{"id":621322,"date":"2023-03-23T10:07:00","date_gmt":"2023-03-23T15:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/23\/how-bad-bunny-does-bad-bunnys-miami-restaurant-really-feel\/"},"modified":"2023-03-23T10:07:00","modified_gmt":"2023-03-23T15:07:00","slug":"how-bad-bunny-does-bad-bunnys-miami-restaurant-really-feel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/23\/how-bad-bunny-does-bad-bunnys-miami-restaurant-really-feel\/","title":{"rendered":"How Bad Bunny Does Bad Bunny\u2019s Miami Restaurant Really Feel?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I realized the moment I stepped up to Gekko\u2019s velvet rope that I was not dressed the part. I would describe my outfit as work-from-home schlubby, pieced together to brave weeknight Miami traffic. The patrons lingering outside\u00a0Gekko<\/a> were sleek, chic, ring-light-ready, and likely on their first stop of a full night out. As I waited under the siren red awning, I heard someone talking to their friend as they walked by: \u201cOh, that\u2019s Bad Bunny\u2019s restaurant.\u201d The draw of experiencing incontestable, international superstar musician Bad Bunny\u2019s first restaurant was, admittedly, the reason I\u2019d made a 9 p.m. reservation and driven 45 miles across town on a Thursday night. My friend, a Miami Beach resident and more appropriately dressed dining companion, had time to throw me one judgy once-over before we were ushered inside.<\/p>\n

For a late reservation on a weeknight, the restaurant was loud and bustling. Gekko\u2019s decor features an eight-foot-long mural of a dragon over the bar, an overabundance of gold motif throughout the space, mood lighting in an ambient red glow, and a menu that, when I visited, included a bone-in rib eye steak for $1,200. Located in Brickell City Centre, the area surrounding Gekko is known to many South Floridians as after-school loitering grounds for bougie private-school-attending teenagers and a shopping haunt for even bougier tourists.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

As a self-identified superfan, I needed to know: Would I feel connected to Bad Bunny as I dined at Gekko? Would his cheeky playfulness and personality somehow shine through on this menu? As a business venture, restaurants make plenty of sense as a partnership for the rich and famous. But what do we\u2014as customers and fans\u2014get out of flashy, celebrity-backed restaurants?<\/p>\n

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The dishes at Gekko are flashy and eye-catching.<\/span>Photograph by Libby Volgyes<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

The plush, jewel-toned, velvet-enveloped Japanese steakhouse, was opened in mid-2022 by\u00a0Groot Hospitality<\/a>\u2014the Miami-based restaurant group known for big-name clubs like\u00a0LIV<\/a> and\u00a0Story<\/a>, and other celebrity-backed restaurants like\u00a0Strawberry Moon<\/a> (a collaboration with Pharrel Williams). The draw of restaurants like Gekko is, at least in part, the pursuit of celebrity-crafted menus. The idea that by eating, say, Wagyu dumplings and octopus tacos, you\u2019re growing closer to the vision of your favorite artist. I hoped to have at least a taste of that feeling.<\/p>\n

We started the night with saccharine $19 cocktails\u2014the \u201cSummer Without You\u201d (an English translation of a Bad Bunny album) for me and the \u201cTruk Lagoon\u201d for my friend. A $120 steak was lit aflame tableside in a blazing plea to be posted on our Instagram stories, and lobster fried rice with just a whisper of funky XO sauce ($42) was good but as my friend quipped, \u201cI could get better at\u00a0Yummy House<\/a>.\u201d As a generally\u00a0meat-reluctant person<\/a>, I insisted on ordering at least one veggie side, but the sticky-sweet eggplant just didn\u2019t do it for us. We ended the meal with a dulce de leche lava cake that our jovial server recommended. The \u201clava\u201d in question made a beige, buttery, tooth-rottingly sweet puddle on the plate. We were too stuffed and overindulged to sop it up.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While Bad Bunny has publicly declared his\u00a0love of the Wagyu crispy rice and A5 Tomahawk<\/a> at Gekko, his impact was otherwise hard to pin down as we ate our way through the menu. The dishes were definitely\u00a0flashy<\/em> and made us do a double-take as they were brought out. Whole fried snapper, coiled and perched on its belly ($72), butter-doused milk bread with crackly nori ($16), and minimalist platters of sushi were on heavy rotation at the surrounding tables, crammed so close together that we were almost shoulder-to-shoulder with other diners. The food at Gekko was dramatic\u2014and listen, we had a good time!\u2014but ultimately, in the context of all the exciting, innovative, food that Miami has to offer, mostly just fine. Plus, the bill we racked up had me sweating as it quickly exceeded the budget I\u2019d discussed with my editor.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Decor includes a massive dragon over the bar and an overabundance of gold motif.<\/span>Photograph by Michael Stavaridis<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

