Award-winning restaurant group Kush Hospitality and founder Matt “Kush” Kuscher will reopen Kush Wynwood this October at 2003 N. Miami Avenue, returning after two years to the historic 1926 building the restaurant called home for nearly a decade. The reopening will anchor “Kush Korner,” Kush’s most ambitious project to date with the transformation of the 7,500-square-foot building into a mixed-use property that pairs a newly designed, 2,200-square-foot restaurant with 10 workforce studios for hospitality professionals protected under a 50-year affordability agreement.
Constructed in 1926 by Samuel Dubbin, a pioneer of Miami’s early Jewish community, this flatiron-style building, once part of a residential pocket known as Little San Juan, has witnessed 100 years of growth and transformation. Over the decades, it has housed Dubbin’s apartments, restaurants, a pharmacy and even a brothel, with a reported connection to James “Whitey” Bulger, one of America’s most notorious mob bosses, who is said to have lived there around the time of his mid-1950s arrest in Miami Beach. The property went on to endure hurricanes, riots and successive waves of redevelopment before eventually becoming home to Kush Wynwood. When it was later slated for demolition by the city, Kush embarked on a four-year effort to preserve and reimagine the building..
As the project progressed, Kush began looking beyond the restaurant. After watching employees contend with rising housing costs, unreliable transportation and lengthy commutes, he built 10 micro-units above Kush Wynwood specifically to provide affordable housing for hospitality workers. Developed in partnership with the Omni Community Redevelopment Agency and supported in part by the Public Benefit Trust Fund, the apartments will remain protected under a 50-year affordability agreement…