The best restaurants in North Miami Beach sit on four streets: NE 167th Street, which locals and city officials have called Chinatown since the early 1990s, NE 163rd Street, West Dixie Highway and the run of Biscayne Boulevard heading south into North Miami. Almost none of it looks like anything from the car. The city covers 5.37 square miles, most of it strip malls and neighborhoods, and the payoff is Cantonese barbecue, Sichuan, Peruvian, Uzbek, Vietnamese and Brazilian cooking at prices Miami Beach abandoned a decade ago. This guide is organized by street, with a last section for the waterfront and special-occasion rooms.
Four Streets That Hold the City’s Restaurants
North Miami Beach is compact, inland, and far easier to eat in than to look at. Despite the name, the city has no beach inside its limits; the sand is in Sunny Isles Beach across the Intracoastal Waterway. That geography shapes dinner, because waterfront tables are rare here and the real strength is a dense, cheap, international corridor a few miles from the ocean.
Work the map street by street. NE 167th Street and NE 163rd Street run through the middle of the city and hold most of what food writers drive north for, including nearly every restaurant on The Infatuation’s North Miami Beach guide, updated in April 2026. West Dixie Highway, just west of Biscayne, carries two small and serious kitchens, and Biscayne Boulevard runs south into North Miami getting cheaper as it goes. Most of the corridor is inexpensive, and the three-figure rooms are on the water or over in Surfside. The city calls itself reachable from virtually all of South Florida in under 30 minutes thanks to the Golden Glades Interchange. For everything beyond dinner, see our guide to things to do in North Miami Beach.
NE 167th Street: Cantonese Barbecue, Dumplings and Thai Heat
NE 167th Street holds the highest concentration of good, cheap food in the city, and the rooms are tiny. Back-of-house space is tighter still, which is why corridor operators run lean inventories and keep the overflow in climate-controlled storage in North Miami Beach, where humidity can’t get at paper goods and dry stock.
King Palace Chinese BBQ is the group dinner on this street. Order the Cantonese barbecue platter, which arrives with duck, chicken and pork, then add shredded jellyfish salad and walnut shrimp. The platter is built to feed a group, and round tables and a walk-in policy mean six of you can turn up without a plan. 330 NE 167th St. $$
Dumpling King is the easiest solo lunch in North Miami Beach. Soup dumplings come first, then the pan-fried dumplings stuffed with chicken, pork, beef or vegetables; the fried rice and noodles are beside the point. Give the soup dumplings a minute, because they land scalding. 237 NE 167th St. $
Panya Thai does jumping squid and boat noodle soup, and it’ll bring real heat if you ask for it plainly. The dining room has no windows, so this is a food trip rather than a setting. Service is quick, which makes it a reliable weeknight stop. 520 NE 167th St. $$
NE 163rd Street: Dim Sum, Sichuan Peppercorn and Uzbek Tables
NE 163rd Street runs east toward the Intracoastal with the widest spread of cuisines in the city, from daily dim sum to Uzbek plov. It’s also where the corridor meets Oleta River State Park, which turns lunch into a plan.
Sang’s Chinese Food & Dim Sum serves more than 40 dim sum plates every day from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., not just on weekends, which quietly makes it the best midweek alternative to a sit-down brunch. General Cheng’s chicken, the kitchen’s crisper take on General Tso’s, is the thing to add. 1925 NE 163rd St. $$. For the rest of the late-morning options, see our North Miami Beach brunch guide.
Sichuan Fish is built for sharing, with round tables and entrees sized for a group. Get the mapo tofu and a whole fish buried under chopped chilis, then the chicken wontons for anyone at the table avoiding mala. The peppercorn load is genuinely high, so one non-numbing dish isn’t optional. 1242 NE 163rd St. $$
Korean Kitchen covers the standards well: bibimbap in a hot stone bowl, budae jjigae, kimchi and wings. There’s a dining room and an outdoor patio, and the patio is the better call from November through April. Takeout is strong enough to fall back on when the room fills. 1661 NE 163rd St. $$
Thai House II replaces a lot of drives to Miami Beach for Thai food. It runs a Thai kitchen and a sushi bar under one roof, with red curry, pad Thai and tom kha among the most-ordered dishes, and spice levels you can set yourself. It doesn’t take reservations, so it’s a walk-in weeknight dinner. 2250 NE 163rd St. $$
Sim Sim Cafe is Uzbek and Turkish sharing food in a strip mall room with windows painted to look like a mosque. Start with haydari, hummus and the bread, then get the plov with lamb, plus manti with sour cream. The cold dips and the savory pastries are $7 each, so ordering several for the table is the correct move. On weekdays it’s dinner only, from 4:30 p.m., with weekend service from 12:30 p.m. 2995 NE 163rd St. $$
Kabobji sits just west of the Oleta River State Park entrance on 163rd Street, which makes it the obvious lunch after a morning of kayaking or riding the trails. The lamb kafta kabob wrap is the order, with falafel and malfouf alongside. The wraps are the platters in sandwich form, so pick one format rather than both. 3055 NE 163rd St. $
West Dixie Highway: Peruvian Seafood and Vietnamese Takeout
West Dixie Highway runs just west of Biscayne and holds two of the most specific kitchens in the city, both small enough that timing matters more than anything else.
