Miami Brunch: A review

Every Sunday we talk about going to brunch, but we never do. This Sunday we broke that routine. I have been hearing alot of things about Sugarcane Raw Bar, and their menu looked interesting so we drove over to Midtown to check it out.

Sugarcane has great decor. We walked into a lush patio area and they immediately sat us outside in the shade. This is the best time of year to sit outside, while seeing that everyone else is 10 feet under snow after all, but I digress. As we looked around, I realized that the restaurant has one major failure - staffing. We were outside at around 1:30 on a Sunday at a place that offers brunch. There were at least 7 other tables sitting in our same courtyard and there was 1 waiter. one. That's setting the poor guy up to fail, I mean, brunch is huge on South Florida weekends, and you have one waiter? There's no way you are going to get good service unless your bussers and runners are epic. Which brings me to my second point. We had to ask for water several times. The bussers were walking around with trays and blank looks on their faces, like they weren't quite sure how they got there and what they were supposed to do.

Our waiter finally got to our table, was very apologetic and quickly took our orders. He had good knowledge of the menu, and checked back a few times to let me know my coffee was on it's way, but the coffee guy took awhile. It was well worth the wait. My cappuccino was amazing, close to what I had in Italy. In between getting our drinks and our food, one foodrunner kept trying to bring us someone else's food. When we got our food, the runner totally forgot to bring an entire part of El Hombre's meal.

My meal was fantastic though. I got the flatbread because I had read that it was a great dish, and it was truly tasty. It was a thin bread with tomato, squash, zucchini, asparagus, mushroom and manchego, topped with an egg. It was almost a little pizza and it was well worth the wait.

At this point our waiter came back, we complained that part of El Hombre's meal was missing and he quickly got us a discount on our ticket.

My synopsis? Food was great and very reasonably priced, but the management needs to work on the staffing, big time. As in, train their bussers and runners (which, honestly, anyone can do) and have more servers working. And make sure their servers maintain the excellent attitude that our guy had.. poor guy was totally in the weeds, but was polite, helpful and apologetic to everyone around us.