Welcome to Miami!
Give us your tired, your pale, your huddled masses yearning for sunshine…
I was trying to work through a long navel-gazing personal essay about choices – making them and owning them and living with them – when I realized that, at the rate I was going, you probably wouldn’t hear from me until 2025. The revelation hit me when I was sitting at my local Pura Vida, sipping on a Supergreens smoothie while staring at a group of women brunching in their post-Pilates uniform of Alo micro shorts, Cartier bracelets and Hermès Chypre sandals. The scene felt so blatantly Miami that it instantly spurred another thought: what in god’s green earth is this bizarre enclave of a city that I’m living in, and why am I not writing about it?!
To give you some perspective, we only recently moved to Miami, but I have been coming here since my parents retired in the Russian Riviera of Sunny Isles back in 2010 – a simpler time when one could still get a beachfront condo for a fraction of New York prices, Art Basel was still a “niche” art show, and Casa Tua was the only fancy restaurant in town. Since then, the city has undergone a Kylie Jenner-level makeover, transforming itself into a glitzy money pit that has lured in about 50% of New York’s finance circuit since the start of the pandemic, catapulting a building boom, real estate boom, and restaurant boom that has given Dubai a run for its undeclared cash. Having lived here for six months, I have a slightly better lay of the land, which I will try to relay.
Disclaimer: this was written by a lame toddler mom who considers two glasses of rosé to be a walk on the wild side and builds most of her observations via Instagram. For insight into all things cooler, please refer to Miami’s Gen Z princess Alix Earle.
Nobody works. Forget LA – Miami (or, at least, Miami Beach) eclipses LA as the city that never works, nor does it feel any societal pressure to do so. Here, the ladies (and their tiny pampered dogs) lunch and shop, the men lunch and golf, and the entire city retreats into long weekend mode at 1pm on a Friday, after which everybody becomes unreachable and nothing gets done. This is also a carte blanche to launch off a sequence of boozy Makoto lunches and boozier ZZ’s dinners and boat days and Faena beach days and all the other fun stuff that makes life in Miami feel like one never-ending vacation where your brain and bank account go to die. (Actually, I might be the only person in this town worried about their bank account, but that’s another conversation for another time.)
The more $$$ it costs, the better. Speaking of ZZ’s – it’s not merely an aggressively overpriced restaurant. It’s a lifestyle you pay 13K to be part of, allowing you to show off your new AP and recount your epic Necker island weekend in quasi-hushed tones while noshing on a $300 tomahawk. In Miami, you pay a premium to then pay an even higher premium, a math equation that only makes sense in a city where the 0.001% goes to avoid state taxes, allowing them to trickle their leftover cash into useful things like car elevators and croc Kellys (here’s a good one that would score a lot of points at Carbone!)
Not cool enough to get into ZZs? Luckily, there are a few other Miami hospitality juggernauts that will welcome you with their overpriced crudo menus, such as all places David Grutman (i.e. Miami’s unofficial mayor and Beckham BFF) and the elevated strip club situation known as E11EVEN. They even have a restaurant now!
Nobody speaks English. Coming from the Midwestern refuge that was Los Angeles, this is something I love about Miami. This is a city so robust with immigrant communities that one can go a full day without coming across a single native English speaker (and, in my case, being reminded that I need to learn Spanish!) For reference, all you need to do is tour a few neighborhood community hubs i.e. Pura Vidas. Head to the one in Aventura for hot Israelis and Russians, Bay Harbor for hot Jews, Design and Coconut Grove for hot Latinos and the one in Sunset Harbor for a mixed bag of Franco-Italian hotness. (Yes, everything in Miami is in a harbor, and everybody owns a boat. It’s like owning a car, ok? America road trips, Miami boats.)
Life moves at a glacial pace. There’s time, and then there’s Miami time, a concept so ambiguous that one is best not investing too much trust into it. Your contractor said he’ll call tomorrow? Give it two weeks. Want to get your painting back from the framer? Tough luck, he actually went to Colombia for the season (true story!) For a city where each person is equipped with a 40K watch, nobody in Miami is in any sort of rush to get anywhere, which is evident by the glacial pace with which people navigate the roads (either that, or they drive like absolute maniacs). To witness a New Yorker’s reaction to this phenomenon, I invite you to take a 15-minute car ride through Miami with my Brooklyn-born partner (you won’t last longer). Namaste!
