MIAReview
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings / @eatthecanvasllc
Tâm Tâm
Included In
Before it was an actual restaurant in Downtown, Tâm Tâm was a pop-up Vietnamese supper club. The kind of stylish dinner party one hopes their adulthood is filled with: string lights, long communal tables, and meet cute opportunities over passed plates of grilled shrimp.
Tâm Tâm the restaurant has retained that energy (and the shrimp). You still kind of hope someone you know will walk by the floor-to-ceiling windows and glimpse you inside, mid-sip of a spiked frozen Vietnamese coffee, at which point they will mentally nudge you towards the “cool” section on the pie chart of everyone they know. But where Tâm Tâm has taken off into another galaxy is the exhilaratingly delicious food, which is better than it’s ever been and incomparable to anything else that currently exists in Miami.
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings / @eatthecanvasllc
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings / @eatthecanvasllc
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings / @eatthecanvasllc
The menu is inspired by quán nhậu, a term for the places in Vietnam where people go to drink and eat. Some of Tâm Tâm’s best dishes, meant to be eaten with your hands, are messy. They are supposed to be. Toning down the fish sauce caramel on the sticky wings, the tamarind glaze on the pork ribs, or altering any aspect of the lamb wrap situation would only interfere with the end result, which tastes awfully close to perfection.
But if you need to make multiple trips to the bathroom to wash your hands, please do. For these are the greatest restaurant bathrooms of them all. One forces its users to break out into song (we don’t want to spoil how), and the other is what being a flea on a tiger must feel like.
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings / @eatthecanvasllc
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings / @eatthecanvasllc
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings / @eatthecanvasllc
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings / @eatthecanvasllc
To encounter something unexpected is the guarantee Tâm Tâm makes with its guests. There’s of course the food, such creative takes on an underrepresented cuisine in South Florida. But if you look between the bright colors that make the dining room pop, you'll see a sign advertising the daily batido options of yesteryear, and an old ventanita window. These are the bones of the Cuban restaurant that used to operate here—purposeful details to give you a sense of place—because at Tâm Tâm it is so easy to forget that you are, in fact, in Miami.
But you are. We promise.
Perhaps it's been too long since a restaurant recalibrated your understanding of what it feels like to eat in Miami. Same here. But that's what Tâm Tâm does. So make a reservation when you need a dinner that won’t compare to anything else. Because nothing, right now, comes close.
Food Rundown
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings / @eatthecanvasllc
Jungle Steak Tartare
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings / @eatthecanvasllc
Shimeji Mushroom
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings / @eatthecanvasllc
Tâm Tâm Wings
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings / @eatthecanvasllc
Tamarind Glazed Pork Ribs
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings / @eatthecanvasllc
Lamb Wrap Situation
photo credit: Cleveland Jennings / @eatthecanvasllc
Mama’s Whole Steamed Fish