This Miami restaurant was famous for its Puerto Rican flag mural. Now it’s closing

A Puerto Rican flag mural covering a four-story building has been at the center of a years-long fight between the restaurant that painted it and residents of its Miami neighborhood. Now the mural and the restaurant may soon be gone.

La Placita Puerto Rican restaurant, a passion project between award-winning Miami chef José Mendín and actor Julián Gil, will close after unending controversy over the flag mural, Mendín said. It is the culmination of nearly four years of code violations, fines, disagreements with residents and legal wrangling with the city of Miami, which said the mural was painted without proper permission.

Mendín, a five-time James Beard award nominee for best chef in the South, said the restaurant is looking to move to a new location but wouldn’t get into details of why he ultimately decided to move on from the restaurant, citing pending legal issues. A final date for closing La Placita has not been set, he said.

Gil, a Spanish-language television star, posted an old photo recently of the blank building, with a broken heart emoji to his 3.8 million followers.

The project left both men weary.

In December of 2018, Mendín and financial backer Gil opened a restaurant to honor their love of Puerto Rican food, with Mendín’s particular gift for elevating the cuisine. They commissioned Puerto Rico-born artist Hector Collazo Hernández to create the mural, entitled “Plantando Bandera (Staking Your Flag).”

The flag was an instant hit with visitors who lined up daily to take selfies in front of the red, white and blue mural.

But it was also an instant irritant to some residents of the MiMo neighborhood, who complained about noise and traffic and said the towering painting went against the strict historic code that doesn’t allow murals.

The city slapped La Placita with more than $60,000 in fines, $250 a day for each day it did not paint over the mural.

After more than two years of failed compromises to replace the flag mural with something that fit the district, like a neon outline of the flag, the Miami City Commission ultimately ruled in January 2020 that La Placita could keep its mural — with a catch. It had to paint over its mural whenever a neighboring business, which the commission had allowed to have a mural, closed or painted over its mural.

That compromise lasted one year.

The neighboring business, Organic Bites, closed, and in February 2021, La Placita received a violation notice and the process started all over again.

“This is ridiculous. Maybe MiMo don’t deserve my flag here,” Mendín wrote in an Instagram post in February 2021. “Tired of being targeted by code compliance, police every day for minimal and normal restaurant music. We won’t give up that easily, but this is just plain stupid.”

Mendín, who was born in Puerto Rico but has made his career in Miami with beloved restaurants such as Pubbelly, Pubbelly Sushi and Casa Isola restaurants, said he is not giving up on making the food of his native island.