Miami gets pretty hot, especially in August, but on the 16th floor of Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants’ Epic Hotel, there’s typically a nice, cool breeze and wonderful views of the Miami River and nearby Brickell. There’s a hot restaurant there too, named after the nearby fishing region known as Area 31, which stretches across the Florida coast into the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea. Most of the fish served by Chef John Critchley at Area 31 are from there, including Key West pink shrimp, escolar and mahimahi.
Critchley was invited to prepare sustainably harvested blackgill rockfish from California’s Morro Bay at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Cooking for Solutions event in May, and his interpretation — slices of lightly seared fillets paired with Vidalia onions and topped with a chestnut purée and salsa verde — was so memorable that we had to know more about him.
To read SeaFood Business Associate Editor James Wright’s interview with Critchley, click here. Wright’s Networking column ran in the August issue of SeaFood Business magazine.
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