What it does not involve is staying at an ostentatious $500-(or $5,000)-a-night Herod’s palace of a hotel and hobnobbing with i-bankers and anorexic scenesters with balloon breasts. Nor does it involve Art Basel, nightclubbing or being seen at whatever outrageously expensive new restaurant or louche dive bar is being buzzed about by Northern foodies.

Image Credit... The New York Times

Before my most recent jaunt in February, a model friend of mine (a veteran of Art Basel) complained, “Most of the allegedly cool stuff in Miami is actually stuff for New Yorkers who go there — it doesn’t have to do with Miami.”

I fervently agree. My theory about Miami, which has accreted like a coral reef over the years, is that, for the most part, it’s best to skip the “allegedly.” It’s the uncool stuff that’s cool about Miami — the salty fried food, the lime-drenched cocktails, the crowded beaches, the tawdriness, even the “touristic” stuff, as foreigners call it. All this bounty will remain after the hot spots of the present have evaporated and new hot spots replace them, as long as the sun, sand and sea remain.

THIS FEBRUARY, my allegiance to the uncool was tested the first night I arrived. I had brought Cressida, my best friend from New York, who was sleeping at our hotel on Ocean Drive while I took a long walk to assess what had changed in South Beach since my last visit. South Beach, like Manhattan, is a walking town, which means you can absorb the evolving cityscape through the soles of your feet. I’d been wandering for two hours on that balmy night, when, around 2 a.m., I spotted the glowing letters “CLUB DEUCE” above a bar on 14th Street, and recalled that an in-the-know New Yorker had urged me to check the place out, because, although Mac’s Club Deuce has been in South Beach forever, chefs from Miami’s most desirable restaurants have taken to going there after hours, which lends the place fresh cachet.

To me, going to Miami in search of cachet is like going to a strip club in search of Sunday school teachers; but the bar was across the street from one of my favorite hangouts, an unassuming restaurant called La Sandwicherie, where I suddenly resolved to get a café au lait. I decided to duck into Club Deuce for some chef-spotting first. I was halfway across the street when I overheard two flashily dressed patrons chatting by an idling limo that blocked the door. “No stretch marks, no bullet wounds, just sex, hot, hot sex!” one man raved to the other. Their cryptic, unsavory exchange was the jolt I needed to remind myself that I knew better than to go cachet-hunting in South Beach. I spurned the allegedly with-it, just in time, and returned to La Sandwicherie for my café au lait. La Sandwicherie, which looks like a cafe car on a train and has been there for a quarter century, lacks cachet but it was, I realized, my kind of with-it.