Barra Callao is a 12-seat Peruvian seafood counter and a new 2026 MICHELIN Bib Gourmand, and 12 seats is the whole story. Pulpo al olivo, ceviche and choros a la chalaca are the plates to point at, and pointing at whatever just came out of the kitchen works fine. It’s mostly walk-in, with reservations offered Tuesday through Thursday from 5 p.m. It’s closed Sunday, Saturdays often mean a wait, and a group of six should pick another night. 17034 W Dixie Hwy. $$
PhoMi2Go is roughly the size of a walk-in closet and built around takeout. The banh mi on a crunchy baguette is the reason to stop, with the pho the shop is named for close behind, plus rice bowls and vermicelli salads. Best as a weekday lunch or a solo meal. 17010 W Dixie Hwy. $
Biscayne Boulevard: Cheap Plates Running South Into North Miami
Biscayne Boulevard is where the price floor drops. Head south from the city line into North Miami and the boulevard turns into skewers, pho, pizza counters and a fish market, with one genuinely strange room in the middle of it.
Farofa Taste of Brazil carves picanha, chicken and linguica off slow-turning skewers, served as a platter with yuca fries and fried bananas or packed into a sandwich. It sits at the cheap end of the boulevard, and two light eaters can share a single platter. The room is narrow and casual and the menu is short. 14691 Biscayne Blvd. $
Basilic Vietnamese Grill has 10 kinds of pho, plus banh xeo, the large savory crepe, spring rolls and vermicelli bowls. Tall ceilings and comfortable booths make it one of the few rooms on this list that rewards a long sit. Portions all but guarantee leftovers. 14734 Biscayne Blvd. $$
Steve’s Pizza has been selling New York-style slices and whole pies from a counter on Biscayne for decades and remains the correct answer late at night, open until 2 a.m. most weeknights and 3 a.m. on Friday and Saturday. There’s no atmosphere and no reservation to make. Come after a long dinner on 163rd Street rather than instead of one. 12101 Biscayne Blvd. $
Catch Specialty Fish Market is a kosher fish market just off Biscayne on NE 123rd Street, and it’s the fish stop on this stretch. Whole fish and fillets fill the case, and the counter makes sushi and poke bowls to order, plus ceviche and smoked fish dip, so lunch and dinner ingredients come out of the same visit. It closes Friday afternoon and all day Saturday. 2208 NE 123rd St. $$
Topkapi is the oddity: Turkish food served inside Hürrem Hammam Spa, which means the only way to eat at Topkapi is to buy a spa day pass, and the pass doesn’t include the food. The trio of dips is the move, especially muhammara and baba ghanoush, followed by manti and grilled lamb. Monday to Thursday passes are $85, against $125 on Friday and weekends, and you should eat after the hammam rather than before. 14652 Biscayne Blvd. $$$
Waterfront Tables and Special-Occasion Rooms
North Miami Beach has one real waterfront restaurant and two nearby rooms that carry an occasion, which is worth knowing before you go hunting for a view inside city limits.
Lique Miami sits on the water at 3957 NE 163rd Street and runs dinner straight into a late lounge, Monday through Thursday from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m., Friday and Saturday from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m., and Sunday from 4 p.m. to midnight. It’s the closest thing the city has to a dressed-up night out that doesn’t require crossing a causeway. Reserve for weekends, and read our North Miami Beach nightlife guide before planning the rest of the evening. $$$
Morton’s The Steakhouse on the mainland at 17399 Biscayne Boulevard handles the steak dinner, with Midwest beef, butcher cuts and wagyu. The bar is the value play, since the Power Hour bar bites menu runs from opening to 6:30 p.m. Sunday through Friday and doesn’t require committing to a full steak. Weekend reservations are worth making a few days out. $$$
The Surf Club Restaurant in Surfside, Thomas Keller’s room inside the Four Seasons at The Surf Club, is the drive to make when the meal is the event. It holds one MICHELIN star and sits about 15 minutes from the middle of North Miami Beach. Book well ahead and expect a dressier room than anything on 163rd Street. $$$
Parking, Reservations and Timing Along the Corridor
Parking is the easiest part of eating here and the main reason locals stay north. Nearly every restaurant above sits in a strip center with its own surface lot, so the garage math that governs dinner on Miami Beach doesn’t apply. The exception is Surfside, where you should expect valet or paid parking.
