13 March 21-27, 2024 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com New Times | Contents | Letters | news | night+Day | Culture | Cafe | MusiC | Sunday, March 31 Come on down to the Garden with your family and friends for a day of springtime festivities. Enjoy music, Eggsplore Galore egg hunts, picnic baskets, Cottontail Express train rides, face painting, spin art, bubble bunny hop dance parties, story time, organized games with candy prizes and more! And for the adults we have special flights and other signature cocktails! SCAN FOR TICKETS Miami prides itself on being flashy so it’s no surprise that the menus at the city’s high-end Japanese restaurants often include glitzy accents - think caviar, gold leaf, and torched bone marrow. Álvaro Perez Miranda is bucking that trend, though, focusing not only on serving authentic cuisine at his four restaurants but also on representing Japa- nese culture as a whole. Clearly, he has succeeded. Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries named him a Goodwill Ambassador for Japanese Cuisine. A mere 187 people hold this honor worldwide, only 21 of those are in North America, and Perez Miranda is the first Latino in the US. Perez Miranda took a unique path to get here. Born into a modest family in Venezuela, he left home to study art - first in Italy, then Los Angeles. He began working in the restaurant industry to pay the bills and as he rose through the ranks he landed an op- portunity to open Italian restaurants in Tokyo. Over the course of nearly a decade, he would go on to build a 33-restaurant empire in the Land of the Rising Sun. Eventually yearning to reconnect with his Latin American roots, Perez Miranda made his way to Miami, where he first opened a restaurant in the emblematic Vagabond Hotel. Upon the suggestion of his teenage son, he decided to pivot to Japanese cuisine with his next venue, Wabi Sabi, which opened in 2018. Now his Miami portfolio includes the fast-casual Midorie, the high-end Hiyakawa, and the new omakase restaurant Ogawa, which debuted in late 2023. No matter which of these restau- rants they’re visiting, diners are immersed in three Japanese principles: ometenashi (selfless hospitality and anticipation of guest needs), komakai (attention to detail), and sensai (delicate balance of flavors). Perez Miranda is very much aware of the weight his ambassadorship carries. “It is a great honor to have my restaurants recognized by the Japanese government,” he says. “The goal has always been to edu- cate not just the U.S. but South America, as well, on the nuances of Japanese cuisine and culture - to transport the diner, as if they were in Japan, keeping it as authentic as possible.” ADVERTORIAL TRADITION OVER TREND How Álvaro Perez Miranda Became the First Latino Goodwill Ambassador for Japanese Cuisine Álvaro Perez Miranda of Art and Design faced criticism over its quashing of the research group Forensic Ar- chitecture’s plans to investigate the Home- stead Child Migrant Detention Center as part of an exhibition at the museum. The in- vestigation was canceled shortly after its an- nouncement at the opening, and the show closed shortly thereafter when the CO- VID-19 pandemic descended. Also in 2020, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the City of Miami Beach on behalf of a group of Black artists after the city removed a painting of Raymond Herisse at the request of the municipality’s police department. (Herisse was shot dead by Miami Beach police offi- cers in 2011.) A Moderate Scholar How does Edward Said figure into all of this? Born to a Palestinian Christian family in Brit- ish-administered Mandatory Palestine in 1935, he fled the country with his family dur- ing the 1947-49 war, which resulted both in the establishment of the State of Israel and the mass displacement of Palestinians known as the Nakhba. Be- coming an estab- lished and respected intellec- tual in the U.S., Said taught litera- ture at Columbia University and es- tablished himself as a major figure in postcolonial the- ory alongside the likes of Franz Fanon and Gayatri Spivak. His book Orientalism, a study of the patronizing, mar- ginalizing cultural view of the West toward Middle Eastern and North African people, is considered a foundational text in the field and is still read in universities nationwide. Alongside his polished academic reputa- tion, Said was a major figure in the Palestin- ian independence movement and worked for years for pro-Palestinian organizations in the U.S. He was critical of, yet accommo- dating toward Zionism for most of his ca- reer, advocating for a two-state solution until the Oslo Accords of the early 1990s failed to produce a true Palestinian state. A member of the Palestinian National Council for many years, he resigned in 1993 over dis- agreements with the Palestinian political es- tablishment and began to argue for a single Israeli-Palestinian state thereafter. In 2000, Said courted controversy after he was pho- tographed throwing stones at an Israeli guard post in southern Lebanon shortly af- ter the IDF’s 18-year occupation of that na- tion ended. He admitted to the act and called it “a symbolic gesture of joy that the occupa- tion had ended.” According to Alexander Cockburn in The Nation, “The FBI was probably tapping Edward Said’s phone right up to the day he died in September 2003.” Neither an aloof intellectual nor a militant, Said was a complicated figure in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but he has little to do with the present situation in Gaza. That makes his portrait’s disappearance from ICA’s walls all the more inexplicable. [email protected] CLOSER TO HOME, OTHER SOUTH FLORIDA MUSEUMS HAVE FOUND THEMSELVES EMBROILED IN CONTROVERSY OVER ALLEGED CENSORSHIP.
