Best of the Decade: Miami's Most Extraordinary Moments, 2009–2019

After ten years of covering Miami — more than 1,800 stories, hundreds of interviews, thousands of events — we have earned the right to make some definitive judgments. What follows is our list of the decade's best: the moments, the places, the people, and the experiences that defined Miami's most extraordinary decade. These are not scientific rankings. They are the considered opinions of a publication that has been paying close attention for ten years. Disagree with us. That's what makes Miami interesting.

Best Sports Moment: LeBron James, Game 6, 2013 NBA Finals. There have been many extraordinary sports moments in Miami over the past decade — the back-to-back championships, the Giancarlo Stanton contract, the Jimmy Butler signing. But nothing compares to LeBron James's performance in Game 6 of the 2013 NBA Finals, when he scored 32 points and hit the three-pointer that sent the game to overtime, ultimately saving the Heat's season and setting up their second championship. It was the greatest individual performance in a must-win game that Miami has ever witnessed, and it happened here.

Best Cultural Moment: The Opening of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2013. The opening of PAMM in December 2013 was the moment Miami announced, definitively, that it was a world-class cultural city. The building — designed by Herzog & de Meuron, with its extraordinary hanging gardens and its waterfront location on Biscayne Bay — was as beautiful as any museum in the country. The collection it housed was serious and ambitious. And the opening, which coincided with Art Basel week, drew the world's attention to a city that was ready to receive it.

Best Restaurant Opening: Cote Miami, 2019. Miami had many extraordinary restaurant openings in the decade — Carbone, Sexy Fish, Stubborn Seed, Alter, and dozens of others that would have topped this list in any other city. But Cote Miami's arrival in 2019 felt like a statement: a Korean steakhouse from a Michelin-starred New York restaurateur, bringing a level of culinary ambition and execution that announced Miami had arrived as a serious food city. The combination of Korean barbecue technique, prime American beef, and a wine program that would embarrass most dedicated wine bars was unlike anything the city had seen before.

Best Neighborhood Transformation: Wynwood. The transformation of Wynwood from a forgotten warehouse district into one of the world's most visited neighborhoods is the urban story of the decade. Tony Goldman's vision, the Wynwood Walls, the galleries, the restaurants, the bars, the murals — all of it combined to produce something genuinely new: a neighborhood that was simultaneously a world-class art destination, a culinary hub, and a social scene. No other neighborhood in Miami changed more dramatically in the decade, and no other neighborhood's transformation had a greater impact on the city's global reputation.

Best Concert: Pharrell Williams / N.E.R.D., 2009. We have covered hundreds of concerts over the decade — from stadium spectacles to intimate club performances. But the N.E.R.D. concert in 2009, which launched Premier Guide Miami's coverage of Miami's live music scene, remains the one that best captured what makes Miami's concert culture unique: the combination of world-class talent, a crowd that genuinely loves music, and a city that provides the perfect backdrop for the kind of joyful, communal experience that live music at its best can produce.

Best Art Basel Moment: The Wynwood Walls' Tenth Anniversary, 2018. Art Basel has produced extraordinary moments every year of the decade — installations that stopped you in your tracks, conversations that changed how you thought about art, parties that felt genuinely historic. But the Wynwood Walls' tenth anniversary in 2018 was the moment that best captured what Art Basel week means to Miami: not just the fair itself, but the entire ecosystem of creativity and community that has grown up around it. Ten years of the Walls, ten years of Art Basel, ten years of Miami becoming something extraordinary.

Best Interview: Madeleine Albright. We have conducted hundreds of interviews over the decade — with musicians, chefs, athletes, entrepreneurs, and cultural figures of every kind. But the conversation with Madeleine Albright remains the one that best exemplifies what Premier Guide Miami's interview program aspires to be: a genuine exchange with a person of extraordinary accomplishment, conducted with the seriousness and curiosity that the subject deserves. Albright's intelligence, her humor, and her willingness to engage with difficult questions made for a conversation that was as illuminating as any we have published.

Best Food Event: SOBEWFF 2013. The South Beach Wine & Food Festival has been extraordinary every year of the decade, but the 2013 edition — coming in the wake of the Heat's back-to-back championships, at the peak of Miami's cultural confidence — felt like the festival at its absolute best. The combination of world-class culinary talent, a city that was celebrating itself, and the extraordinary setting of South Beach produced something that was more than the sum of its parts. It was Miami at its most joyful and most generous.

These are our picks. The decade produced hundreds of moments that could have made this list — and the fact that we had to leave so many extraordinary things off is itself a testament to how much Miami accomplished in ten years. The city that enters the 2020s is not the city that emerged from the financial crisis in 2009. It is something better, something more ambitious, something more genuinely itself. We are proud to have been here for all of it.