This Steakhouse is Miami’s Hardest Reservation | On The Line | Bon Appétit

Sonny's is a steakhouse that opened in Miami 2024 after its celebrated pop-up. Now we're full steam ahead, booked out almost every night of the week. On a busy night we're hitting five 600 plus covers. Hanger Steak's one of our best sellers. Sometimes we sell up to 100 of those a night. 2,000 oysters we're selling. Parker House rolls 350 orders of two. Agnolotti, I think the record sits at 115 orders. On the individual prep day, the team is coming in at around 5am. They've got to be knocking out 20 to 30 tasks, big and small, every single day. To be a restaurant of this size and do the volume that we do at the quality we do, you've got to make it fun. That will flow into our guest experience and really show people that hospitality that Sunny's is known for. Morning guys, how are you? I'm Aaron Brooks, Executive Chef here at Sunny's Steakhouse in Miami. It's 8am, our prep team's already been in there for a few hours. Let's get inside and get the day started. So Sunny's originally started as a pop-up in the location we are now during the pandemic. The team then, dining room tables around, a makeshift grill in the corner over there, charring Wagyu steaks and dry-aged prime steaks for the guests. When it came about this was going to be a fully-fledged restaurant after the pop-up definitely sparked my interest and this is why we're here now. So as you can see the window here looking into the kitchen everyone's come in they're getting ready it's time to get inside and let's start our prep day for service. So right now we're in our butcher's room. It's a refrigerated butcher chamber. We have two full-time butchers working here every day. We also have a dry-aged cooler behind you there where the meat dry-ages and we store all of our sub-primals. We make sausages in here, terrine, deboned chickens and deboned duck legs. We're at a point in our day now where it's time to get into a lot of butchery, but the first thing we're going to do is get into our dry age exports. We dry age in-house 35 to 45 days on an export. So an export is a bone-in ribeye, all right, that's what we've got here. This one's been sitting around for about 40 days, starting to get a nice little bit of mould on it there, a little bit of bark on it, a little bit crunchy on the outside, that's going to give it this beautiful beautiful nutty flavour. So this is our band saw, named so for the band blade that's on it. Alright, it spins super, super fast and it's going to cut through all these bones. So we've taken that first outside piece off. That's that crunchy, barky stuff there that we want to get rid of, the mold. We'll take that off and then next we'll get in there and we'll cut our first steak off here. This is USDA prime black Angus beef from the Midwest. We cut them about 30 ounces. Our serving portion is 26 but we're going to trim it down. What we have here is what we call a bone scraper. This is going to take any merely bone pieces that got shredded by the bandsaw, it's going to take that off because it's not really fit for consumption there. So we're going to scrape that all off until we see the nice color of the meat there and then jumping in here it's time to trim it up. So first I'll take a portion of this fat off here and then just going around the outside I'm trimming ever so lightly. Without taking too much of the meat off, but removing that harder bark that's on the outside. All done. All right this has got to be my happiest place in the restaurant. I'm inside the dry age room. Here at Sunny's we're really blessed to have a facility that enables to dry age your own beef. Not a lot of steakhouses have that blessing but having it in-house for us and being in control of ourselves and maybe bringing different cuts or something special to try something new, we really have a great privilege to be able to do that. This is the shelf where we we age the exports. This one's been on the shelf about 10 days now. So here's where we segue all the cuts for tonight, all right? These have been portioned and ready to go for this evening. You see here we've got our dry-aged ribeyes with the bone in, nicely trimmed on the outside. Here we've got some beautiful Aussie lamb racks ready to go, the American Wagyu. Look at the marbling, fine-grained marbling from the purebred Wagyu. So here we have our dry-aged duck breast. These ducks are from Hudson Valley. They're absolute beauties. We get them in whole, remove the legs. We use the legs for ragu, we also use it for terrine, and then we dry age the breast on the cage. These age for about 10 days. So here I'm going to be making some sausage. Here at Sunny's we make all the charcuterie in-house. We have bacon, we have a cheesy sausage stuffed with aged comté. Whenever we came up with a dish, we broke it down and said, you know, whatever we put on the plate in that