Los Félix

The aim of Los Félix, as expressed in the leadup to its opening in 2021, was “to become the neighbourhood taquería.” Born of less haughty intentions—music, flavour, a new community—it’s doubtful that Michelin stars were on the table. Yet, now that Los Félix has retained its Michelin star for four years running, it appears that there might have been some degree of undue modesty in head chef Sebastian Vargas’ conception of this compact taco house on Miami’s Main Avenue.

A Miami destination, Los Félix has become a spot on the map for out-of-towners seeking access to the aesthetic of chic discernment that has underscored Miami’s burgeoning popularity. And in an age in which time-worn techniques of preparing and cooking ingredients are seemingly finding more and more traction amongst tradition-starved societies, nothing seems more appealing than a taco with ancient bona fides, made in the way the Aztecs might once have made it. Only five years old, Los Félix is the latest link in a chain that stretches back millennia.
As a restaurant, it’s hard to classify—part-Mexican joint, part-taqueria, part-natural wine bistro, part-denizen of contemporary haute cuisine—but as a philosophy, it’s more comprehensible. “Ancestral wisdom” is one way of putting it; Vargas uses the phrase to explain the restaurant’s name, an homage to the indomitable Mexican actress Maria Félix, who represents the deeply-ingrained knowledge of mothers and grandmothers across Latin America that have “preserved these traditions,” as well as “the female trailblazers who embody the fierce and the tender.”

The phrase also refers to the way ingredients are sourced and treated. If anything, Los Félix is a restaurant that revolves around one staple ingredient—corn—and, to be more particular, around its cultivation and nixtamalisation according to ancient techniques. Farmed in the Mesoamerican milpa tradition, in which maize gets intercropped with various agricultural products—beans or squash, for example—it then gets brought to Los Félix where a miller prepares it each morning using an in-house molino. Focused primarily on sourcing maize from Mexico, produce from other locations—from the Appalachians to Peru—maintains and promotes Vargas’ commitment to biodiversity. It’s a complete cycle, from milpa to mesa, the Aztec version of farm to table, and topped off with the most modern of touches: a glass of natural, biodynamic wine.

This style of refreshed traditionalism makes Los Félix a faultless fit on Main Avenue, one of the more historically significant thoroughfares in the Miami metropolitan zone. Just a few blocks away from the restaurant sits the oldest extant house in Miami-Dade County. Indeed, Coconut Grove itself, with its trademark banyan trees and broad avenues, is a historic core of the city and certainly one of its more storied neighbourhoods. Here, tales and fables abound; not far from the corner of Main and Grand, at the site of the old Convention Center, The Doors’ lead vocalist Jim Morrison is purported to have exposed himself to a fanatic audience and wound up being arrested for indecency. Call it an inspired homecoming—Morrison was, after all, a Central Florida child—or perhaps a spell of the eccentricity for which Florida is renowned, not everybody takes to it equally. Vargas certainly didn’t, at least not immediately. After a aperipatetic upbringing, he was hesitant about settling in Miami. “I need a lot of greenery, nature, mountains, rivers and sea,” he says. “And I didn’t see that here.”

Over the years, the winds of chance have taken him from Colombia to India, from France to Sweden, and finally to the United States. What credit for his culinary style he doesn’t lend to his mother, Vargas lends to his youth in Shahjahanabad, India. Memories of the spice markets linger in his food—not any particular spice, but the way a flavour profile can combine and form a layered construction. Though he gained entry into Le Cordon Bleu, Vargas only lasted two weeks, unable to stomach the anodyne, highly technical, “oh-so-French” approach to putting a plate together. So, off he went to learn from the most enterprising and daring chefs he could, with Swedish chef Magnus Nilsson being one of the more impactful. Yet, ultimately, it all comes back to his Colombian heritage, and the Indigenous culinary and agricultural customs of Mesoamerica.

Los Félix functions according to the fundamental concept of shared traditions and meanings. The idea of “the neighbourhood taqueria” is one way of expressing this; the tightly packed tables and open kitchen that characterise the restaurant’s layout are another. If eclecticism sings itself into view on the plate, it also appears in Los Félix’s trademark musical offerings—a vinyl record is always spinning somewhere, and on weekends late-night DJ sets complement the vitality of the menu. There’s a kind of social intimacy to the experience of Los Félix that plays well amongst a culture thirsty for communal sharing at a deeper-than-surface level. The people are the stimulus, ancient knowledge is the operative agent, and food—in this case, the “sacred substance” of maize—is the intermediary. Find a more timeless formula if you can. In Vargas’ words, “No technology will ever replace the act of bringing people together at a table and feeding them.”