August 7, 2026
Who's In and Who's Out: Miami Spice 2026 vs. 2025
The official Miami Spice roster for 2026 lists 389 restaurants. The archived 2025 roster lists 379. On paper that's a quiet, boring year: up ten, business as usual, twenty-fifth edition, everybody clap. (The GMCVB publicly claimed a record 387 for 2025 and "more than 300" for 2026, which is its own small lesson in how these numbers get reported.)
The paper is lying. Underneath that +10 net, roughly 104 restaurants joined the program and roughly 94 dropped off. Better than a quarter of the 2026 roster — about 27 percent — wasn't on the 2025 list. That's not a stable institution adding a few names. That's a turnstile.
We pulled the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau's official participant list for 2026 and compared it against an archived snapshot of the same page from the 2025 season, then hand-matched the renames, relocations and rebrands that look like churn but aren't — ADRIFT Mare becoming ADRIFT Mare by David Myers, LT Steak & Seafood becoming LT South Beach, Ossobuco trading its Coconut Grove room for an Aventura one, and about a dozen more.
Two caveats before the names, because they matter. First, this is a comparison of two published rosters, not a survey — a restaurant absent from the 2026 list may have closed, may have been priced out, may simply have chosen to skip a year, and in a few cases may have joined too late for the snapshot. We're not claiming to know which. Second, the counts are approximate: Mareva 1939 is missing from the archived 2025 roster even though the bureau describes 2026 as its twentieth consecutive season, so at least one apparent "newcomer" is a listing artifact. Treat 104 and 94 as close, not exact.
The Newcomers That Matter
The 2026 class is unusually top-heavy. This isn't the year Spice picked up a dozen neighborhood trattorias — it's the year several of the loudest, most expensive rooms in Miami decided the program was worth their time.
Maple & Ash is the headline, in for 2026 along with its adjoining bar concept, Eight Bar. Tâm Tâm, the Michelin Bib Gourmand Vietnamese restaurant downtown, is a first-timer and probably the single best value proposition on the list. Grand Public, one of Coconut Grove's most-discussed recent openings, is on it. So are Da Angelino, the Italian concept from Graspa Group and Ariete Hospitality, and The Mexican, the Dallas import on Brickell Key.
Then there's the arrival that says the most about the program's direction. L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon — South Florida's only two-Michelin-star restaurant — declined to participate in 2024 and joined in 2026, the exact year the GMCVB introduced its $95-and-up "Miami Spice Reserve" tier. The three-course Robuchon lunch runs $95, Fridays and Saturdays only; the four-course dinner is $155. Read that however you like, but the sequence is hard to misinterpret: the top of the market wasn't going to play at $65.
The 2026 first-timers to book:
The Ones That Weren't Here Last Year
A separate group isn't new to Miami at all — they're established rooms that appear on the 2026 list and not the 2025 one, whether that's a return after a year off or a first appearance. Macchialina, the South Beach Italian standby, is on it. So are Papi Steak, Marion, Strawberry Moon, Torno Subito, Mango's Tropical Cafe, Cecconi's at Soho Beach House, Fooq's, Double Luck and Luma in Key Biscayne.
That's the part of the churn nobody talks about. A restaurant leaving the list isn't necessarily a verdict — plenty of them treat Spice as a lever they pull in the years they need it and skip in the years they don't.
On the 2026 list, absent from 2025:
Where Miami Spice Moved
The churn is geographically lopsided, and it doesn't map onto where you'd expect.
Coconut Grove is the year's biggest winner in absolute terms, up eight to 26 participants. Chop Steakhouse, Cotoletta, Manoli, Le Specialità, AVA, Drinking Pig, Sushi Garage's Cocowalk location, 1986 Steakhouse and Da Angelino all joined a neighborhood that had thinned noticeably by the end of last season. Brickell is up seven to 59, the largest single neighborhood after South Beach, adding Cactus Club Cafe, Amazónico, Rosa Sky, Seia, The Henry, Osaka Nikkei, Ockap and Edge. Downtown added Giselle, Yamashiro and El Cielo. South Miami grew from eight to twelve.
The losers are more surprising. Wynwood churned harder than anywhere in the county and came out down seven, from 32 to 25 — eight names in, fourteen out. Brooklyn Chop House, Manta, Otto and Pepe, Pari Pari, ZIVA, Ichimi and Cha Cha Chá joined; Shiso, Rosemary's, Salvaje, Lira Beirut, Novatore, Italica, Presidente Bar, Wyn Wyn, Zuri and SuViche's Wynwood room all came off. South Beach is down six, from 73 to 67. Little Havana nearly halved, from nine to five.
