The Real Foodie

I was so excited when this southern style restaurant opened in October 2011 in South Beach, where there was not one restaurant that served real food, I could hardly wait. I waited for months after passing it by each day, still under construction. I could tell it was going to be a farm-to-table restaurant by the style of the graphics they used for their shopfront sign and window posters and though I was being overly optimistic (in hopes of a change in the area), I was miraculously right in the end!

The only other restaurants we would go to before Yardbird Southern Table & Bar opened were Sustain Restaurant which closed in May 2012, Michael’s Genuine Food & Drink or Harry’s Pizzeria (both the same owner) who also get most of their ingredients from local, organic farms, but coming from New York City, this selection was very limited. (We later started going on a weekly basis to BM Organics in Fort Lauderdale which is by far our favourite restaurant of all time and has a standard of food beyond any other restaurant I have been to because they source a hundred percent of their ingredients from local organic or Amish farms in Pennsylvania and strictly adhere to the principles of the Weston A Price Foundation.)

Yardbird Southern Table & Bar have become a huge success; they are busy every night and it is impossible to get a table on a weekend night (unless you are a regular like we are). They fry their pastured chickens in lard (their fries unfortunately in canola oil unless you ask for lard) and the majority of their food comes from local, organic farms. They are not a hundred percent organic (I discovered one time after eating their Adluh stone ground grits that they were GMO and they use conventional mayonnaise for their devilled eggs) but if you choose carefully you can have a real food meal, which is priceless in a town as small as South Beach.

Yardbird Southern Table & Bar was one of the winners of the 2013 Slow Food Miami Snail of Approval.

Update: In May 2012 BM Organics Market closed down. In July 2013 the chef and partner at Yardbird Southern Table & Bar, Jeff McInnis, left and has been replaced by Clay Miller.