South Beach on South Street

Miami Café aims to bring a bit of South Beach to South Street

by Trey Popp

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Published: Aug 7, 2007

Miami Café aims to bring a bit of South Beach to South Street. Pressed sandwiches, empanadas and plenty of plantains figure into the menu, and the décor drips with tropical themes. Surrounded by splashes of canary yellow and lime green paint, which enliven a room that's fully open to the sidewalk, you can ensconce yourself beneath a whirring fan and watch the world stroll by. You can take in some salsa music. You can sip on a mojito or a mangotini.

On those fronts, Miami Café makes for a pleasant departure from the Philadelphia norm. When it comes to the food, however, South Street reasserts itself. The dishes may bear Spanish-language titles, but it's as though they're translated back into the cheesesteak vernacular on their way to the plate.

The restaurant does serve actual cheesesteaks — as well as burgers, buffalo wings and mozzarella sticks — but that's a minor part of the menu. Over the course of three visits, I stuck to items that aren't quite so common in that neighborhood.

A Cuban pressed sandwich, one of about half a dozen varieties on the same theme, featured a generous cargo of pork and ham wrapped with Swiss cheese in a satisfyingly crusty roll. Pickles added flavor, but there wasn't much special about the mustard, which was advertised as Dijon. For $8.50, it was not even close to the flavor bomb of a Cuban served a dozen blocks to the west at Pumpkin Market.

A trio of "patacones" promised sandwiches featuring plantain flatbread. It was actually big ovals of fried, mashed plantains. These were too greasy to be eaten with your hands, and even with a fork and knife, the fillings slipped right out. The very mild chorizo in my version easily could have been mistaken for a wholly different type of sausage, and the sautéed onions and peppers it came with played like cheesesteak toppings.

Somewhat more successful were plantain cups filled with shrimp and mild jalapenos. The small shrimp were grocery-store-grade, but had picked up a nice flavor from being poached in pickling spices. But once again, the setup was still pretty greasy. The bottom floor of a flan dessert was nice, but the upper story had a consistency more like scrambled eggs, which wasn't so great.

When it comes to people-watching with a drink in hand, the pedestrian show outshines the beverages. My mojito suffered from far too little crushed mint, and the limitation of rums to the Bacardi brand was uninspiring. And this is not a place to drink wine. Each time I asked for one of the two whites on the menu, the restaurant was out — and serving only Turning Leaf, the stuff of coach-class airline carts.

For people who like the heavy, unchallenging food that predominates on South Street, Miami Café is a perfectly good place to sit down and eat food that's not as different as it makes itself sound. But for the rest, South Beach is still a plane ticket away.

(t_popp@citypaper.net)

Miami Café

429 South St.215-238-1771
Snacks and sandwiches, $5-$10.95

 

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