Thursday, September 25, 7:00 pm
Members $90, guests $115

The moon over Miami shines on rising star Alan Hughes, one of the most epicurious young executive chefs this side of the Gulf Stream.

Take a good look around Miami’s Buena Vista East neighborhood and notice the emerging scene—anchored by the hip, instant-hit One Ninety Restaurant. After its first year, One Ninety was rated in Zagat’s Top 5 food newcomers in 2003. This is not your father’s Miami, with early-bird specials and all-you-can-eat buffets. This is the cutting edge of Little Haiti, the revitalized design district that is part of Miami’s cultural renaissance in film, fashion, and entertainment. This is where locals of all persuasions are bumping elbows with gourmet seekers from coast to coast—at Alan and Donna Hughes’s first solo establishment.

Only it’s hardly establishment. Former supermodel-turned-designer Donna runs the front of the house, notably low in velvet rope attitude and high in designed funk. It’s a storefront with great taste; it’s a hip counterculture hangout, graced with Alan Hughes’s eclectic fusion cuisine.

Hughes, a native of Argentina, brings ten years of international creativity to the plate. From his roots at New York’s Sarabeth’s, Hughes has cooked and baked his way around the globe, from Spain to Mexico. He’s willing to experiment, yet is grounded by solid principles garnered from his apprenticeship with Francis Mallmann in Argentina and from his schooling at the French Culinary Institute.

Hughes has carved his niche as a new-millennium, breakaway neighbor of the now famous “mango gang,” the early ’90s South Florida chefs who became known for their New World Floribbean cuisine. The Miami Herald’s Kendall Hamersly suggests you check out One Ninety before the neighborhood completely emerges. He recommends the unusually light mushroom risotto cooked with a potpourri of portobello, oyster, and porcini mushrooms. Topped with raw enokis, the result is “pure mushroom with a whimsical look and fresh-tasting finish.” Pay special attention to dessert (who doesn’t?). While pastry chef at Nemo’s in Miami and Casa la Femme in New York, Hughes truly spread his culinary wings.

Heralded by the local press, One Ninety was awarded Best Foie Gras as well as Best Neighborhood Bar by the Miami New Times. On Sundays, the queue stretches block-long for brunch, “an unimpeachable, downright unbelievable spread,” Pamela Brandt wrote in the Miami New Times.