Jeremy Ford has served luxurious dishes like a foie gras tart at Stubborn Seed in Miami.
Stubborn Seed, chef Jeremy Ford’s tasting-menu hot spot in Miami Beach’s sizzling South of Fifth neighborhood, will open a Las Vegas location next year. Ford and Grove Bay Hospitality Group plan to debut Stubborn Seed at Resorts World Las Vegas in the summer. And while Ford knows Las Vegas is where a lot of chefs go much bigger and grander, he’s taking a measured approach to his expansion.
In Miami, the Michelin-starred Stubborn Seed has 78 seats between the dining room and the bar. In Las Vegas, Ford plans to max out at around 120 seats.
“That’s kind of my stopping point,” Ford says during an interview. “I think if you want the true Stubborn experience to be great, you’ve got to limit how big [the restaurant is]. We want to give you the best version of us.”
For Ford (who won season 13 of Top Chef) and Grove Bay co-founders Francesco Balli and Ignacio Garcia-Menocal, Las Vegas is an opportunity to resurrect some greatest hits while forging a new path forward. One beloved dish that Ford plans to serve in Vegas is braised celery root with crispy maitake mushrooms and an aerated Dijon crisp. He opened Miami’s Stubborn Seed with this dish in 2017 and has had numerous guests ask him to bring it back.
Ford is proud of his braised celery root because it proves that plant-forward cooking can be a delicious and memorable part of fine dining.
“That dish has won me two competitions where everyone around me was using caviar and truffles,” he says.
But to be clear, Ford has nothing against caviar, truffles and other high-end ingredients. He might even put caviar atop the celery root for VIP guests. What he wants to do at Stubborn Seed, which infuses curry leaves into butter and uses spices from around the world, is weave together many different influences and flavors.
His celery root was a hit in Miami, so Jeremy Ford will serve it in Vegas.
Like in Miami, the second location of Stubborn Seed (which is Grove Bay’s first expansion outside of South Florida) will serve seasonal tasting menus. Ford will continue to cook premium meat like Crescent duck from the North Fork of Long Island. (In Miami, he’s made smoked duck with foie gras stuffed in the breast.) He’ll offer caviar service and top-tier truffles. Ford, who’s put caviar and truffles over pasta and fried potatoes in Miami, isn’t the kind of chef who will ever settle for shaving summer truffles at his restaurant.
“We love truffles, but we don’t use truffles when they’re not the best,” he says. If they’re not Périgord truffles or from Australian winters, we’re not going to have them on the menu.”
Ford is focused on bringing in “every delicious ingredient at its peak,” whether it’s seasonal seafood or wild East Coast ramps that might only be available for a month and a half each year.
Ford, who’s served dishes like grits grown in the same soil as carrots at Miami’s Stubborn Seed, also looks forward to showcasing California farmers-market ingredients at his Vegas restaurant
“Miamians are going to hate me when I say this, but West Coast produce is some of my favorite produce I’ve ever had,” says Ford, whose experience includes stints at L’Orangerie and Patina in Los Angeles before he became executive chef at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Matador Room in Miami. “I’ve worked in New York, LA, San Francisco. I’ve had a taste of everybody’s produce. Harry’s Berries, I don’t think there’s a better strawberry on the planet.”
Beyond those California strawberries, Ford is looking forward to exploring “the unknown” as he develops his Las Vegas menus.
“The discovery part of this is what I’m most excited about,” he says. “I have no idea what’s in store for me in Vegas and I love that. I love being a bit lost for a little while.”
Bread service gets the Stubborn Seed treatment.
This process of discovery, of course, will spur many new ideas as Ford evolves his tasting menus. But Stubborn Seed at Resorts World Las Vegas will also have a bar menu with crowd-pleasing a la carte dishes like truffle chicken and a beef rib (smoked and cooked sous-vide, and then served inside shiso-and-herb crepe tacos).
“I think stuff like that for the bar, really fun, delicious, crazy food … those things will be on the menu probably forever,” Ford says.