And Coral Gables and Doral finished exactly flat — 32 and 21 respectively — while the composition underneath changed substantially.
That last point is the one worth sitting with. A meaningful share of 2026's growth isn't new restaurants at all; it's existing chains and multi-location brands enrolling additional branches. Piccola Pizzeria went from zero locations to three. La Boulangerie Boul'Mich added three, for eight in total. 107 Taste added two. Fogo de Chão put a Kendall room in; True Food Kitchen came in at Pinecrest. The roster got bigger faster than the restaurant scene did.
New to Spice, worth the trip:
Cactus Club Cafe Downtown Miami
Who Came Off the List
The departures split into a few recognizable patterns.
Whole portfolios, all at once. This is the most striking thing in the data. All four Pubbelly Sushi locations came off. All four SuViche locations came off. Both Ruth's Chris steakhouses came off. Cooper's Hawk and The Hampton Social went too, and Earls and Gyu-Kaku each dropped a location while keeping another. When a single restaurant exits it reads like a scheduling decision; when a group withdraws every location simultaneously, that's a group-level call — though none of them has said publicly why.
The independents. Yardbird, Mr. Chow, MIMI Chinese, Narbona in the Grove, Mamey, Sra. Martínez, Brasserie Laurel, Mignonette, Elastika, Rosemary's, Novikov, Ironside Pizza, Golden Rule Seafood, MesaMar, Il Pizzaiolo, Meet Dalia, La Grande Boucherie, Shiso, Old's Havana and La Mulata are all on the 2025 list and off the 2026 one.
And some are simply gone. Blue Collar, Danny Serfer's Upper East Side restaurant and one of the most generous Spice participants the program ever had — he ran the entire menu, no upcharges — is no longer operating. So are Stiltsville Fish Bar, Dolce Italian and Paya. Summer is when Miami restaurants die; 2025 also took Caffe Vialetto after 26 years, Michelin-starred EntreNos, Osteria del Teatro after nearly four decades, and Itamae AO, which won a Michelin star in April and closed on August 2.
For the rest, there's no public statement, which is normal — almost nobody quits a restaurant week loudly, and as far as we can find, no Miami restaurant has ever done it on the record with a stated reason. What operators in other cities have said for years is that the discount attracts people who don't come back at full price, that tipped staff earn less for the same work, and that the fixed fee plus the prep burden makes it a heavy lift for a small kitchen. Whether any of that applies to the names above, we can't tell you.
The one Miami operator who has talked about it publicly is Josh Hackler, who skipped Spice at Los Felix and Krüs Kitchen in 2025, ran his own direct-to-locals deals instead, and reported higher summer profits than the year he participated. That's one data point, not a trend. But it's the only one anybody has put their name to.
On the 2025 list, off the 2026 one:
What the Churn Actually Tells You
Three things.
First, the program got more expensive and more stratified in the same year. Dinner moved from a reported $45 and $60 in 2025 — one local outlet had the lower tier at $49 — to $50 and $65 in 2026, with a $95 Reserve tier layered on top. That's a meaningful jump in twelve months, and it arrived alongside the highest turnover we can document. Some of the restaurants that came off the list may simply have looked at the new bands and decided the discount was no longer worth what it cost them.
Second, the headline number does a lot of work and says very little. "More than 300 restaurants" has been the bureau's line two years running. If the story were straightforward growth, you'd expect a stable core with additions at the edges. Instead better than a quarter of the roster rotated in a single year.
Third — and this is the part worth chewing on — the churn cuts in both directions on the question of who Miami Spice is now for. The 2026 additions lean toward chains, multi-location brands, hotel restaurants and a new luxury tier. But the exits are chain-heavy too: Pubbelly, SuViche, Ruth's Chris, Earls, Cooper's Hawk and Gyu-Kaku all pulled out. What's actually happening is faster rotation at both ends, in a program that started in 2002 with a single price point and about fifty restaurants and now spans four tiers and nearly four hundred. That kind of scale buys reach. It also makes the list a lot harder to read as a recommendation — which is a shift in what the thing is, even if nobody has announced it. It's the same dynamic that reshaped Miami's homegrown restaurant groups as they scaled.
If you want the full context on how the program works and what it costs restaurants to be in it, we've broken down the economics separately. And if you'd rather eat outside the prix-fixe entirely this summer, our roundups of Miami's best cheap eats and the Bib Gourmand end of the Michelin list don't require a promotional calendar.
One last practical note. Rosters shift after publication — restaurants join late, drop out quietly, and the bureau updates the list without announcing it. Before you go, confirm the menu, the price tier and which days the menu is actually served. Plenty of kitchens run Spice on selected weekdays only, and that's where most of the disappointment comes from.