Aba arrived at Bal Harbour Shops on 2 November 2022, the first Miami project from the Chicago hospitality group Lettuce Entertain You, built around the cooking of Top Chef alum CJ Jacobson with Marc Jacobs as executive partner. It occupies a rooftop position at 9700 Collins Avenue with a lounge-style terrace, and the menu is explicitly vegetable-forward — which in practice means the section of the menu most restaurants treat as the warm-up is the part you should be ordering from.
The right way to eat here is a table of dips and bread rather than a main each, and the rooftop and the dining room fill at different hours. Ask Karpo how to build an Aba order for your group size and when to book.
Order the dips like they are the main course
The assortment of dips is the signature, and two in particular make the argument. One is a carrot dip built with sunflower tahini rather than sesame — a substitution that changes the whole profile, giving a nuttier, slightly sweeter base than the standard. The other is an avocado hummus finished with Dungeness crab, which reads on paper like a Miami flourish and on the plate like a genuinely good idea.
The correct order for a table of four is three or four dips, the bread that comes with them, one or two vegetable dishes and a single shared protein — not a main each. That is how the menu is constructed and how the kitchen intends it to be eaten. Ordering four separate mains at a restaurant like this is the most reliable way to have a merely fine dinner in a room capable of a very good one.
What 'vegetable-forward Mediterranean' actually means here
It is not a vegetarian restaurant. It is a restaurant where the vegetables are treated with the same seriousness as the fish and the lamb, which in Mediterranean cooking is closer to the tradition than the meat-centred version most American restaurants serve. Char, acid and fat do most of the work; the cooking style tends to put things over high heat and then dress them aggressively rather than build long sauces.
The practical upshot is that this is one of the easier upmarket restaurants in Miami to eat well at if you do not eat meat, and one of the few where a table split between vegetarians and everyone else does not require negotiation.
Bread deserves a line of its own. Dips of this kind are only as good as what carries them, and a table that runs out of bread halfway through four bowls has effectively wasted half the order. Ask for more before you think you need it; it is the cheapest correction available on a bill of this size.
The rooftop is a timing decision
The terrace is the reason to choose this over the many other Mediterranean restaurants in Miami, and it is worth treating the timing deliberately. The restaurant is open daily for dinner from 4pm to 11pm, with weekday lunch and weekend brunch as well, which gives you a wide range of very different experiences at the same address.
Late afternoon on the terrace, before the dinner rush, is the best version and the least contested. Peak dinner between seven and nine is the most crowded and the hardest to book. Weekend brunch is a different restaurant again — brighter, louder, and more about the room than the food. Pick according to what you want rather than defaulting to eight o'clock.
Wind is the terrace variable nobody mentions. A rooftop on the northern barrier island catches whatever is coming off the Atlantic, which is pleasant for most of the year and genuinely disruptive on a blustery winter evening. If the forecast is breezy, ask for the sheltered side or take the indoor room; the food is identical and the conversation is easier.
Bal Harbour, and what it costs you to get there
Bal Harbour Shops is a luxury retail centre at the northern end of Miami Beach, and the restaurant sits inside that context rather than in a neighbourhood. That has predictable consequences: the price level is high, the dress code is smarter than most of Miami, and the surrounding blocks are residential towers and beach rather than a bar strip you can wander into afterwards.
Collins Avenue north of the main South Beach cluster is a long, slow drive at peak hours and the traffic up the barrier island is the single most underestimated part of the evening. Valet parking at the centre is the standard arrival. If you are staying in South Beach, budget considerably more time than a map suggests, particularly on a weekend.
Practical notes
Aba is at Bal Harbour Shops, 9700 Collins Avenue, Suite 101, Bal Harbour, FL 33154. It opened on 2 November 2022 from Lettuce Entertain You with chef CJ Jacobson and executive partner Marc Jacobs, and is the group's first Miami restaurant. It is open daily for dinner from 4pm to 11pm, with weekday lunch and weekend brunch. The menu is vegetable-forward Mediterranean and the dip selection is the signature — the carrot dip with sunflower tahini and the avocado hummus with Dungeness crab are the two to start with. Order three or four dips plus vegetables and one shared protein for a table of four rather than a main each. The rooftop terrace is best in the late afternoon before the dinner rush. Valet at the shopping centre is the normal arrival; allow extra time for Collins Avenue traffic.
Tags: #MediterraneanFood #MiamiRestaurants #AbaMiami #BalHarbour #RooftopDining #CollinsAvenue #Mezze #Hummus #MiamiEats #VegetableForward #ThingsToDoInMiami #MediterraneanNearMe #MiamiDining #SunsetDinner
Sources consulted: lettuce.com · modernluxury.com · balharbourfl.gov
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Ask Karpo first
Want to know whether the terrace has space tonight, which dips are on right now, and how long the drive up Collins Avenue will actually take? Ask Karpo for a workable Aba booking window, an order built for your table size, and a realistic departure time from where you are staying.
