Miami Nights, which brought the “Sizzle of South Beach” to Westlake, closed its doors on January 30. The restaurant/dance club/curiosity opened just over a year ago, promising to bring “the eclectic cuisine and colorful nightlife of Miami” right here to sunny Northeast Ohio.
Dr. Joseph Girgis, a medical doctor with zero restaurant experience, told Scene at the time of opening, “I am passionate about gourmet food and believe that we are offering something completely new to the Cleveland dining and entertainment scene.”
Apparently, bottle service, VIP seating, DJs, and a menu of pricey steaks, chops and tuna, was a formula that did not appeal to the suburban clientele.
Local designer Aaron Sechrist, who early on experienced the magic within those four walls, offered this touching elegy, which he shared with Scene.
“I never left paradise and paradise never left me. RIP.”
This article appears in Feb 1-7, 2017.
This was doomed from the beginning. Why would anyone want to pay for bottle service in Westlake, Ohio?
My comment on the article when it opened…Not within a year but pretty darn close…Not trying to say I told you so, but….
PAUL
10/26/2015 AT 10:58 PM
30
DISLIKES
37
LIKES
Just like everything else on Sperry rd and in that location, it will close within a year….Especially trying to push bottle service…in Westlake? C’mon now.
REPORT
DISLIKE LIKE
Yeah you need to know what kind of people are in the neighborhood and somehow overly-rumped women squeezed into sausage casing dancing in heels on a lighted disco floor does not scream “Westlake”
Who charges a cover charge in Westlake!!!!
Wow…it lasted a whole 15 months? Why am I neither shocked nor surprised? Why the hell did you pick suburbia?
Cheaper than the inner city? Maybe, but ultimately DOOMED TO FAIL!
Told ya, doc!
Re: Miami Nights to Bring the Sizzle of South Beach’ to Westlake (posted 11/12/15)
Here’s your diagnosis, doc: WESTLAKE AIN’T CLEVELAND…AND NE OHIO AIN’T SOUTH FLORIDA.
Deal with it…and put your money into the stock market or something else. Stop dreaming.
Yeah, wait until mid-winter and “MIAMI NIGHTS” and 70s and ocean breezes…IN YOUR MIND…become “CLEVELAND REALITY…teens and twenties and zero wind-chill and squalls off the lake. And NOBODY showing up…especially on weeknights.
If you MUST piss your money away, then try your luck in one of the happening city hoods.. You went with WESTLAKE? SERIOUSLY? Who is your advisor and what is he smoking? Pass that pipe over to me, bro!
Again…Cleveland ain’t Miami…anymore than Miami is Cleveland…would a Midwestern-themed dump work down there? Then why should an “Eighties-themed Miami Vice” concept work up here? It is what it is, like it or leave it. Shit, man, ya gotta use your fucking noodle, doc…how did you ever make it through med school? WISE UP!
Chuckles the Clown
this fucking place.
showed up here with two of my girlfriends one weekend night and they tried charging us a $15 cover. trying to charge 3 women a cover? we said no and as we were walking away, the doorman said he’d waive the cover and let us in. upon walking in, we realized that the place was nearly empty. just a few employees milling around (a few waitresses and a DJ) and a handful of customers sitting at the bar. at 9pm on a friday night. we left and went next door to Outback..
The amazing thing is that it stayed open for a whole year…
Meanwhile, they obviously burned through what must have been a ton of money…
Chuckles the Clown
I think they stole those dancers from Now That’s Class
let’s go to duck key and fish off the pier joe, i mean joseph….sorry it didn’t work out. there’s always the keys….
Well, it’s easy criticize others from hiding behind a keyboard, but at least they deserve credit for taking a chance and invest in Ohio. It could have been a success if it was a bit more researched/thought out, but hey at least they’ve tried. Smart investors will learn from this. 🙂
It could have been a success if it was a bit more researched/thought out? Not really? The demographics were obviously not taken into account. Wrong age range, wrong lifestyle, wrong cultural norms.People who live in Westlake are not “boogie nights” types, and not the kind of folks who frequent dance clubs or the “eclectic cuisine and colorful nightlife of Miami…if they were, they would not be living in Westlake in the first place.
The suburban-based chains don’t need a lot of research or thought to know that putting a Friday’s or an Applebee’s in Ohio City or Tremont or Gordon Square would be a huge financial mistake. Hipsters and city folks wouldn’t go there, any more than conservative suburbanites want dance floors, club scenes, VIP seating, DJs, and all the rest of that “entertainment”. That’s strictly a city thing, and people who want that sort of shit will find a way to live in the city. Those who don’t…won’t.
This isn’t exactly rocket science, either. Anyone who knows Cleveland, or any other large city, knew immediately that this place, by choosing to focus on the people in the boonies, never had a prayer. Putting it more bluntly, would anyone with any common sense spend a fortune to put a German beer hall in Beachwood?
