The ‘darkest bar’ in South Miami closed after nearly 70 years. Now it’s back

Randy Alonso understands that Miamians are desperate to hold on to their history, any history, even if it means finding it in a 70-year-old dive bar.

That’s why the buzz has been so steady over the last three years since Alonso and his business partner, Chris Hudnall, announced they were resurrecting Fox’s Lounge in South Miami. It opens today, hoping to emulate the atmosphere that made it anecdotally the “darkest bar in Miami” for 69 years.

“It’s not going to be the same. It’s a new chapter. But if we can capture what the Fox meant to people over the years, we’ve succeeded,” Alonso said.

The Fox, shorthand for Fox’s Sherron Inn, started life as a bar founded by the late Hank and Betty Fox in 1946, with an attached hotel and a liquor store pick-up window. It evolved into an unpretentious hangout with solid cocktails, stiff drinks and a hearty menu that Alonso dubbed something of an American brasserie, with dishes like French onion soup and seared tenderloin Thumb Bits on garlic toast.

Stories poured out of it for nearly seven decades, until it closed in the summer of 2015, as they do at local watering holes. Don’t forget the one about the Dallas Cowboys knowing to reach then-University of Miami coach Jimmy Johnson at the payphone at the Fox, where he was nursing a drink before being offered the NFL job.

Alonso and Hudnall nurtured these memories as former owners, waitresses, bus boys, regulars — even the wife of the late chef — contacted them to share stories about the bar. They helped shape its new form.

That outline is drawn from the past. The new restaurant is bathed in red, from red candle light to red leather banquets to the recreation of the red fox painting hanging over the booths. You’ll find a vintage jukebox, though not the original. And they are thinking of installing a payphone in the back.

It’s dark, a windowless room, where the only outside light comes from the liquor store window, similar to the original. In this version, the layout is flipped, with the walk-up Sherron Inn Liquors out front (opening later this summer) and the bar facing the alley in the back.

That renders moody, familiar lighting for low key drinks and a menu based on some of the most popular dishes from the original. Alonso said he spoke with the wife of the late chef and she passed on the original recipes. Some the staff has tweaked, while adding dishes that seem to fit, like a three-cheese grilled cheese on Japanese milk bread.

“We want to stay true to some dishes, but we wanted to be creative and playful with others,” Alonso said.

Above it all hangs the original Fox’s Lounge neon sign (which can tell its own stories, from how it disappeared from the building, showed up in an empty lot in the Design District during Art Basel, and mysteriously returned to the bar in the eight years since it has been closed).

Alonso knows about starting over. His family owned La Epoca department store in Cuba, which they recreated in downtown Miami after the Cuban government seized the original, along with all other private property. He asked his friend, Hudnall, to help him turn his downtown denim store into Lost Boy, a now perennially packed bar adorned with items from his family’s past life as merchants, from his grandfather’s desk to the typewriter on which he wrote his college essay.

There is a bit of storytelling here, that merger of the real and the invented, the old and the new, in today’s Fox Lounge. Enough, Alonso hopes, that new patrons will find it cool and old ones will find it familiar.

“I said, if I’m going to do this, let’s do it to the T,” Alonso said, “as authentic as possible.”

Fox’s Lounge

Address: 6030 South Dixie Highway, South Miami

Hours: Monday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-2 a.m. Kitchen closes at 11 p.m.

More info: FoxsLounge.com