Twenty-five years in restaurant years is several millennia in regular years, so it doesn’t come as a huge surprise that original Mango Gangster Allen Susser has pulled the plug on his signature eatery in Aventura, Chef Allen’s.
The move, according to reports, was prompted at least in part by the expiration of the restaurant’s lease. But even after a reinvention a couple years back that turned the haute Florida cuisine restaurant into a more casual, seafood-oriented bistro, at my last visit it seemed like the place had really run its course. The crash and burn of Delray’s Taste Gastropub, where Susser was consulting chef, wasn’t a happy moment either.
Susser will still be in the game, however, doing consulting and operating various Chef Allen’s concessions in the area. Combined with Mark Militello’s closing of his eponymous restaurants, Jonathan Eismann’s shuttering of his Design District eateries and Norman Van Aken’s virtual disappearance from the local restaurant scene (there are varying reports about how involved he actually is with Norman’s 180 in Coral Gables), it seems the elder generation of chefs who first put South Florida on the culinary map are starting to bow out.