Chuckles the Clown
How many of you have opened/operated a restaurant? You can’t criticize someone unless they actually DO something. What have any of YOU critics done except harp on some guy that tried to make a go of his place. I’m glad I’m not a member of your “I told you so” group.
“You can’t criticize someone unless they actually DO something”
Are we allowed to criticize Hitler? How about the president? Or what if someone opens a bar called “poops” where they smear excrement on your food – can we criticize that?
That video looks like some sad 80’s place. Yuk.
To those who are defending the “risk” of doing something like this and “investing in Ohio” with this… you really need to screw your head on straight. At BEST, this is a teaching experience for someone who may never have owned a restaurant or club before. Maybe they’ll stay in the business and do it better next time (though they are still likely to fail again, statistically, even if they learn from this experience.)
Operating a successful restaurant is a lot more than buying a building and cooking decent food. Operating a bar moreso than that. Operating a club, well… you might as well just burn your money in the fireplace, based on the nationwide success rates of clubs even in hot locales. It is hard. Very hard. And even when you do everything 100% right, you’re still subject to trends and influences completely beyond your control.
This place MIGHT have lasted longer or turned a minimal profit if they had any intelligence and actually bothered to read their audience. That location on Sperry Rd is smack in the middle of the “Viagra Triangle” — the small group of restaurants frequented by single seniors on the West side. You think I’m joking… I’m not. The only hookup culture in Westlake is above the age of 65… and it’s a vibrant one.
Instead, they pulled the big-city crap of charging a cover, going for “VIP bottle service” and doing literally everything that is even starting to fail miserably in Vegas and LA. It’s like someone read a memoir of a club owner in the mid-2000’s and said “hey, I can do that!” without ever actually doing one iota of research into their market. Plenty of people would have loved to visit a decent restaurant on this side of town, with decent cocktails and a dance floor with thumping music on the weekends. There IS a market for that kind of establishment in Westlake.
… but not like this. They literally drove their business away. It wasn’t “brave”, and they weren’t “supporting the local economy”. It was colossally stupid and they let ego and dreams get in the way of actually giving the available clientele anything even remotely approaching what they actually wanted.
Good riddance.
Never new it existed!
” …the “Viagra Triangle” — the small group of restaurants frequented by single seniors on the West side. “
Wow…haven’t seen or heard that expression in a LONG time, but it made me recall a story I saw YEARS ago in the PD…and it used the same two words to describe the nightlife in Westlake. I think I even saved it for my files. But I lost a lot of stuff in a flood about six years ago. No idea what year it saw print, but it was ages ago.
“You think I’m joking… I’m not. ”
I know you’re not…ask anyone else who went to the old Savannah at Bradley Road and Detroit. Lots of cover bands and oldies bands that played the classics…the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies stuff…and drew enthusiastic crowds of geezers for a good fifteen years. Ownership changes shut it down, not demographic changes. Westlake didn’t suddenly get thirty years younger, and it never will. If anything, it’s going the other way..
“The only hookup culture in Westlake is above the age of 65… and it’s a vibrant one.”
Well, it most likely didn’t start out that way…the people in that scene were probably around fifty when it first began. Just like everyone else in Westlake and the rest of the planet, the local population simply got older. Hey, single geezers need to get laid, too!
And if they’re in a committed relationship, they want somewhere to go and dance to the music they grew up with, have a few adult beverages, and maybe a decent meal. A decent bar with decent food and booze, and live music by folks who know how to make good music. But in Westlake, it’s usually doo-wop or disco, not Eighties or Nineties…and beyond..
The DJs, the VIP crap, the cover charges, the pretentious bullshit? Guaranteed to crash and burn out there in the graying boonies. Don’t know why anyone is surprised that it finally did so.
Chuckles the Clown.
I laughed when it opened and heard about the bottle service along with all of the other ridiculous things they were doing. Clubs are usually near other clubs not a medical center. A night club in the suburbs with a lovely view of a highway marginal and the sounds of I-90 if you sat outside certainly sounds appealing to….no one. I”m laughing again. I hope no one is owed money given how much the doc probably lost on this failed idea. Yikes.
South Beach or Westlake? Smoking hot Hispanic women or 400-pound Polish lesbians? Hmmm…tough decision.
Cleveland or Chicago?
Burning river or gangs massacring each other in the streets with tommy guns, especially today? Hmmm…tough decision on which stereotype is more ridiculous…
Chuckles the Clown
I loved this place.
Just what in the world were these people thinking by opening up an overpriced 80’s guido dance joint and restaurant in Westlake, of all places?! This glorified disco eatery might appeal to zaftig MILFs and sugar daddies in Jersey, but not here in the more tame and homogenous Midwest!
Seriously can we just finally get a decent chain, gulp, yeah I said it, here like PFChangs, it’s a decent corner that’s been cursed with too many half baked start up ideas
Or even Portillos or a Roy’s or oceanarrie