dish, it's going to be made here. So if we talked about putting a sausage on the menu, the meat was going to be ground in-house, stuffed in-house, smoked in-house, grilled over charcoal and served to our guests. So here what we've done is we've ground some Berkshire pork with a little bit of our dry-aged fat as well from our dry-aged prime exports, seasoned with a bunch of spices, some chili, there's some piquillo pepper in there as well, a touch of white wine, and now we're stuffing it into a pork casing. We'll tie these into about four inch links and then we'll run it as a special on the menu this evening. Growing up, my father used to take me down to the butcher shop and we'd have a bit of a yarn with the butcher, a bit of a chat, you know, and talk about what's in the case and what's been fresh made that day, what's really special. So when I get to come in here and work with the team, it does take me back to the conversations I used to have. I had a work experience at a butcher and I think maybe that's where I got some of this passion for making some of these crafted meats, so to speak. If you just tie the end to stop the stuffing from coming out, sometimes you'll get some air bubbles in there. So you're going to prick these holes in here and then we're going to flip her over. Again just getting some of those air pockets out so when we twist our casings don't burst or at least we hope they don't. Okay so pinching and twisting. We're going to leave these to dry a little bit. It'll enable us when we grill them to get the skin nice and crispy. We're going to go outside and check out how the guys are doing on the bread. So what's a good meal without some really great bread? Here at Sonny's we make our Parker House Rolls. These are one of our It's one of our signatures, everyone loves them. Here we have the team rolling out the Parkers. These have been mixed, a little bit of a table rest here for about 20 minutes to proof lightly. Now we're going to weigh them, ball them up, proof them again and then they'll go in the oven. It's a yeast dough that's been enriched with a bunch of eggs and a ton of butter. It's super light and super fluffy. We baste it with an egg wash before we bake it as well and top it with Maldon salt and poppy seeds. That crunch of that saltiness on the Maldon salt as you chomp into this beautiful, luscious bun, it's pretty awesome. We serve it with Vermont butter, doused in honey as well. Warm on some soft butter with the honey. Heaven. Each day we make about 700, 750 of these and we're almost sold out every day. Okay, so this mixer here, we're making the dough about three times. So we'll make a batch, take it out. As we're resting that first batch, we're making another one. So these are our rolls from earlier that you saw on the table, the big ball of dough, and now the egg wash, Maldon salt, and finish with the poppy seeds before baking. So here we have the Parker House rolls that have gone into the oven. These will be baked for about 16 minutes. So a scoop of ice just like this goes in with the Parker House as they're placed in the oven to bake. It raises the humidity in there, the steam. This helps with the rise, helps with the crust So look at these, absolutely perfect. They got the perfect proof, the perfect rise and it baked at 375 degrees, enabling them to rise here level with the top. These look stunning. Okay, now that our Parker House rolls are looking great, we'll get those other batches in the oven. It's time to move on and get some more prep done. So each day the team spends about three to four hours on just making pasta. We have five different shapes on the menu. So here's our sweet corn agnolotti. Small little pillows of pasta stuffed with the corn farce. Nice and sweet, nice and silky. This would be blanched to order and then tossed through a butter sauce, monté au beurre, with urfa pepper oil for its rich nuttiness. A little bit of spice in there, blue crab, and it's finished with a squeeze of lime. We plate that with a ton of chives on top. Listen, this is a day one dish. People come from all around for this. Every day, you know, anywhere from 1,200 to 1,800 annually. 15 pieces to an order, 100 orders a day. Do the math. It's a lot of pasta. It takes a lot of focus and a lot of passion for this. The process of making the filling itself is a feat. It takes a lot of time. Sweet corn, slow cooked with shallots, white wine, lots of butter, passing through a fine chinois, pushing every piece through so the texture is super, super smooth. Piped in, folded over and cut. All pastas that we have on the menu stand alone as really, really great dishes. Gnocchi, other extruded pastas, Campanelli, different braises, different vegetarian options in the pastas as well. Listen, we're a sunny steakhouse, we're a steakhouse at heart, but in between a lot of dishes that really tie into the culture, which is Miami, the excitement, the fun, which really makes Miami special. I think you really feel that in the room, in the service, and in the food. So where we are right now is we're at our pass, our expo stations. We have a number of expos here. The amount of meals that goes across this line is pretty extraordinary. We have about 100 plus people on the team here. Although we're only open for dinner, the team is coming in as early as 5am. We've got product coming in all day here. Meats, seafoods, produce, dry goods. Taking that product in and then putting it on the shelves. 