Sunny’s Steakhouse

Holding back at the steakhouse pass

The rolls arrive with honey butter before the fire takes over. Cary Hynes, chef at Sunny’s Steakhouse in Miami, works from that kind of restraint, the same instinct that made his Parker house rolls read as more than a comfort gesture. His public Miami arc began in 2018, when he moved to the city to open Jaguar Sun, a compact Downtown room where bar food, drinks, creative pastas, and a tight menu had to carry their own weight. There was no large kitchen to soften a weak idea. The cooking depended on clarity, on plates that could sit beside a serious cocktail program without trying to outshout it.

At Sunny’s, in Little River, that discipline moves into a larger steakhouse frame without surrendering the earlier lesson. Hynes has said, “One of the things I was scared about was the idea of making it overly fancy and losing what made it so attractive to people.” The sentence matters here because the risk is real: a modern steakhouse can become a display case. Hynes’s work is sharper when it protects appetite first, then builds its detail around that appetite. The lineage that can be stated is not a named apprenticeship, but a method carried from a limited station into a room with more heat, more reach, and more ways to overwork a plate.

Live oak, pasta, and the small corrections

The center of the program is the live oak fire. Steaks take their character from that heat, with USDA Prime cuts, Australian and American Wagyu, dry-aged ribeye, and hanger steak among the offerings. The sauces show the kitchen’s range without letting the beef disappear: pineapple hot sauce, bone marrow vinaigrette, Béarnaise, salsa verde, XO, potato butter, and Périgourdine all point in different directions from the same pass.

Hynes does not treat the steakhouse form as a single discipline. The raw bar brings chilled oysters, shrimp cocktail, raw scallop with black aguachile, and hiramasa with charred serrano relish into the same conversation as the grill. Handmade pastas keep a thread from the Jaguar Sun years, including sweet corn agnolotti with blue crab and saffron, duck lasagna, and spicy rigatoni with pork sugo. Parker house rolls remain part of the table’s rhythm, now alongside Caesar salad with fried breadcrumbs, steak tartare on sourdough with burnt leek aioli, and rotisserie chicken with French fries. The menu is not small, but it still asks each dish to justify its place.

Little River under the banyan

The room carries the old Florida idea lightly. Sunny’s sits in Little River, at 7357 NW Miami Ct, with indoor tables and an outdoor courtyard gathered around a banyan tree. White linens, midcentury lines, and large windows frame a room built for noise, wine, martinis, and the slower sequence of a steak dinner. The bar has its own hand in the place, with a pick-your-path martini menu, a large wine list, and cocktails that include the Green Ghoul, Mangonada, Circus Permit, and Fino Martini Service.

What gives the room its useful tension is that the setting can take a celebration, while the cooking still remembers the compact kitchen. The pass does not need to explain that connection. It shows up in the order of the meal: rolls, raw bar, pasta, fire, sauce, a glass set down at the right moment.

A steakhouse measured by restraint

Sunny’s was added to the Michelin Guide in March 2025, and the restaurant has drawn national attention in the same year from publications tracking new American dining. Awards can name the room, but they are less precise than the work Hynes keeps returning to: a steakhouse plate that knows when to stop. If the meal has a signature instruction, it is still there in the Parker house rolls with honey butter.