There’s no real reason to anchor this post with a photo (courtesy of Showtime) of Michael C. Hall in Dexter, except that the show is set in Miami, where we visited recently—and surely the Chamber of Commerce won’t complain about having an exceptionally attractive serial killer serve as a poster boy for their city. We could have used Jackie Gleason, I suppose, but where are the sex and sizzle in that?
What a gorgeous relief from the Manhattan skyline in winter. In Miami, you have the jeweled aquamarine tones of the water and, along all the shores, shiny new buildings touched with bursts of colored light at night: It’s like a city that somehow got into its head that it was really a cocktail bar.
New York had Robert Moses. Miami seems more like a resort dreamed up by the owner of Moss (a Manhattan hallmark of the Vivosian lifestyle). Playfulness, frivolity and prettiness were key accents of two hotel-lobby “scenes” Aldo and I investigated on a balmy, moonlight-saturated Friday. First was the new Mondrian on West: The concept is a consciously mod white-on-white fantasy of smooth gleaming molded plastic/fiberglass. Near the front entrance, where Aldo was stunned by the Gatsybesque sheen of someone’s parked Rolls convertible, one found an inspiredly silly automat, bathed in fuchsia light, selling jewelry, T-shirts and a paperback of The Valley of the Dolls (which, in case you didn’t know, is the source of our Patty Duke photo up top). In the main area, chandeliers were hung within giant golden bells. Moving outside, we were delighted with the poolside “umbrellas,” a sort of Jeff Koons sight gag: they were shaped into enormous table lamps.
The revelers were young and gorgeous and loud, except for one or two very old exceptions who were vigilantly lacquered and cossetted and watchful. If this scene ever gets old, it will be like them. It will be Liberace. How sad.
Next we hopped over to the renovated and recently reopened Fountainebleau, where we had a nightcap in the exquisitely tiled front room of Scarpetta (it has a sister restaurant here in Manhattan). The atmosphere there was somewhere between waterfront dock and Milanese fashion house. The Fontainebleau, designed by Morris Lapidus and opened in 1954, boasts an eye-seducingly luxe interior so full of polished stone, gleaming detail and undulating curves it suggests a Taj Mahal created to house the remains of Marilyn Monroe. The crowd wasn’t as hip as at the Mondrian, but the sense of space and flow and stone-cooled air were irresistible. (The Mondrian’s lobby-level staircase, by the way, seems to be an homage to the Fontainebleau’s famous “Staircase to Nowhere.”)
The newly popular Design District, oddly enough, didn’t offer nearly as much high-design amusement: it felt distinctly emptied out and Edward Hopperishy. But we enjoyed a very good meal outdoors there at Michael’s Genuine: The skirt steak came with a memorably rich green-olive aioili that I wanted to smear over everything, my forearms included. A few nights later, straight up Key Biscayne Boulevard by another forty blocks, we found our favorite meal at Michy’s. Aldo had a salad with beans and walnuts that he said was one of the best he ever had in his long and terrifyingly eventful life.
We always have lunch at that Little Havana mainstay, Versailles, which in its own décor of chandeliers and paneled mirrors is just as impeccably overdesigned as the Mondrian or Fontainebleau: What makes it real, and appealing, are the waitresses. They seemed a bit tired and frayed, in the old Thelma Ritter manner, but brought the huge portions without fuss and without attitude.
Now we are back in New York, and missing it all. But we DVRed season three of Dexter, and we’ll settle for that.
