to get rid of it. Now we realize we are sitting on top of a resource of immense value.”