Sporting four gold skull-shaped rings on his right hand, Roman Jones points to a vacant lot across the water from Kiki’s on the River, his Mediterranean restaurant that caters to a jet-setting crowd on the outskirts of downtown Miami.
“I’m going to call it Pirata,” Jones said. “It’s going to be a more affordable place for locals where you can show up in flip-flops, shorts and a baseball cap.”
Jones motions to another property, where a blue one-story building sits, shuttered, near the Flagler Street drawbridge. “That was Captain Tom’s, and it was the oldest restaurant on the Miami River,” Jones said, his accent giving away his British and French roots. “We’re going to bring it back.”
The concept will be a combination of the Crab House, another defunct Old Miami seafood restaurant, and a Smith & Wollensky steakhouse that’s less expensive than both Kiki’s and his most recent venture next door, Moroccan restaurant Habibi.
“It’s not gonna be as pricey,” Jones said. “Obviously, I’m going to try to be a little more realistic.”
Jones carved his place in the hospitality industry when he owned some of the biggest nightclubs in Miami Beach. Since 2017, he’s been working on his restaurant row, investing more than $25 million in land purchases, and millions more in lease agreements and renovations for eight properties along the Miami River that span 2.6 acres and have a combined 1,360 square feet of river frontage. Not all the sites are adjacent to each other, but if Jones builds every venue he envisions, he will have 55,000 square feet of restaurant space along the riverfront.
This is bigger than dining: Jones wants to remake Miami River into a culinary district, but the play hinges on the parallel success of condo and multifamily developers building nearby. If thousands of new residents buy up units in planned towers on or near the Miami River, by big names like Alan Faena, Standard International and Terra, his establishments will have a steady stream of clientele who dine at every price point.
Yet, some developers and land brokers rely on the chic cache Jones is bringing to the Miami River in their marketing materials, said Christian Arrabal with AdviseCRE, who has handled Jones’ deals. “They’re showing off Kiki’s lifestyle,” Arrabal said. “I think it’s really a testament to his decision to divest from Miami Beach.”
The strategy will test Jones’ track record of being a frontrunner in South Florida hospitality’s most lucrative trends and real estate ventures.
“I’m pretty good at figuring out what’s next and what’s moving,” Jones said. “And when I look at a location, I don’t come with any preconceived notions. I always try to stay within scale.”
From fast food to fast life
Jones was bound for life in the fast lane. His father, Mick Jones, co-founded the rock group Foreigner. His mother managed nightclubs in Paris where he sometimes spent nights during his childhood hanging out in the DJ booth. He’s got impeccable timing, arriving in Miami about a month before Hurricane Andrew ravaged South Florida in 1992.
“The ground floor of my girlfriend’s father’s house was under water,” Jones recalled. “Sailboats were in the middle of the road. Just insanity I had never seen.”
In the aftermath, Miami Beach began to blossom into the American Riviera. Models, fashion photographers and the late Gianni Versace took over Ocean Drive, replacing the aging retirees who, post World War II, had turned the city’s most famous stretch into God’s waiting room. “It was also the end of the Cocaine Cowboys era,” Jones said. “You’d go to a nightclub and people would literally shake the doorman’s hand with a baggie of cocaine.”
“The good thing about Taco Bell University is that it actually taught me how to run margins really tightly. They control costs down to a micro level. It’s helped me later in life with my restaurants.”
At the time, Jones worked in the fast food industry, opening small dining spots inside mall food courts using skills he learned from taking college business courses offered by Taco Bell. “The good thing about Taco Bell University is that it actually taught me how to run margins really tightly,” Jones said. “They control costs down to a micro level. It’s helped me later in life with my restaurants.”
By the late nineties, Jones had leapt to nightlife, becoming a partner in Opium Group with French brothers Eric and Francis Milon who ran Living Room, one of the first successful clubs in Miami Beach. For more than a decade, Opium Group dominated the scene, with Prive, Opium Garden, the Cameo, Mansion and Mokai.
In 2019, the partnership ended just as Miami Beach’s run as a nightclub mecca was approaching its own sunset. New venues in Brickell, downtown Miami and Wynwood stole the crowds that used to make the trek over the causeways.
“I think that kind of just sucked the life out of Miami Beach,” Jones said. “Miami Beach is pretty much dead.”
Next (water)front
For much of its existence, the Miami River, a six-mile channel that runs from near Miami International Airport to Biscayne Bay, has served as a blue collar port where cargo ships ferry goods between the Magic City and the Caribbean and Latin America. Boat repair yards and junk sites cluster there too. The city of Miami spent $89 million in government grants to dredge and clean up the river over a 10-year span, but the body of water is still among the most polluted in South Florida, according to published reports.
Yet, Miami River frontage has turned into prime land. Since the first local real estate boom after the 2008 recession, developers have set their sights on the river, specifically the stretch between Brickell and downtown Miami. Between the two neighborhoods, more than 7,000 condos and apartments have been built along the Miami River, and more than 10,000 units are in the pipeline, including a Faena-branded, two-tower project with 440 luxury condos.
Jones turned his attention to the Miami River, opening Kiki’s in 2017 to tone down his late-night work schedule and evolve his party business model.
Kiki’s and Habibi close at midnight. “I want to be in bed by 2 o’clock in the morning,” he said. “In the nightclub business, people don’t start showing up until 2 o’clock in the morning.”
When the pandemic hit, with restaurants forced to shut down and then to limit capacity, Jones felt anxious for months.
“You feel responsible for the people that work for you,” he said. “It was really tough being under that pressure. Sometimes, we skirted the law by staying open when we shouldn’t have necessarily been open. ”
Once all business restrictions were lifted in the summer of 2020, Kiki’s enjoyed a boom fueled by out-of-staters temporarily or permanently moving to Miami. The rally reinvigorated Jones’ belief in the Miami River.
“The best remedy for anxiety and stress is to have a good time,” he said. “Covid just killed New York and it reestablished Miami as a No. 1 destination.”
In 2022, Jones bought his first property on the Miami River, paying $20 million for a four-story office building with a boat dock at 528 Northwest Seventh Avenue, records show. He plans to open a restaurant on the ground floor. The same year, he entered into a ground lease for the single-story building at 452 Northwest North River Drive where he recently opened Habibi.
“Tourists and locals want to get on a yacht,” Jones said. “And they want to pull up to places on the river on a boat.”
The following year, Jones purchased an auto repair shop at 666 Northwest 6th Street across from Habibi and Kiki’s for $5 million. He plans to use a portion of the site as a storage lot for his restaurants; the seller also entered into a long-term lease for the auto shop, Jones said. Last year, Jones dropped $2.5 million for a closed church built in 1950 at 28 Northwest North River Drive that he wants to convert into a wedding chapel and event space.
Jones gets all these deals because he has a good reputation.
“With Roman, he closes on time, on budget and doesn’t request extensions,” AdviseCRE’s Arrabal said. “Those are stories that help solidify the next deal.”
In addition to the purchases, Jones also recently secured a lease for a space at 5 Southwest South River Drive for Call Me Gaby, an Italian and French bistro, and entered into a partnership with the family that operates Casablanca’s Seafood, a restaurant and fish market on the same block as Kiki’s and Habibi.
Eventually, Jones plans to convert Casablanca’s into a Venice-style seafood restaurant. This restaurant row is for everyone.
“I’m really bent on programming everything so I can appeal to every segment of Miami,” he said.