The dating scene is a nightmare. I haven’t tried it myself, but I’ve heard some really disturbing stories that make the New York dating scene seem grounded and humble. Miami being a naked and vain town through and through, rumor has it that most guys don’t swipe right on anybody who hasn’t adorned their Hinge profile with Face-tuned semi-nudes taken on their BFF’s cousin’s yacht. When you do start dating somebody new, you need to look out for things that would never cross your mind elsewhere, i.e. fraudulent bank accounts, fraudulent body parts, and fraudulent identities. Normal stuff.
Cartier is a universal love language. Cliché as it is, most of Miami Beach is still a place where bank accounts are best showcased in sartorial form and “quiet luxury” means swapping your Chypres for Loro Piano loafers. You can easily figure out how many kids, lovers and milestone birthdays a woman has had judging by the number of trinkets on her wrist, which, combined, can easily pay for a home in Wichita, Kansas (I know this because I accidentally zoomed my Zillow search there and, boy, was I in for a treat!) Here in Miami, affection is best showcased with green Bottega shopping bags and tiny Kelly bags and huge Range Rovers, one of a very short list of socially acceptable cars. (Speaking of which, one would be remiss not to mention the staggering traffic that routinely paralyzes the city, making it all but impossible to get from one Pura Vida to another without running your G Wagon into a concrete wall. Elon, move here and give us a tunnel already!)
The school race is real. As I have learned in the past six months, the Mount Everest of Miami parenting is successfully maneuvering one’s child into one of the five decent private schools in the city, which I will avoid going into specifics about, because you don’t bite the hands you’re praying will feed you. With half of New York having moved to Miami over the past 4 years, the likelihood of succeeding at this endeavor is akin to getting a six-figure copywriting job in the era of Chat GBT. (Here’s a fun read that really paints the picture.) On a brighter note, private school consulting is now an actual vocation, so I may be on to my next career path here!
Drama is everywhere. Maybe it’s all the “passionate” Latin cultures or the fact that nobody works, but life in Miami is basically an exercise in trying not to get wrapped up in some nonsensical drama about your friend’s ex or your malicious building board or some other mundane bullshit that most New Yorkers don’t have a second to think about. Drama is everywhere – it's in the school mom chat, it’s in your JetSet class, and it is certainly alive and well in your condo building, where one can get their Bentley tires slashed for vexing the wrong people. Each building in our Russian Riviera could qualify for its own chart-topping reality show, and I’m down to audition!
There IS a cool Miami. As much as I love to plant my bitchy little claws into the Sunny Isles chi-chi set, I’ve seen a glimmer of hope on the horizon. The influx of fresh blood in this town has spurred a very cool budding subculture of vinyl bars, foodie restaurants and art galleries, with neighborhoods such as Little River, Downtown and a certain section of Wynwood starting to feel hipster-fied in the best possible way. I’m a huge supporter of this and can’t wait for the day I can finally put my basic B Hermès slippers on ice and descend back into my denim-meets-denim comfort zone. If you’re curious, head over to Dante’s HiFi for a preview!
It really is my happy place. I can talk all the sh*t I want, and yet I genuinely love Miami. Unlike Los Angeles, which felt as hollow as my daughter’s Calico Critters house, Miami has passion and warmth and soul. People are fun, friendly and so high on their Vitamin D supply that they seem genuinely happy with their lives, a rare feat that makes them a pleasure to be around. (Yes, I recognize that a lot of this is “fake”, but I’m at a point of life where I would rather deal with fake happiness than authentic misery.) So give us your tired, your pale, your huddled masses yearning for sunshine… We will show them a good time. That’s a promise.
Miami native here! Beyond a spell during elementary school, I didn't seriously live there until I was in an adult, specifically 2020-2023. This is so accurate it gagged me!