The celebrated chef brought his distinctive approach to diasporic cooking to South Beach with Las’ Lap, drawing on Trinidadian roots, Miami’s Caribbean communities and the stories that travel with food.
There are chefs who cook to impress you, and then there are chefs who want you to remember something.
Kwame Onwuachi belongs to the second category. His cooking has always carried a sense of autobiography: a little New York, a little Louisiana, a little Nigeria, and the unmistakable influence of a family history that refuses to fit neatly inside a single culinary tradition.
For Onwuachi, a plate can be an archive. A familiar ingredient can become a passport. And a restaurant, at its best, can tell a story about where we come from, where we have traveled and what we have brought along.
That sensibility arrived in Miami Beach with Las’ Lap, the restaurant and rum bar where Onwuachi joined the New York hospitality team as chef and partner. The project gave him a new setting in which to explore a deeply personal part of his culinary identity: his Trinidadian heritage.
It was not simply another celebrity-chef opening. It was an opportunity to let the Caribbean speak in a city where its influence is already woven into the cultural fabric.
A family history on the menu
Onwuachi’s connection to the Caribbean is not an aesthetic exercise. His grandfather is from Trinidad, and that family connection helped inspire the partnership.
Speaking with Resy ahead of the restaurant’s opening, Onwuachi explained, “My grandfather is from Trinidad, so I thought this was the perfect partnership where I can add to their story.”
That sentence offers a useful way into his cooking. The food is not presented as a museum exhibit or a nostalgic exercise. It is a living conversation between inheritance and imagination.
At Las’ Lap, West Indian traditions meet the broader culinary influences of South Florida. The menu has included dishes such as escovitch crab claws, South Beach snapper, Caribbean-spiced bucatini with clams, Haitian-inspired wagyu griot and an oxtail Cubano with Wagyu bacon.
The combinations are deliberate. They recognize that Caribbean food is not a single, fixed category. It is a collection of histories shaped by migration, trade, colonization, resistance, adaptation and the everyday creativity of people making a home in new places.
Miami, with its Haitian, Jamaican, Trinidadian, Cuban and broader Latin American communities, offers a particularly rich landscape for that kind of conversation.
“I drew inspiration from the different cultures of Miami,” Onwuachi told Resy. “From Haitian to Latin … I looked at what the locals enjoy and created dishes that I felt expressed my culinary style through their palates.”
It is a revealing description of his approach: not simply bringing a menu to a new city, but listening to the city before deciding what belongs on the plate.
The Las’ Lap idea
The Miami restaurant grew from a conversation with Ryan Shaffer, a founding partner of the original Las’ Lap on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The name refers to the final hour of Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago—a fitting reference for a concept that treats dinner as only the beginning of the evening.
The Miami version was designed to move between restaurant, rum bar and nightlife destination. Located at The Daydrift hotel on Park Avenue in Miami Beach, the project brought together a dining room, outdoor setting and rooftop atmosphere.
The distinction matters. Onwuachi was not merely lending his name to a menu. Contemporary coverage identified him as a chef and partner, with a role in shaping the restaurant’s culinary identity.
The ambition was to create something that felt at home in Miami rather than a transplanted New York concept. The food, drinks and atmosphere were meant to move together, with Caribbean flavors at the center and the city’s own cultural mix informing the experience.
That is a more interesting proposition than simply opening another fashionable restaurant in South Beach.
The chef behind the story
Onwuachi’s career has never followed a particularly predictable script.
Raised across New York, Nigeria and Louisiana, he developed a relationship with food that was shaped by movement, family and the experience of navigating different cultural worlds. He trained at the Culinary Institute of America and came to national attention through Top Chef.
His early restaurant career included a high-profile Washington, D.C. opening, the Shaw Bijou, which closed shortly after its debut. It was a difficult chapter, but not the end of the story.
He returned with Kith/Kin, where his cooking drew on Afro-Caribbean influences and personal history. In 2019, the James Beard Foundation named him Rising Star Chef of the Year.
Then came Tatiana at Lincoln Center in New York, a restaurant that brought his storytelling sensibility into a setting that was unmistakably his own. Its menu drew on the foodways of the African diaspora and the neighborhoods, memories and experiences that shaped him. The New York Times named Tatiana its top restaurant in New York in consecutive years.
His later work has continued to expand that conversation, including Dōgon in Washington, D.C., and Maroon, his Caribbean steakhouse project in Las Vegas.
Across these projects, the common thread is not a particular cuisine. It is a point of view.
Onwuachi has spoken about the connections between dishes that are often treated as separate traditions. West African okra soup and gumbo. Jollof rice and jambalaya. Foods that carry different names and histories but reveal a remarkable conversation across geography.
In an interview with The Talks, he offered a concise description of what makes a dish meaningful: “If a dish tells a story, it has a soul—you’re not just cooking for perfect seasoning.”
It is a philosophy that helps explain why his work resonates beyond the restaurant world. He is not simply asking diners to try something unfamiliar. He is inviting them to recognize the relationships between things they may already know.
Miami is more than a backdrop
There is a temptation, particularly in restaurant coverage, to treat Miami as a collection of beautiful rooms, expensive cocktails and fashionable openings. But the city’s food culture is far more layered than its postcard image.
Its Caribbean communities have shaped the region’s restaurants, markets, music, neighborhoods and everyday dining habits. The influences are not new arrivals. They are part of the city’s foundation.
That makes Onwuachi’s Miami project especially interesting. His approach acknowledges that Caribbean food does not need to be introduced to Miami. It needs to be interpreted with care, imagination and respect for the people who have sustained it.
The strongest dishes at Las’ Lap reflected that balance: familiar traditions given a new frame, ingredients and preparations placed in conversation rather than arranged as novelty.
The oxtail Cubano, for example, suggested a meeting of culinary histories rather than a simple mash-up. The Haitian-inspired griot and the Trinidadian references pointed toward a wider Caribbean dialogue.
The point was not to make every culture taste the same. It was to show how much those cultures have always been speaking to one another.
A Miami chapter still unfolding
Las’ Lap opened in August 2025 and received an enthusiastic early response. Time Out Miami awarded it five stars in its November review, praising its atmosphere and its ambitious approach to Caribbean and South Florida influences.
But the restaurant’s story has also taken an unexpected turn. Las’ Lap closed for a summer pause on June 28, 2026. Subsequent local reporting described uncertainty around its reopening, while the restaurant’s own website has continued to present the Miami location and reservation information.
That distinction deserves attention. A restaurant’s digital presence is not the same as a confirmed reopening, and the status of the physical operation should be established before anyone makes plans to visit.
For Onwuachi, however, the significance of the Miami chapter is larger than a single opening calendar. It offered another opportunity to explore the relationship between personal history and place—to take the food traditions that shaped him and allow them to meet a different city.
His career has been built around that kind of movement. From New York to Washington, from the Caribbean influences of his family to the many cultures that shape American food, he has made a compelling case for cooking that is both deeply personal and expansive.
The most memorable chefs do more than feed a room. They give diners a way to see the world differently.
Onwuachi’s Miami story reminds us that the Caribbean is not one flavor, one island or one story. It is a constellation of histories, and its influence continues to travel—through families, neighborhoods, music, memory and, of course, the food.
And sometimes, the most interesting thing a chef can do in a new city is not introduce himself.
It is listen.
Mood Magazine | Cuisine
