‘It feels like drafting Michael Jordan’: Can you blame popular Miami chef for opening J&C Oyster in Hollywood?

Can you blame the chef who’s conquered some of Miami-Dade County’s top restaurants — KYU, Sugarcane Raw Bar & Grill, Zuma, Drinking Pig BBQ — for moving to Broward?

Raheem Sealey is willing to trade it all for an oyster bar five minutes from his house, lured by seafood and the laidback dream of a gentle Hollywood seabreeze.

Sealey is half of the chef duo behind J&C Oyster, an Asian-accented seafood restaurant opening to the public on Wednesday, April 3, on Harrison Street in downtown Hollywood. At 2,000 square feet, the open-kitchen space is awash in ocean blues and warm gold accents, where Sealey and co-head chef Monika Dominguez (KYU, Chug’s Diner) serve littleneck clams and french fries in pools of sake, togarashi-brined fried chicken and raw oysters in spicy Thai chili sauce. J&C is a project from restaurateur Cesar Cifuentes, who also operates Oaxaka, a Mexican-Asian fusion spot next door.

Being a new resident of the town locals proudly call “Hollyweird” appealed to Sealey, a St. Croix native who likes soaking his toes on relaxing Hollywood beach, which is “not super-busy like Miami and makes you feel like you’re in the Caribbean since it’s not polished.”

“I had to get away, and the beach was the way to get away,” says Sealey, who originally moved to Miami to care for his sick grandmother. She and his grandfather raised him in the Virgin Islands.

After rising in the kitchens of Asian-inspired KYU (pronounced “cue,” like barbecue), Sugarcane Raw Bar & Grill and Zuma Miami, Sealey in 2020 opened a pandemic pop-up, Drinking Pig BBQ, which brought Caribbean-kissed brisket and spare ribs to the locked-down masses. At the end of a North Miami cul-de-sac, his Instagram-famous stand —which he opened with his wife, Yohanir Sandoval, and partner Mark Wint, married oak-smoked meats with caramelized jerk seasonings.

It was during one of Drinking Pig’s pop-ups at Wynwood’s open-air market Smorgasburg that Sealey met the man he now calls his “brother”: Cesar Cifuentes.

A kinship blossomed instantly. Sealey admired how Cifuentes grew Oaxaka (pronounced “Osaka,” after the Japanese city) from a tiny booth at the Yellow Green Farmers Market into a downtown brick-and-mortar — with a sister location heading later this year to Cooper City.

“I don’t have much friends,” Sealey says. “From meeting Cesar and his family, I met a guy who was solely funding restaurants on his own. When he had this idea in his head to make the best restaurant in Broward, how could I say no to my friend? J&C is one of the most important things to me right now.”

Cifuentes took no convincing in recruiting Sealey.

“It feels like drafting Michael Jordan to the team,” he says. “Who would have thought the executive chef at KYU would ever work here, that I’d be eating ribeyes at his house on the weekends?”

Dominguez, one of eight former KYU employees working at J&C Oyster, likewise feels part of the family. At Zuma and KYU, Dominguez says she gained Asian cooking techniques working alongside her “mentor,” Sealey. Together, they crafted J&C’s menu of 25 dishes, marrying seafood with flavors drawn from both chefs’ backgrounds.

One of them is braised oxtail ($27) plated with citrusy Japanese fruit yuzu kosho and buttered white beans, a callback to Dominguez’s childhood in Cuba when her father cooked oxtail for dinner.

“When we do any dish, we base it on the comfortable feeling you get of eating at home, of it being cooked by your mother or grandmother,” she says.

Sealey cribbed the idea for pairing littleneck clams and french fries in a pool of sofrito butter and sake ($26) from his friend, Timon Balloo, who offers clam chowder fries on the menu at The Katherine in Fort Lauderdale. It was also inspired by a childhood memory of his Puerto Rican mom, who dug clams out of the ground with a butter knife at Altona Lagoon in St. Croix.

“It’s one of my favorite memories,” Sealey says. “We’d clean them off and eat them right there on the shore.”

A half-dozen East and West Coast oysters ($24) come with horseradish and a mignonette of nam prik pao, a savory-sweet roasted Thai chile jam. Nam prik pao also accompanies snapper ceviche ($16) and a seafood platter (market price) of Alaskan king crab, shrimp cocktail, oysters and butter-poached lobster.

For non-seafood eaters, there are five meat dishes, from steak tartare ($16) to rich, roasted bone marrow ($35) topped with herbs and miso-flavored Japanese sourdough milk bread from Oori Bakeshop in Miami’s Little River.

But Cifuentes, Sealey and Dominguez all say their standout dish is lobster risotto ($63), which uses sushi rice flavored with a lobster stock of mirin (sweet rice wine), soy, miso and mascarpone, and finished with XO sauce (a Chinese condiment of dried shrimp and scallops), lemon zest and parmesan.

“When I create food in my head, I taste it a million times before I even make it, if that makes sense,” Sealey says. “But no one was thinking those (risotto) flavors would pull together quite like that.”

An open doorway right of the entrance connects J&C Oyster’s dining room to Oaxaka, a shared space that lets him serve full liquor at both restaurants, Cifuentes says. Along with six sakes ($12 to $96) and a variety of champagnes, red and wine wines, there are eight Asian-themed cocktails ($17 to $20).

Cifuentes has already signed leases on two more restaurant spaces across the street from J&C Oyster, part of his ambitious plan to turn downtown Hollywood into a stronger dining destination.

“Raheem is just the first step,” he says. “We’ve got killer Miami chefs, but this is a Hollywood story.”

J&C Oyster is at 2035 Harrison St., Hollywood. Go to JandCOyster.com or call 954-300-1007.