Hitting the South Beach Wine and Food Festival with Miguel Aguilar

Chances are you’ve heard of Wynwood Kitchen & Bar and its toque chef, Miguel Aguilar. If you haven’t, you will soon. Aguilar took over the restaurant, a visually striking space at the epicenter of Miami’s emerging arts district in 2011. Shy of three years later, Aguilar gears up for his third appearance in the Magic City’s hottest food event of the year, South Beach Wine and Food Festival, and tells us about the moment everything changed.

Born in Venezuela, Aguilar and his family relocated to Philadelphia when he was 10 years old. At the age of 21, he moved back to his native country with his vegetarian girlfriend. He started working as a high-mountain guide, taking people trekking through the Andes Mountains, up to 17,000 feet, and thats where he first discovered he liked cooking.

“I’d set up lunches for them. That’s where my flair started,” divulges the chef. He’d go to bodega to buy pasteles or to the farmers market to get stuff to make lunch for the families. “The vibrancy of the vegetables blew me away. It was like a painting and I think a lot of it had to do with the altitude of where we were — 3,000 above sea level. Everything just had this freshness about it that I’ve never seen in a supermarket in the US,” Aguilar said. He passionately speaks about the super orange color of the carrots and oranges, as well as the resilient green of broccoli. Till this day, color remains to be one of his biggest inspirations in the cooking process, especially at Wynwood Kitchen & Bar, where the food has to match the ever-evolving art of the walls. 

After realizing he had a passion for food, Aguilar moved back to Philly and started working the restaurant industry, but front of house. “I served tables and was a bar back for about four years before I got into cooking.” He manned every station in the kitchen, working his way up from salad to the grill and then sauté. Eventually this scored his a sous chef promotion, and at the same time he was able to go back to school because he’d finally resolved his citizenship. It was then that everything started falling into place.

“I’d heard that Stephen Starr was coming into town to open a restaurant with Douglas Rodriguez and I just knew I had to work there,” he said. A big fan of the founder of Nuevo Latino Cuisine, Aguilar has always loved his books. “Stephen asked me why he should give you a sous chef position when I didn’t have that much experience, and I said I don’t really care to be a sous chef I just want a job with Douglas and your company,” Aguilar said. That line and perseverance was enough to get him hired at Alma de Cuba, and his skills, to get him a sous chef title just eight months into his position, all the while attending culinary school. 

Aguilar gets his break… 

But it was well worth it, as he learned a great deal from Rodriguez. “He’s a really flamboyant character,” said the chef. “A really lively guy – lots of fun, lots of intensity, lots of detail to dishes and lots of flavor.” He met his wife, who also worked for Stephen Starr doing front of house and the connection was immediate. When she relocated to Miami, he followed and after a three month consulting stint, he met Tony Goldman, co-owner of WKB.

After formal interviews with all the owners, Aguilar did a tasting of his food for them. “I still remember what I made,” he reminisces. He cooked hummus and pico verde, which are both on WKB’s menu today, a poblano black bean cake topped with a pan seared salmon finished with poblano zucchini puree, black bean soup with cilantro crema, and a turkey burger.

“Once they offered me a position, I shared my vision of what the restaurant could be,” Aguila said. “I proposed global small plates with a Latin flair. Everything meant to share and an inexpensive price point.” After doing about five to ten tastings with 10-15 dishes each time, dishes were approved, some tweaked and others eliminated. They closed for a couple of days and swapped everything out. New dishes, new menus, new plates, new execution and rolled it out. “We haven’t looked back since. It’s been phenomenal,” Aguilar said.

Almost three years later, Aguilar is glad to be part of the movement and rise of the burgeoning Arts District. “Lots of new restaurants and bars are just starting to open here. People are just now really starting to know What the Wynwood Walls, Art Basel, and Wynwood Kitchen and Bar are,” he proudly says. “We’ve gotten notoriety where our lunches are great our dinners are great and business is just flowing through the door.”

And it isn’t stopping anytime soon. In 10 years, Aguilar hopes to still be running WKB and have his own Mexican restaurant with his wife. As far as the immediate future, Wynwood Kitchen & Bar is participating in year’s Thrillist BBQ Blues and Medianoches event at Wynwood Walls hosted by Anne Burrell and Emilio Estefan. Lee Schrager, the man behind the festival reached out to Aguilar personally and asked that he go against the rules for the medianoches event, where everyone is tasked with putting a twist on the classic ham and pork sandwich. “Lee reached out to us and asked that we do not go with the flow, and instead of doing a medianoche wants us to do our empanadas,” explains Aguilar. The chicken ropa vieja empanadas are WKB’s number one selling dish. “I guess they’re just that popular that even he himself requested we do something different.”