5.30, we open the doors and that's when dinner service starts. That's when the masses are coming in to experience what we do. Service is non-stop all the way until midnight. We're a tough reservation to get, so to speak. 500 plus, 600 plus covers every single night between terrace and dining room. And then in the background, this kitchen lit up and firing on all cylinders. That's the magic of this place. So a lot of our plates, we call them treasures. We have some really, really beautiful china that we've got from some great vendors. But a lot of our stuff, it's antiques. It's one-offs. It's special little pieces that we serve some of our dishes in that make it unique for our guests. Who doesn't want a pelican with french fries coming out of the mouth of it? The look of that, the feeling that you get when you say, wow, I've got something that nobody else has in this room. My Queen of Marns come on an octopus, for God's sake. Look at this thing. You know, four Queen of Marns there come to the table, a real sight to see. This is what makes a lot of the vessels that we use here at Sunny special and make our guests feel special because you're getting something unique and not what everyone has. And we'll be in the middle of service and you'll hear someone shout out, hey, I need the pelican, or hey, I need the lunchbox. And it's a special vessel that they're a fan of that they wanna use for certain dishes. How they present and how they make it unique for our guests. So one of the things that we're really, really known for here at Sunny's is our Queen Anne ice cream sandwich. These are our queens here. Queenie has portioned them, she's folded them up, each one lined with sugar. The dough itself is a laminated Danish dough, so it does have yeast in it. It's been laminated with layers of some of the best butter we can get. The dough is rolled out into large sheets. It's cut into squares that are about two inch by two inch, folded in, pressed in like these beautiful little almost like tulip shaped pastries in there. And that keeps the lightness on the outside, so when it bakes it does proof up and create those air pockets in there that creates the layers that really make the lightness and the crispiness. And then we're going to proof it. Popped in the oven here to proof for about 20 minutes. When it's the right size, that's when we take them out. We'll turn that oven up and we'll bake them really, really hard and fast to get that sugar caramelizing on the outside. That bubbling is the butter and also the sugar. And as that butter cooks down and the sugar caramelizes, that's when you get that glassy caramel around the outside of the Queen Anne. It's one of the signature moves on a queen. You've got to have that caramelized sugar on the outside. Sort of a glassy almost. These queens, we make roughly 200 a day. And it's a laborious process. You really have to know what you're doing. If your butter gets too warm, it's going to split inside the layers of pastry. It's not going to bake up. You're not going to get that beautiful lightness that you're looking for. There is really a lot of love that's put into these things. So here we have our ice cream machine. This is where Queenie's churned our ice cream, churning the process of pouring the custard in, or the anglaise, milk, cream, sugar, egg yolks, and lots of vanilla beans, cooked until perfectly set, poured into our ice cream machine so we get this beautiful, beautiful scoop of ice cream. It's not too hard and not too soft. When you crunch into that, Queen, it doesn't ooze out the side, but it has that texture as well that just gels so perfectly with that crunchy pastry. Now here's our queens. They are all done. Look at these things. Absolutely amazing. That's what I'm talking about. See that glassy caramel on the outside? And if you can hear that, that crunch, and look how flaky it is. Here mate, you got to try that. Okay. What do you reckon? Wow. How bad, huh? Crunchy. How light is it? Very light. Yeah. The only thing that's missing is some ice cream. It's amazing. So here we're all set now. We've got our Queen of Marns bait. It's time to get these cooled down, wrapped up nice and tight so that humidity doesn't kill that caramely, glassy, crunchy outside texture. All right, it's two in the afternoon and we've just got our seafood delivery. Ian's going to