Boia De

Hands first at the pass

Black tagliolini lands chilled, cut through with crab and vin jaune, while Alex Meyer works as chef at Boia De in Miami. His cooking here keeps contact with the food close: hands, gloves, the quick reach for a tool only when it saves motion. Meyer came to the restaurant after kitchens built on speed and exacting repetition. He worked under Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo at Animal in Los Angeles, staged at Eleven Madison Park in New York City, helped open Son of a Gun, and became sous chef at The NoMad in New York City from 2012. Before that, Emory University gave him a different starting point, but the discipline of the line shaped the way he cooks now. At Boia De, opened in 2019, that background settles into food that is modern Italian in structure and freer at the edges. The plate does not labor to explain itself. Beef tartare takes tonnato and garlic-shallot crumble; gnocchi can move with black truffle or another seasonal turn; Luci’s Chopped Salad stays cold, sharp, and built for appetite rather than ceremony.

Italian grammar, Miami timing

The program runs through small plates and à la carte pastas, with the bench doing much of the talking. Meyer’s signature register favors clean flavor and direct delivery, a useful discipline in a room where several dishes arrive for the table and each one has to keep its place. Tagliolini Nero, Beef Tartare, Gnocchi, Chocolate Budino, and Luci’s Chopped Salad form the steady spine. Around them, the kitchen changes pastas with the season and keeps the combinations a little sideways: potato skins with stracciatella and caviar, chicken liver and duck foie gras pate with strawberry jam and chicken jus, baby artichokes moved through brown butter with hollandaise and pine nuts. The method is not tweezer-heavy, by Meyer’s own account. He has said he uses his hands a lot when cooking, and that tweezers matter when they save time rather than when they decorate a plate. That tells you plenty about the pass. Utility comes first. The flourish has to earn its space.

A forest-green room beside the laundromat

The room sits in the Bravo Supermarket Plaza at 5205 NE 2nd Ave, next to a coin laundromat, marked outside by a pink neon exclamation point. Inside, Boia De feels compact and close to the work, a forest-green nook with the odd compression of a small vessel. The counter and tables put the kitchen’s rhythm within reach: plates crossing, wine moving from a curated list, staff keeping the room warm without sanding off its edge. It is upscale casual in the useful sense, polished where the food needs support and loose where the room needs breath. The noise stays conversational, so the details remain audible: the scrape of a spoon through budino, the arrival of clams, the pause before a shared plate is divided. This address holds one Michelin star in the 2025 Guide, and the room still gathers around Tagliolini Nero.