As South Florida has become one of the most expensive places for dining out and for food and beverage tenants paying close to $100 a square foot for prime spaces, more local restaurants made an annual ranking of the 100 top grossing dining establishments in the country.
Fifteen South Florida restaurants are ranked in the 2025 Restaurant Business Top 100 Independents list.
Mila, a pricey Mediterranean restaurant with a private members club in Miami Beach, claimed first place with $51.1 million in revenue this year, supplanting last year’s No. 1 restaurant, Joe’s Stone Crab, another South Florida dining institution. Mila occupies a 13,000-square-foot rooftop space at 1636 Meridian Avenue owned by David Edelstein’s New York-based Tricap.
The restaurant, owned by Gregory Galy and Marine Giron-Galy, ranked second last year with $49 million in revenue. Galy is a restaurant and hospitality developer.
Joe’s, which has been around for 110 years in the same spot in Miami Beach’s South of Fifth neighborhood, dropped to third place in the latest Top 100 Independents list with $47.6 million in revenue. Last year, Joe’s generated $49.4 million to claim the top spot. The restaurant is part of a two-story building owned by Stephen Sawitz, Joe’s CEO.
The 13 other restaurants are ranked between 21 and 94 in the Top 100 Independents.
Four more restaurants made the Top 100 Independents than last year, when 11 South Florida dining establishments were on the list. Still, South Florida’s restaurant industry is going through some upheaval, Felix Bendersky with F+B Hospitality told The Real Deal.
“It was a tough year,” Bendersky said. “We saw a lot of restaurants close. The biggest misconception [that restaurateurs] have is what it takes to hit those numbers, even for the best of the best. When a landlord says. ‘I need a [tenant] that can do $30 million,’ you can count the number of people who can do it with one hand.”
The South Florida restaurants on the Top 100 Independents represent the top 1 percent of the tri-county region’s dining scene, Bendersky added. “Miami has become a place where there is no inbetween,” he said. “The ones that made the list are all part of fantastic groups that are the best at what they do.”
Other restaurants that made this year’s list include Komodo Miami at 26 with $23.1 million in revenue, Gekko Miami at 52 with $17.3 million in revenue and Papi Steak Miami at 64 with $15 million in revenue. David Grutman’s Miami Beach-based Groot Hospitality owns the three venues. Although Komodo Miami tumbled from sixth place last year, and Papi Steak Miami fell from 27th place in 2024. Gekko Miami was not on last year’s list.
Komodo Miami occupies a ground-floor space in an office tower at 801 Brickell Avenue owned by Miami-based Gatsby Enterprises. Papi Steak leases a space at 736 First Street in Miami Beach owned by Bernard Klepach, a North Miami business man who owns duty free shops at Miami International Airport. And Gekko Miami is in a ground-floor commercial unit of the SLS Lux Brickell condominium at Eight Southwest Eighth Street owned by a Delaware entity.
Dining out in Miami is more expensive than other U.S. metros such as Dallas, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, according to Chef’s Pencil, which analyzed the cost of a mid-range three-course meal in a city and compared it to the average monthly net wage there.
A mid-range three-course meal in Miami costs an average of $60. At Mila and Joe’s Stone Crab, an average meal can cost $188 and $120, respectively, according to the Top 100 Independents list.
