I realized the moment I stepped up to Gekko’s velvet rope that I was not dressed the part. I would describe my outfit as work-from-home schlubby, pieced together to brave weeknight Miami traffic. The patrons lingering outside Gekko were sleek, chic, ring-light-ready, and likely on their first stop of a full night out. As I waited under the siren red awning, I heard someone talking to their friend as they walked by: “Oh, that’s Bad Bunny’s restaurant.” The draw of experiencing incontestable, international superstar musician Bad Bunny’s first restaurant was, admittedly, the reason I’d made a 9 p.m. reservation and driven 45 miles across town on a Thursday night. My friend, a Miami Beach resident and more appropriately dressed dining companion, had time to throw me one judgy once-over before we were ushered inside.
For a late reservation on a weeknight, the restaurant was loud and bustling. Gekko’s decor features an eight-foot-long mural of a dragon over the bar, an overabundance of gold motif throughout the space, mood lighting in an ambient red glow, and a menu that, when I visited, included a bone-in rib eye steak for $1,200. Located in Miami's Brickell neighborhood, the area surrounding Gekko is known to many South Floridians as after-school loitering grounds for bougie private-school-attending teenagers and a shopping haunt for even bougier tourists.
As a self-identified superfan, I needed to know: Would I feel connected to Bad Bunny as I dined at Gekko? Would his cheeky playfulness and personality somehow shine through on this menu? As a business venture, restaurants make plenty of sense as a partnership for the rich and famous. But what do we—as customers and fans—get out of flashy, celebrity-backed restaurants?
The plush, jewel-toned, velvet-enveloped Japanese steakhouse, was opened in mid-2022 by Groot Hospitality—the Miami-based restaurant group known for big-name clubs like LIV and Story, and other celebrity-backed restaurants like Strawberry Moon (a collaboration with Pharrel Williams). The draw of restaurants like Gekko is, at least in part, the pursuit of celebrity-crafted menus. The idea that by eating, say, Wagyu dumplings and octopus tacos, you’re growing closer to the vision of your favorite artist. I hoped to have at least a taste of that feeling.
We started the night with saccharine $19 cocktails—the “Summer Without You” (an English translation of a Bad Bunny album) for me and the “Truk Lagoon” for my friend. A $120 steak was lit aflame tableside in a blazing plea to be posted on our Instagram stories, and lobster fried rice with just a whisper of funky XO sauce ($42) was good but as my friend quipped, “I could get better at Yummy House.” As a generally meat-reluctant person, I insisted on ordering at least one veggie side, but the sticky-sweet eggplant just didn’t do it for us. We ended the meal with a dulce de leche lava cake that our jovial server recommended. The “lava” in question made a beige, buttery, tooth-rottingly sweet puddle on the plate. We were too stuffed and overindulged to sop it up.
While Bad Bunny has publicly declared his love of the Wagyu crispy rice and A5 Tomahawk at Gekko, his impact was otherwise hard to pin down as we ate our way through the menu. The dishes were definitely flashy and made us do a double-take as they were brought out. Whole fried snapper, coiled and perched on its belly ($72), butter-doused milk bread with crackly nori ($16), and minimalist platters of sushi were on heavy rotation at the surrounding tables, crammed so close together that we were almost shoulder-to-shoulder with other diners. The food at Gekko was dramatic—and listen, we had a good time!—but ultimately, in the context of all the exciting, innovative, food that Miami has to offer, mostly just fine. Plus, the bill we racked up had me sweating as it quickly exceeded the budget I’d discussed with my editor.
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Some celebrities take a more involved approach to crafting the menus at their restaurants. Priyanka Chopra Jonas, for example, waxes poetic about how the menu of her NYC restaurant, Sona, mirrors the beloved flavors and memories of her childhood. Mr. Bunny, however, takes a decidedly more hands-off approach. At Gekko, the clearest nod to his stardom was the cocktail I drank when I first sat down, named after Un Verano Sin Ti, Bad Bunny’s record-breaking album. The most evidence of his connection to the restaurant is perhaps on Gekko’s Instagram account, where comments oscillate between heart-eye emojis and fan notes to the singer, and complaints about the restaurant’s service.
A tucked-away after-hours lounge promises a luxe experience of more surprise celebrity drop-ins, luminescent cocktails, and made-for-TikTok moments, but the only thing Gekko has gone truly viral for recently is the accusation that staff ate a customer’s birthday cake after charging them a $50 cutting fee. That didn’t deter the content creators though—around us, the “phone eats first” way of life reigned supreme. Gekko definitely leans into an aspirational aesthetic—dark, dramatic, intimate, with the implied hope of bumping into Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio as he tucks into 24-karat-gold-plated lobster dumplings (a real, $36 dish on this menu) in a private corner booth. But despite Gekko’s star-studded opening night, the restaurant seems as much like a celebrity hang out as any other clubby restaurant. Which is to say, not very much so.
Instead, Gekko ends up feeling like a venue where one can live out their own celebrity fantasy. A woman in the booth next to us pulled out a vape pen midway through her meal and a server politely gestured for her to put it away. Instead, she gave him a warm smile and a wave, as if she’d been spotted by the paparazzi, and continued to send up plumes of fruity vapor. We watched this interaction from behind the blurry haze of our on-fire steak.
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During our dinner the playlist cycled through songs my friend dubbed “crying in the club vibes,” with high-tempo remixes of Adele and Sam Smith. We heard only one Bad Bunny song on our way out the door at the end of the night (a house remix of “Dákiti”), which felt more like a coincidence than intentional branding. A casual listener or a diner ignorant of the restaurant’s backstory could easily spend a night at Gekko without ever feeling the Bad Bunny-ness of it all.
As a self-confessed, unabashed fan of the Puerto Rican reggaeton artist (with the Spotify Wrapped data to back it up), a visit to the Brickell neighborhood steakhouse left me feeling disappointed. To be lured in by the hope of some sort of connection to the superstar, and instead shell out over $400 for a meal in a relatively generic dining room was not enough for me. If the Bad Bunny restaurant can’t deliver on food or vibes, it should at least lean in and let us have more Bad Bunny.