Los Fuegos by Francis Mallmann

Fire as the working station

Fire sits in view before the plate does; Francis Mallmann, chef at Los Fuegos by Francis Mallmann in Miami Beach, Miami, builds the room around that heat. The Argentine cook’s public record begins in 1970 on Lake Nahuel Huapi, cooking on a boat for tourists in Argentina, a service setting where weather, movement, and timing were part of the work. That early fact matters here because Los Fuegos does not treat flame as atmosphere after the cooking is done. It is the method at the center of the restaurant.

Francis Mallmann is known for open-fire cooking, and this Miami Beach address carries that discipline into the Faena Hotel’s dining room. The lineage available to name is not a chain of teachers or apprentices, but a practice: Argentine asado, gaucho tradition, Patagonian memory, and the control of direct heat. At the bench, that means food meets fire in public view, with the cook judging char, smoke, distance, and rest by the behavior of the ingredient rather than by concealment behind the pass.

Asado translated for Miami Beach

The program is à la carte, but its grammar is asado. Meats, seafood, vegetables, and shared plates move through an open-fire kitchen that gives the restaurant its tempo. Skirt steak, ribeye, lamb, and chorizo appear in the parrillada format, while wood-fired beets, cheese empanadas, and lomo milanesa give the menu its more specific local memory. The kitchen also works with seafood, seasonal vegetables, roasted preparations, and dishes that do not all pass directly over wood, though fire remains the organizing hand.

Mallmann’s cooking does not depend on complication. It depends on exposure. A beet can take smoke and still keep its sweetness; a steak can take a harder char if the interior rests properly; an empanada needs enough heat to set the pastry before the filling loses its shape. Those are small decisions, repeated across the station. The restaurant pairs that work with an exceptional wine program, built to sit beside smoke, fat, salt, and the sweetness that comes from vegetables cooked close to flame.

The room lit by the pass

The room answers the cooking with theatre, but the strongest light still comes from the pass. Red and gold tones, leopard-print booths, gold accents, live music, and the glow of the open kitchen give Los Fuegos a polished Miami Beach charge without removing the rustic edge of the craft. It is elegant and lively, but the place keeps returning the eye to the fire.

That matters in a hotel dining room, where design can easily outrun the hands. Here, the décor frames the work rather than replacing it. The counter, the pass, and the movement between them make the restaurant feel less like a sealed room than a staged asado, with Mallmann’s method visible throughout.