Walk into the Daily Creative Food Co. on any given morning, and there’s a hum of activity vibrating behind the long counter. From the staff taking orders up front, to the people working the grills and stations in back, there’s a harmonious symphony of movements and sounds.
Regulars filter in, as they’ve been doing so for the past two decades, nodding at familiar faces on the team who know their orders by heart. A young professional picks up her to-go bag while an older couple settles into their usual table near the window. Owner Adam Meltzer, the conductor behind it all, is usually spotted darting around to support the team or tucked away in his back office, close at hand if needed.
Seeing Potential in a Pre-Boom Edgewater
Back in 2006, Edgewater wasn’t yet the glossy corridor of glass towers it is today, and this stretch of Biscayne Boulevard was still rough around the edges. Meltzer remembers unlocking the doors before sunrise, when the neighborhood still bore the marks of neglect: empty storefronts, a few lingering characters from long nights out, streets that hadn’t yet been sterilized by development. But what he saw was potential: “There were good bones here,” he says. “It just needed people who believed in the area.”
Born and raised in New York, Meltzer had already spent years running a full-service restaurant in Manhattan before what he describes as a “partnership divorce” pushed him to start over. At the urging of his brother, a Miami transplant working in construction, he came south looking for a fresh start and a niche to fill. What he found was a gap between the high-end dining rooms of South Beach and the fast-food chains that dominated the city’s main corridors…