If you don’t like Fox’s, perhaps we can’t be friends.
To be fair, not everyone will appreciate the vibe of the “darkest bar in Miami.” A whole lot of you probably won’t get a dive bar where the specialty is called “thumb bits.” You’re probably going to hover there in the door waiting for something to open up finally, and you might not like that one bit.
But look. Fox’s Lounge is so steeped in wood-paneled nostalgia—from the prime rib on Tuesdays and Thursdays only, as it’s always been, to the sidecars served with cocktails—that you immediately feel like it has always been your place.
A lot of people made Fox’s their regular haunt since it opened in 1946, and they wept when it closed in 2015 to make room for some developer’s multi-use bullcrap. When that didn’t happen, the guys behind Lost Boy, Tropezón and El Salón swept in. The ways in which they worked to restore Fox’s seems almost maniacal. They had artists recreate paintings that, back in the day, might have seemed overpriced at a dime store. They sought out the folks that made the red leather banquettes and scored reams of fabric just before the company folded. The end result: Fox’s is just as unremarkable, just as outrageously dimly lit, as ever, just as it should be.
The menu looks like the one from the place your grandparents would’ve taken you if you were of the age when you sat between them on a Buick’s front bench seat.
This sentimentality continues even onto the Instagram page. There, you’ll find Polaroid-looking pictures taken with a too-bright flash. There’s even someone’s finger blocking the staff photo. Why’s the burger out of focus, and who’s this guy? It’s a big old serving of nostalgia pie.
As far as the food, the menu looks like the one from the place your grandparents would’ve taken you if you were of the age when you sat between them on a Buick’s front bench seat. There’s a grilled cheese sandwich, a tuna salad plate and a platter of shrimp butterflied and fried, just like at Bob’s Big Boy. The cheeseburger deluxe is a tower of double patties, dressed but still too dry, served with crinkle fries reminiscent of the ones mom dethawed. Burger King comes to mind with the onion rings, and the french dip is a simple two-ingredient affair of bread and meat until you sop up Fox’s special sauce and mild horseradish cream. The peanut butter pie comes with whipped cream looking like it came out of a spray can, dotted with walnuts and memories of, dunno, maybe a church picnic.
Those thumb bits, every table seems to order them. They’re chunks of tender sirloin on bits of garlic bread with a little bowl of that special sauce. Like a lot of what you get here, there’s not much to it, but you will also perhaps love it.
Like the food, the cocktails are from a previous generation, not all fancied up at some Prohibition bar but as simple and tidy as a 1950s suburban lawn. The Gibson is not messing around, just gin, dry vermouth and pickled onions. Order the dirty martini, which comes with a bit extra in a tiny glass goblet sitting in an ice bath, ready for a top-off. Nobody back in the bar steeped the vermouth for the manhattan in a tincture or some such—just a manhattan, served straight up and very cold.
Those drinks are the only thing you’ll get after the bar closes at 10:45. That’s when the lights go even lower, to the level where that old dude in the big booth in the back suddenly looks like the Marlboro Man, and the music changes from ‘50s stuff to something more banging. College students take over about then from the of-a-certain-age clientele who stood in the entranceway earlier waiting for a no-reservation table.
By now you might be wondering why. Why all the love for a place that’s deliberately not that nice? Can someone who never went to the old Fox’s really appreciate a complete throwback? Let’s become regulars and find out.
