A Michelin-approved restaurant closed in Coral Gables. This local favorite replaced it

When you enter the new Kojin 2.0 restaurant in Coral Gables, the cozy restaurant may not strike you as a vast culinary empire.

But to its delighted proprietors, used to working in a tiny room with eight seats and two IKEA induction burners in the back of a ramen joint, it’s huge — and it’s heaven.

“We have a real kitchen!” crows general manager and executive pastry chef Katherine Mederos, who co-owns the restaurant with her husband Pedro, the executive chef. “We love telling people that.”

The Mederoses have reason to celebrate, along with Chris Suarez, the executive sous chef. The trio has traveled a long way to take over the former space of Michelin-recommended restaurant The Lion & The Rambler , which closed quietly in the spring, and stake their claim in the busy Gables restaurant scene.

Kojin started life as a pop-up in South Miami, then found a temporary home in 2021 in the back of the now-shuttered Hachidori Ramen in Miami’s Little River neighborhood. The space behind the main restaurant wasn’t quite as big as they had hoped it would be — hence those induction burners, an apartment-sized countertop oven and a couple of comfy couches for cat naps.

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“There were many days where me and Pedro truly fell asleep on those couches,” Suarez says, laughing.

Size didn’t stop them. They drew diners, serving creative Japanese cuisine and, somehow, 15-course tasting menus.

The first Kojin closed in 2023. Now, at Kojin 2.0, there are 30 seats instead of eight. There’s room to breathe and work, to stretch and flex, to put a shine on the techniques that have made them a local favorite.

Pedro Mederos describes the new restaurant’s cuisine as “chef driven.”

“A lot of our food is inspired by hyper seasonality in Japan, and we’re taking what’s accessible to us,” he says. “We’re giving it the reverence that it deserves the same way they do in Japan. So a lot of our flavors are Japanese, a lot of our techniques are Japanese.”

Make no mistake, though: Kojin 2.0 is not a sushi restaurant.

“We’re not your typical Miami Japanese restaurant where it’s like sushi and Donburis,” Pedro Mederos says, referring to the popular Japanese rice bowls. “We’re really exploring a lot of regional Japanese cooking. . . . We’re calling ourselves modern American cuisine but still with a heart and soul of a Japanese restaurant.”

Explaining that distinction to new guests is something the team expects to do over and over, at least for a little while.

“Sometimes people are unaware of what Asian cuisine is beyond sushi,” Katherine Mederos says. “So we’re like, ‘You know, we have scallops from Hokkaido or different Japanese fish coming in.’ We bring these things to the table, and they’re like, ‘This is delicious but not what I was anticipating.’ Which isn’t a bad thing. But we do have a bit of a struggle conveying exactly what the difference is between what we’re doing versus what people have in their mind.”

Kojin 2.0 will offer three different tasting menus, but you can also order a la carte. The small but elegant menu will change, but for the summer you can expect to find a la carte items like the Kojin Caesar salad, unlike any you’ve had before, with katsumirin, kizami nori and smoked trout roe. You’ll also find short rib served with curried carrots, carrot-top chimmi and celery root puree; locally caught fish with green peppercorn oil, and “Chicken Twice,” a blend of truffle pate and chicken atop sunchoke and greens. There’s also a chicken sando, a Japanese sandwich, with a patty it takes Suarez two days to make.

Desserts include an already-popular frozen Key lime pie, which consists of Key lime pie ice cream between graham cracker cookies, dipped in a white chocolate shell and topped with toasted meringue and coconut. Or you can try Duck N Donuts, a doughnut filled with foie cremé.

There are three levels of tasting menus: an entry level version with around eight courses; a mid-level menu with 12 courses that comes with two desserts; and the executive tasting menu, with even more courses, a beverage pairing and two seats at the counter to watch the kitchen action up close.

Juggling tasting menus and a la carte options is more work for the kitchen, but Pedro Mederos says the extra work is worth it.

“I don’t want to put our guests in a box,” he says. “I want this to be the place where they can come have a beer after a hard day at work or celebrate their anniversary. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. It should be both at all times.”

Katherine Mederos, who said the restaurant plans to add takeout lunch options for the nearby offices, says the a la carte options offer a less expensive way to try the menu.

“People also don’t need to drop $200 going out for dinner for two,” she says. “I know that’s something for the two of us — we want to go out for a nice dinner and not drop 200 bucks but still have a good meal. And that’s where we’re trying to find that balance. We love our locals. So I want to make sure that they can come in more often than just once in awhile. We would love to celebrate a special event with them, but we just don’t want to be that place where that’s all you are able to do.”

In some ways, the team at Kojin 2.0 sees itself following in the footsteps of a restaurant that spent nine years in that space on Ponce before moving on to a bigger space: Giorgio Rapicavoli’s Eating House, which still draws legions of loyal fans to its new home on Giralda Plaza .

Suarez and Pedro Maderos, both natives of Miami, understand that some diners still think of the space as Eating House — and they want to inspire that same sort of loyalty.

“What made him so successful was there was a level of consistency and experience,” Pedro Mederos says. “And that’s something that we wanted to bring back to the space.”

Kojin 2.0

Where: 804 Ponce de Leon, Coral Gables

Hours: Tuesday-Saturday

More information and reservations: www.kojin2.com or 786-747-1404