Reservations follow a clear split. The corridor is walk-in country; Barra Callao offers bookings Tuesday through Thursday, while Lique Miami and Morton’s both want a weekend reservation. Small independent kitchens on 163rd and 167th keep their own schedules and some close one day a week, so call before driving across town for a specific dish. Nothing on this list is walkable in any useful sense either; the corridor is a driving street with long blocks and fast traffic.
Weather sets the schedule from June through September. Mornings are clear, a thunderstorm rolls through mid- to late afternoon, and the evening clears again, so patio meals belong at either end of the day. The Atlantic hurricane season runs June 1 to November 30 with a peak around September 10, and when a watch goes up, outdoor furniture comes off every patio on the corridor. Operators without a back room rent a 5×15 unit, about the contents of two rooms, for exactly that stretch of the calendar.
One more thing worth saying out loud: the people who eat through this list hardest are the ones with no working kitchen. A gut renovation puts a household on 167th Street for a month, and a 10×10 storage unit holds the contents of three rooms, enough for the kitchen, dining room and living room while the contractor works.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the best restaurants in North Beach, Miami?
North Beach is the Miami Beach neighborhood roughly between 63rd Street and 87th Terrace, not part of North Miami Beach, and the two get confused constantly. If you’re already on the beach side, Surfside and Bal Harbour are closest. If you’ll drive 20 minutes inland, the 163rd and 167th Street corridor gives you far more range for less money.
What are some good restaurants on the water in North Miami?
Lique Miami at 3957 NE 163rd Street is the waterfront restaurant inside North Miami Beach itself, with dinner service that runs into a late lounge. Beyond that, genuine water views mean driving east to Sunny Isles Beach or north to the Aventura and Haulover marinas. The corridor restaurants are inland strip-center rooms, and their appeal is the cooking rather than the view.
What’s the difference between North Miami and North Miami Beach?
North Miami and North Miami Beach are two separate cities, side by side, and neither one has a beach. North Miami Beach sits north, holds the 163rd and 167th Street corridor, and covers 5.37 square miles. North Miami sits directly south along Biscayne Boulevard and is home to MOCA North Miami and much of the cheap Biscayne Boulevard stretch in this guide.
Where can you eat well in North Miami Beach on a budget?
Four counters do most of the work: PhoMi2Go for banh mi on West Dixie Highway, Dumpling King on 167th Street, Kabobji near Oleta River State Park and Farofa Taste of Brazil for skewered picanha on Biscayne Boulevard. Steve’s Pizza handles the late slice. None of them need a reservation.
When do North Miami Beach restaurants run Miami Spice menus?
Miami Spice runs August 1 through September 30, with some restaurants extending their fixed-price menus through October 31, 2026. Morton’s on Biscayne Boulevard is the local participant most people ask about, with a $65 three-course dinner Sunday through Thursday. September is also the cheapest month to visit, which is the trade for the heat and rain. Our guide to the best time to visit North Miami Beach covers the rest of the calendar.
Storage Space Between the Kitchen and the Corridor
Value Store It’s North Miami Beach facility sits minutes from the 163rd Street corridor, in a city where the apartments and the kitchens were both built small. A 5×5 locker, about the size of a small closet, absorbs the boxes, serving pieces and holiday platters that swallow a closet at home. 5×10 units take the contents of one room or a caterer’s folding tables and chafing dishes. From there, a 10×15 unit covers a two-bedroom apartment, a 10×20 unit holds a three-bedroom home, and a 10×30 drive-up unit, about a garage and a half, is what contractors and restaurant owners ask about. Rentals are month-to-month with no long-term contract, and the location page carries that facility’s own hours and contact details.
If a move, a renovation or a growing business has left you short on room in North Miami Beach, Value Store It can help. Then get back to the corridor, because a month of dinners on 163rd and 167th Street is a better consolation prize than most cities offer.
