If you have lived in Brickell for more than a year, you already know Brickell Backyard: the half-mile stretch of park underneath the Metrorail tracks between the Miami River and SW 13th Street, where the running club meets and the dog walkers cut through on their way to Mary Brickell Village. What you may not have clocked is that this half-mile is about to stop being the whole story. The final phase of The Underline, a 7.36-mile segment connecting SW 19th Avenue near the Vizcaya Metrorail station to Dadeland South, was awarded to a construction joint venture in October 2022 and is expected to be completed in 2026. When it opens, the corridor a Brickell resident can walk or bike without touching a car door will jump from just over two and a half miles to ten, and for the first time it will thread south through Brickell, Coral Gables, and Kendall all the way to a Metrorail station in the suburbs.
That is the thesis of this month's update: Brickell's daily-life radius is not just filling in with new restaurants and grocery stores, it is physically expanding outward, and the timeline for that expansion happens to land in the same year the neighborhood's restaurant scene tipped from "nice options near the office" to something closer to a destination in its own right. Neither of those things is happening in isolation. Read together, they say something about where this neighborhood is headed that a list of new openings alone would miss.
The park you already use is about to get four times longer
Most people who use the park day to day think of it as one thing, but it was built in three separate pieces. Phase 1, the Brickell Backyard, opened to the public on Feb. 26, 2021, and Phase 2 opened on April 24, 2024, extending 2.14 miles from SW 13th Street to SW 19th Avenue through the historic Roads, Shenandoah, and Silver Bluff neighborhoods. Add those together and the built corridor today runs a little over two and a half miles, mostly hugging the edge of Brickell and the neighborhoods just south of it.
Phase 3 is a different order of magnitude. It nearly triples the built mileage in one push and, unlike the first two phases, it does not stay close to home. It is the segment that finally connects Brickell's park life to Coral Gables and the Metrorail line running into Kendall, giving residents a continuous, shaded route to places that currently require a car or a train transfer to reach on foot.
The scale of use so far suggests this matters more than it might sound. Brickell Backyard alone created a welcoming green space for the nearly 400,000 residents who live within a 10-minute walk of the park and urban trail, and in its first year the project drew over 2 million visitors and hosted more than 50 free events. That was one half-mile segment. When Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniela Levine Cava cut the ribbon on that first phase, she called it "the first step toward a people-first Miami." Four years later, the next and much longer step is close to finished.
Two farmers markets, two schedules, and a mix-up worth avoiding
If you have ever shown up to buy produce on the wrong Saturday, you are not alone, and the confusion is structural, not personal. There are two separate markets operating under similar names a few blocks apart.
The Underline's market sits at The Underline's Brickell Backyard Promenade green crosswalk on SW 1st Avenue across from SW 9th Street, curated by an outside events group, and it does not run every week. It operates the second and fourth Saturday of every month from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Confirmed dates through the fall include September 13 and 27, October 11 and 25, and November 8 and 15, all at the same Promenade location.
Brickell City Centre runs its own, separate weekly market, and the two are easy to mix up if you only half-remember the name. The City Centre's version pops up under the Metromover's paved pathway every Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., with fruit stands, artisanal goods, and live music. So if your plan is produce and pastries on a specific Saturday, check which Saturday and which crosswalk before you leave the apartment. One runs biweekly on the Underline's green crosswalk, the other runs every week under the mall's Metromover line.
Miami Spice turns 25, and this year the discount menu got an upsell
Miami Spice has been the late-summer ritual for two and a half decades, the two months when otherwise-expensive kitchens open up with fixed-price menus to fill tables during the slow season. This year the promotion celebrates its 25th anniversary, returning Saturday, August 1 through September 30 with more than 300 participating restaurants serving three-course prix-fixe menus.
What is new is the ceiling. This year's lineup includes $40 brunch and lunch menus, $50 and $65 dinners, and the debut of Miami Spice Reserve, a new $95 tier for restaurants serving even more elevated experiences. A program built around value dining now has a $95 option inside it. That is not a contradiction so much as a signal. Brickell's kitchens are no longer positioning the neighborhood as a place to eat well for less during the off-season. Even the discount window now has a luxury lane, which tracks with what has actually been opening on the ground floor this year.
The new arrivals are treating Brickell as a primary market, not a test kitchen
A handful of the year's most talked-about openings did not pick Brickell as a secondary location or a soft launch. Amazónico debuted in Brickell as the U.S. arrival of the Latin American-inspired restaurant created by Sandro Silva and Marta Seco, a brand first opened in Madrid in 2016 and now established in London, Dubai, and Monte Carlo. That is a global hospitality group choosing Brickell for its first American footprint, not Miami Beach or Wynwood.
PopUp Bagels, the Connecticut-born viral bagel brand, is bringing its cult-favorite bagels and loaded schmears to Brickell as part of a broader South Florida expansion, turning what started as a pop-up concept into a permanent neighborhood fixture. And on the grocery side, a new grocery store with a bouncer has landed in Brickell calling itself "the healthiest grocery store in America," already drawing attention for its expensive produce and hot bar dishes.
On the higher end, one new Brickell dining room has built its entire menu around excess: a minimum of 10 grams of ossetra caviar on every dish, which is why the fried chicken costs $74. Whether or not that is your idea of a Tuesday dinner, it tells you what kind of spending the neighborhood's newest operators think Brickell can support.
Free is still part of the routine
None of this has pushed out the free stuff, at least not yet. Brickell City Centre keeps a running calendar of no-cost programming built around "Find Your Centre" wellness offerings and "Gather" children and family activities, and its weekend fitness series has become a fixture in its own right, with a signature Jetset Pilates class as part of its recurring lineup alongside watch parties and pop-up art installations. It is one of the few corners of the neighborhood's calendar that has not gotten more expensive as everything around it has.
What this adds up to for anyone living here now
Put the pieces next to each other and a pattern comes into focus that no single headline captures. The physical footprint of the neighborhood's park system is about to grow four times over, connecting Brickell on foot for the first time to Coral Gables and the Metrorail corridor into Kendall. At the same time, the neighborhood's dining identity has moved decisively upmarket, to the point where even its annual value-dining promotion now includes a $95 tier. International hospitality brands are choosing Brickell as a first stop rather than an overflow market. And the free, recurring community programming that made the neighborhood feel accessible in its early build-out years is still running, at least for now, alongside all of it.
None of this shows up if you only track restaurant openings or only track infrastructure news. Together, they describe a neighborhood whose physical reach and price point are both expanding at the same time, which is worth knowing whether you are planning your next dog walk or thinking about what your own place here is worth in a market that is visibly still being built.
If watching Brickell's radius expand has you curious about what that means for your own property's value this year, Maruja Gil offers a complimentary home valuation grounded in exactly this kind of neighborhood-level detail, not just comparable sales.
