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Tucked away in the up-and-coming Little River neighborhood in Miami, Florida, you’ll find Off Site Nano Brewery, a casual restaurant with some of the best bar food in town. Owned and operated by Steve Santana and his partner Adam Darnell, the menu features a koji-cured burger, secret recipe hot dogs, and french fries that take at least 12 hours to make (they have a long soaking and blast chilling process) — all thanks to Santana’s love for tinkering in the kitchen until a dish reaches perfection.
“My favorite thing about being in the kitchen is getting to nerd out and research,” says Santana, who also owns a fast-casual taco spot in Miami’s North Beach called Taquiza. “Problem-solving and figuring out what the most efficient way or best way to get something done is such a cool process.”
It’s similar to the mindset he had in his former life as a computer coder. But these days, it’s crazy to imagine that 15 years ago, Santana was just a guy who worked behind a computer all day and read popular food blogs for fun.
“Back in 2009, I found out about these dinner clubs called Cobaya that took place in random locations around the city, and I thought it would be cool to host one in the penthouse suite of the building I was working at in Midtown,” shares Santana, who cold emailed the founders of the dinner club and almost immediately got a ‘yes.’”
The dinner club would change Santana’s life. “It was the first time I saw things like a 63-degree egg [an egg placed in a water bath at 63°C for around 40-45 minutes, to the point at which the egg white is just cooked, but the yolk is still creamy and runny], and this was revolutionary stuff for us in Miami at the time,” says Santana, still in awe of that night. The guest chef that night? It was none other than Jeremiah Bullfrog, an industry legend who founded Miami’s first food truck, Gastropod; served as Rick Ross’s private chef; and now owns Square Pie City, a popular Detroit-style pizza place in Wynwood.
After that dinner, Santana and Bullfrog became close friends. Santana helped create Bullfrog’s website, email blasts, and blog — all thanks to his computer background.
“We’d spend a lot of time together and often I’d find myself inside his food truck, where I’d help him with little things like salting the burgers,” Santana says, “and he would teach me different techniques that really got me interested in being in the kitchen.”
While continuing at his day job, Santana found himself working more and more food events. He also enrolled in the Miami Culinary Institute, where he took two semesters of courses to get a better feel for the kitchen. “It was the book-learning aspect, if you will,” says Santana.
Three years of a little learning and “just helping out” led to a giant leap: leaving his computer gig.
“Around Art Basel 2012, I left my computer job to make no money and be a cook for the first time,” says Santana, who explains he knew it was time to follow his passion and see where it would go.
Santana joined Bullfrog on the opening team at Broken Shaker, which is now one of Miami’s most award-winning cocktail bars. He learned to figure things out on the fly, from working with vendors to creating menus. “I really busted my chops for a solid two or three years there,” says Santana. “After that, I became the daytime cook at Giorgio Rapicavoli’s restaurant Eating House, where I really got to have creative freedom in one of the most popular restaurants in Miami at the time.”
Within a year, an investor offered Santana a small counter-service restaurant space on the ground floor of a hostel on South Beach.
“There weren‘t any legit taco spots in the area, and I was researching and thought it would be really cool to dig in and get super nerdy about it,” says Santana. He immediately bought 10 Mexican cookbooks — all in Spanish — to learn how to make the best tortillas possible, and the concept for Taquiza was born.
The first location opened in the fall of 2014 and quickly became known for its house-ground blue masa tortillas; creamy, chewy, puffy totopos; and a range of delicious tacos with proteins like barbacoa and chapulines (grasshoppers). A hearty array of hot sauces and pickled toppings allow guests to build their own dream concoction. (Fun fact: Guy Fieri featured the joint on an episode of “Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives.”) A decade and a new North Beach location later, Taquiza is now just steps away from the sand, making it the perfect post-beach bite.
In those early years, after working all day at Taquiza, Santana often hung out at a tap room in Wynwood called Boxelder Craft Beer Market — which happened to be owned by his now-business partner Adam Darnell.
“Just like with Jeremiah, I’d hang out at Boxelder so often that eventually I started kind of working there and creating pop-up menus,” says Santana. It was on one of those menus, he notes, where one of his signature dishes first came to life: the Super Good Chicken sandwich now found at Off Site.
At the time, Boxelder was known as the incubator of some of Miami’s coolest pop-ups, many of which have turned into brick-and-mortar businesses — like El Bagel, United States Burger Service, and Apocalypse BBQ. On extra-busy special occasions, Santana would step in and help cook — usually a chicken sandwich of some kind, having perfected the buttermilk battered fried chicken thigh. Boxelder eventually closed its doors, but the timing couldn’t have been better: Santana was offered yet another restaurant space, and he knew he wanted to partner with Darnell. By 2021, Santana and Darnell opened Off Site Nano Brewery; it became an instant hit.
These days, Off Site is Santana’s main focus. You can often find him in the kitchen working on hot sauce recipes and testing new ways to perfect classic bar bites.
“The food is very similar to what we’d serve at Boxelder — bar food done as well as we can possibly do it, with as much as we can do ourselves,” says Santana, who notes he’s done hardcore research and development on everything from the hot dogs (using Darnell’s all-beef, no-funny-bits family recipe) to the fries (which took two weeks to create the perfect 12-hour recipe), to the sauces and pickles.
While everyone thought the Super Good Chicken sandwich would be the menu’s biggest hit, it was the burger that stole the show.
“It’s not a smashburger like so many other spots are doing these days,” says Santana. “It’s a six-ounce patty made using chuck, brisket, and short rib that’s koji cured — koji is basically the mold that cultivates on rice and is what’s used in Japan to make miso and sake. It has a very umami flavor when added to meats.” Other than that, it’s a classic burger served on a Martin’s seeded potato bun, housemade kosher pickles, white onion, and American cheese.
“It’s not fancy; it’s just really good,” says Santana.
Other menu items include a pastrami Reuben sandwich, a classic cheesesteak, and a crispy fish sandwich that Santana says is a fun take on the Filet O’Fish, where he cleverly turns fresh mahi into a huge filet that hangs over the bun.
Then, of course, there’s Off Site’s actual nano-brewery, which is even smaller than a micro-brewery, making less than 2,000 barrels of beer per year. “Our Super Good Lager is our mainstay, and it’s brewed off-site (no pun intended), and then we make seven or eight other beers at a time to serve on tap,” says Santana. The rotating beer menu often includes collaborations with some of Miami’s best breweries and special seasonal offerings.
After over a decade in, Santana says he has no regrets about leaving the corporate world behind. “I still see the restaurant business as a fun, creative outlet, where I get to set a goal and work to find the most interesting way to get there,” says Santana.
At a time when it seems like every New York hospitality group is trying to take over Miami, Santana says he loves the respect the local restaurants have for each other and how they’ve always got each other’s back. “Miami might be a big city, but it’s got such a close-knit community, where everyone is super helpful and supportive of each other’s projects,” says Santana. “That’s really what made it easy for me to dive into this world.”
