Most restaurants inside a hotel are there for the guests upstairs. Toro Toro isn’t one of them. It’s chef Richard Sandoval’s Pan-Latin take on the steakhouse — the skewers-brought-to-your-table rodizio format — and it’s been drawing a downtown crowd for over a decade. Come for the meat, stay for the fact that it doesn’t behave like a hotel restaurant at all.
Miami Guide Take
Toro Toro is a Pan-Latin steakhouse from chef Richard Sandoval inside the InterContinental Miami at 100 Chopin Plaza, Downtown. It’s built around a wood-burning rodizio — dry-aged, USDA prime cuts carved tableside off skewers — plus Latin small plates, a zero-proof cocktail program, and a DJ-driven Sunday brunch. Casual-elegant, business-casual dress, reservations recommended for weekend nights.
The move here is the rodizio: dry-aged USDA prime cuts fired on a wood-burning grill and carved onto your plate off the skewer, churrascaria-style, until you tell them to stop. That’s the headline. But Sandoval built the rest of the menu to actually keep up — Latin small plates, ceviches, and a few things (the lobster mac, the fried brussels sprouts) that regulars order before they’ve even looked at the steak list.
The room reads sexy-not-stuffy — dark, loud on weekend nights, DJ going during Friday happy hour and Sunday brunch. It’s a business-dinner room that can flip into a date-night room, which is a harder balance than it sounds. If you want the food without the volume, go at lunch (noon–3) or early on a weeknight; if you want the Miami energy, that’s exactly what weekend nights and the brunch are for.
Two things worth knowing about how it’s run: there’s a real zero-proof cocktail program now — the Espresso Maíztini is the one people talk about — so a non-drinker at the table isn’t stuck with soda water. And Toro Toro does Miami Spice every August–September with a three-course prix fixe, which is the smartest way into a prime steakhouse at this price.
