When dining at Pao by Paul Qui, the lavish restaurant at the Faena Miami Beach, a must-try is the “unicorn” dish, a visually arresting union of the flavors of land and sea, and an homage to the distinctive modern art on display. The dish is inspired by the Damien Hirst-designed “Golden Myth” unicorn (which was bought for roughly $6.5 million) and is installed in the center of the room, under a gold-painted, domed ceiling and surrounded by dining banquettes. It’s just one of many moments of grandeur and whimsy that punctuates an experience at the sophisticated property.
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For the Manila-born and Texas-based chef Paul Qui, who opened Pao when the hotel opened in 2015, creating the unicorn dish was a process that started before the owners of the opulent oceanfront resort tasked him with creating this modern Asian restaurant.
“The first time I put uni and corn together was the year that Tyson Cole won the James Beard award at Uchi,” explains Qui. It was 2011 and Chef Tyson Cole had just won the prestigious award for Best Chef: Southwest for Uchi in Austin, where Qui had worked and risen to being Executive Chef of Uchiko, Cole’s non-traditional Japanese restaurant.
“We were invited to cook at the awards ceremony in New York and I rolled out a version of this dish with corn sorbet and topped it with fresh uni and grated dehydrated uni on top,” says Qui.
Pairing the briny golden lobes of uni, a luxe ingredient also known as sea urchin roe, with the sweet crunch of corn isn’t necessarily an intuitive union but in Qui’s dish the two unlikely bedfellows share a confederacy of flavors that work together. “Tyson is my mentor and he would inspire me by putting things with different colors together - and that got me thinking about these two ingredients,” explains Qui. “When we opened Pao, the unicorn sculpture wasn’t supposed to be here. The original plan was to have the giant woolly mammoth in the restaurant, says Qui, referring to Hirst's “Gone but not Forgotten,” the gilded skeleton of a three-meter-tall woolly mammoth sculpture housed inside a glass case in the hotel’s garden. “The deal breaker was that the mammoth is five tons and there’s a chandelier that’s three tons that hangs below the restaurant in the Faena theater underneath us so the floor couldn’t hold the weight. But the owners of the hotel happened to have this Damien Hirst and it fit. And when they made the plan to install the unicorn I thought - okay, I need to make something iconic, visually stunning, that can represent what we do here at Pao - and the first thing that came to mind was the uni and corn dish.”
A spiky sea urchin shell serves as the bowl for a grilled sweet corn pudding topped with creamy uni and a sake aioli, along with kalamansi and arbol chile. Each bite has a pop of sweetness, heat, and umami-cloaked frothiness that’s both hearty and light. The flavors and ingredients are certainly pitch perfect, but it’s the composed look of the course that continues to dazzle guests.
Qui elaborates on how the dish went from the corn sorbet cone to this iteration: “A lot of what I do comes from the soulfulness of street flavors. And I was thinking about how I could use what I did with the corn sorbet cone and still have it be striking. So, I was inspired by corn in the cup - like esquites, the street food staple served in Mexico - and then I thought, let’s put it inside the uni shell and it will be stunning. So, we reduced corn milk and added shellfish stock to give it a little more depth and then put the charred corn back into it as well. I like using foams if it’s done the right way and I needed the dish to be lighter, so I added the espuma on top to give it some spice.” The end result is a dish that’s both fitting for our current photo-obsessed age and feels timeless enough to have been something our ancient ancestors may have stumbled upon, perhaps during a time when wooly mammoths roamed the earth. As Qui sums up: “I love the dish because it still looks relevant even today.”
Hero image: Faena Miami Beach / Pao by Paul Qui