Some celebrities take a more involved approach to crafting the menus at their restaurants. Priyanka Chopra Jonas, for example, waxes poetic about how\u00a0the menu of her NYC restaurant, Sona<\/a>, mirrors the beloved flavors and memories of her childhood. Mr. Bunny, however, takes a decidedly more hands-off approach. At Gekko, the clearest nod to his stardom was the cocktail I drank when I first sat down, named after\u00a0Un Verano Sin Ti,<\/em>\u00a0Bad Bunny\u2019s record-breaking album. The most evidence of his connection to the restaurant is perhaps on Gekko\u2019s\u00a0Instagram account<\/a>, where comments oscillate between heart-eye emojis and fan notes to the singer, and complaints about the restaurant\u2019s service.<\/p>\n

A tucked-away after-hours lounge promises a luxe experience of more surprise\u00a0celebrity drop-ins<\/a>, luminescent cocktails, and made-for-TikTok moments, but the only thing Gekko has gone truly viral for recently is\u00a0the accusation that staff ate a customer\u2019s birthday cake<\/a> after charging them a $50 cutting fee. That didn\u2019t deter the content creators though\u2014around us, the \u201cphone eats first\u201d way of life reigned supreme. Gekko definitely leans into an aspirational aesthetic\u2014dark, dramatic, intimate, with the implied hope of bumping into Benito Antonio Mart\u00ednez Ocasio as he tucks into 24-karat-gold-plated lobster dumplings (a real, $36 dish on this menu) in a private corner booth. But despite Gekko\u2019s\u00a0star-studded opening night<\/a>, the restaurant seems as much like a celebrity hang out as any other clubby restaurant. Which is to say, not very much so.<\/p>\n

Instead, Gekko ends up feeling like a venue where one can live out their\u00a0own<\/em> celebrity fantasy. A woman in the booth next to us pulled out a vape pen midway through her meal and a server politely gestured for her to put it away. Instead, she gave him a warm smile and a wave, as if she\u2019d been spotted by the paparazzi, and continued to send up plumes of fruity vapor. We watched this interaction from behind the blurry haze of our on-fire steak.<\/p>\n

During our dinner the playlist cycled through songs my friend dubbed \u201ccrying in the club vibes,\u201d with high-tempo remixes of Adele and Sam Smith. We heard only one Bad Bunny song on our way out the door at the end of the night (a house remix of\u00a0\u201cD\u00e1kiti\u201d),<\/em>\u00a0which felt more like a coincidence than intentional branding. A casual listener or a diner ignorant of the restaurant\u2019s backstory could easily spend a night at Gekko without ever feeling the Bad Bunny-ness of it all.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

As a self-confessed, unabashed fan of the Puerto Rican reggaeton artist (with the Spotify Wrapped data to back it up), a visit to the Brickell neighborhood steakhouse left me feeling disappointed. To be lured in by the hope of some sort of connection to the superstar, and instead shell out over $400 for a meal in a relatively generic dining room was not enough for me. If the Bad Bunny restaurant can\u2019t deliver on food or vibes, it should at least lean in and let us have more Bad Bunny.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Antara Sinha<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I realized the moment I stepped up to Gekko\u2019s velvet rope that I was not dressed the part. I would describe my outfit as work-from-home schlubby, pieced together to brave weeknight Miami traffic. The patrons lingering outside\u00a0Gekko were sleek, chic, ring-light-ready, and likely on their first stop of a full night out. As I waited […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":621323,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32866,34544,534],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-621322","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-bunny","8":"category-bunnys","9":"category-financial"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621322\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/621323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=621322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=621322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}