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Leku, a Basque restaurant inside Allapattah’s Rubell Museum, used to be a reliable place to eat fussy, tasty dishes after ingesting the art collection next door. But the restaurant’s pivot to seafood (it now calls itself Leku Fish & Garden) has made this a place you can walk right by on your way out of Rubell.
The new menu tries too hard to be cutting edge, with dishes like “sea-cuterie” featuring tuna, salmon, and shrimp all doing bad impressions of sausages. Fish entrees are somehow both dull and chaotic, especially a forgettable tuna loin made memorable thanks to an unpleasant, over-funked coffee and cabrales sauce. And for a restaurant attached to one of Miami’s best museums, Leku just lacks style. The massive painting above the bar, a pop-surrealist recreation of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam,” is at odds with the bare dining room, which looks like a construction crew gave up halfway through building a fancy restaurant. This place doesn’t stand up to the great works of art it inevitably has to follow.