Thursday, June 28, 7:00 P.M.
Members $85, guests $110

Here at the Beard Foundation, we can spout off fashionable new cuisines with the best of them—Progressive Cuisine, Nuevo Latino, French-Asian Fusion, Contemporary American, Mediterranean-Inflected-California Cuisine, etc., etc. But we’ve got to admit we were more than a little intrigued when we heard about chef Johnny Vinczencz’s self-styled "New Floridean Barbecue Cuisine." At the fashionable Art Deco Astor Place Bar & Grill in trendy South Beach, Vinczencz combines boyhood taste memories of the heartland where he grew up with the tropical flavors that have seduced him in his adopted South Florida home, and he does so with perfect culinary pitch. As the New Times put it when they nominated him to their Best of Miami list, "Caribbean cowboy chef Johnny Vinczencz is relent-lessly innovative, mercilessly creative, ruthlessly talented."

Like many a chef, Vinczencz got his start as a dishwasher. In his case, the job was at the local Sheraton Hotel, and he was a lad of 15. He graduated to a cooking job, then worked his way up the line and ultimately served a three-year apprenticeship with Ziggy Alespach, then the head of the Culinary Federation of America. For the next decade, Vinczencz crisscrossed the United States, working in the catering/banquet divisions at a number of Sheraton and Marriott hotels. He particularly enjoyed an assignment in Florida, and vowed to return one day. When that day came, he sought out celebrated New World Cuisine chef Norman Van Aken, then at a Mano, to be his mentor. Next, he moved on to Raleigh Blue Star, which he helped open. That job was followed by sous-chef stints at Maxaluna and Max’s Grille in Boca Raton. He came to the gorgeously restored Astor Place in 1995.

There, "the beautiful people give him standing ovations nightly," according to Restaurant Hospitality, which named him a rising star in 1997. One year earlier, Esquire had listed him as a "chef to keep your eye on." Vinczencz appeared on the cover of South Florida magazine, which called him "a culinary treasure." As for The Miami Herald, the headline of its review of Astor Place said it all: "Setting Divine, Flavors Sublime."