process some fish here. We've got some beautiful Hiramasa from New Zealand. What he's going to do is some suki-biki and this is for our Hiramasa crudo. He's just using his knife on a particular angle to almost scoop underneath the scales without cutting into the flesh. It's super important. It's not only the skill of the cutter, but also the quality of the knife. You've got to have an extremely sharp blade. When it's that sharp as well, pivot on the wrong angle and then you're into the flesh and then that can shorten the shelf life of the fish. We get it whole because it'll always be fresher because you can see the fish whole, you can examine it, you can look for the signs, how firm the flesh is. If the eyes are cloudy, the smell of it, check the gills, how red they are. You know, when you buy portions, you don't know how long it's been sitting in ice or sitting in a styrofoam container. This, we can check it and make sure that it's up to standard for what we want to serve. So the next step, Ian will remove the head here. What he's doing now is he's cleaning out the bloodline that runs along the inside of the belly, inside of the spine there, cleaning all that out as well, because that can send the fish bad pretty quickly. A lot of the things that we do here for some cooks might be something that they learn in a module at culinary school for an hour or two or a day but will they use those skills when they go into the industry you know there's a lot of places that don't have the means or the availability to do it so here we try to always push ourselves to make sure that we're doing that so people have that opportunity to not only just do it once but over and over again Again, to build their skillset through repetition. The simplicity in it, you know, some people might look at it as just, it's a few slices of fish with some salsa on top. But at the end of the day, the care and love that has gone into it, not only through sourcing, but also processing, in my mind is pretty impressive from start to finish. So now Ian's placed the hook on it and that will hang just like that in our dry-ager. Hold it still. I know, I move stuff so quickly too. So today we received a whole bluefin tuna. This is coming from Mexico. Ian's about to break it down into separate cuts. He's going to take top loin off it, bottom loin. We're also going to have some belly pieces and he's going to take the collar off too. All these different areas of the tuna have different quantities of fat within the muscle structure. So we use them for different applications as well. Some of them are great for tartare. We do a beautiful Sicilian sashimi, we call it. You'll get the otoro, which is the fatty belly. Chutorro, which has a higher concentration of fat. And then the akami, which is the lean. You can see the gradient there lighter being fattier and then going into the very lean up here around the bloodline there. Belly and loin. This is the belly with that beautiful fat in there and then heading up to more of the leaner area here. You could hang it just like this and then take loins off as you need it but these pieces if they're not used tonight they'll be used tomorrow for service. All right we'll let Ian finish up here with the tuna that'll go into our dry age what needs to be portioned tonight for service we're going to wrap up here and get ready It's 3 p.m every day we put up family meal it's time for folks to start coming in for their shift or for wrapping up for their day they'll grab a bite they'll sit down and talk about what's happening for tomorrow or talk about what's going to happen for tonight but it's a very very important time for us for everyone to get together and just enjoy a bite before service. Then we'll roll into the front of house pre-shift a time for us all to get together to talk about specials for the evening px's what we're featuring for our butcher's cuts then it's bang straight into service. Leading into specials, your butcher's cuts for this evening. We have one. We're going to be doing Wagyu KC's bone-in KC strips, 20 ounces. They're $160. I have six of those. Tonight, we have a Sicilian tuna sashimi. Okay, so we're back to tuna only on the sashimi. We got a massive bluefin tuna from Mexico just broken down today. It'll have the three cuts of tuna in it. It is summer. It's still hot. The waters are hot, so the tuna isn't as fatty as it has been, But it's still delicious nonetheless, and we'll do that for 24. Okay? Thank you, Chef. Thank you so much. I'm back. Rib eye, asparagus. Rib eye, asparagus. You want to take that up to Club Soda for me? Fire 4 East. Come on, let's get a yes, Chef, for the cameras, guys. Yes, Chef. Yes, Chef. All right, guys, thanks for joining us. It's time to rock on and get ready for service. We've got about 500 on the books tonight, so it's going to be a banger. Real quick, what time is it? It's 5 o'clock. I'll do it again.