What’s next for a 70-year-old Miami landmark? A new leader has plans for Sunset Corners
Cousins Michael Bittel and Larry Solomon point toward a narrow wood and cement room. It’s an unknown place to most customers. But the “bottle room” is where the 70-year-old Sunset Corners got its start.
In the decades since, the room hasn’t changed much. The former owners of Sunset Corners, grandsons of founder Bernard Rudnick, talk about the history of the room as they talk about the history of the landmark wine, liquor and cheese shop that opened in December 1954 on Sunset and Galloway in the Kendall area.
What’s inside the mysterious cave-like space? Wine. Lots of wine.
Two cases of Maison Nicolas Sauvignon Blanc and four cases of Maison Nicolas Cabernet Sauvignon. They’re piled on the scuffed cement floor. The shelves hold a mish-mosh of pitchers, wine glasses, boxes of business cards and a hand-scrawled order that asks for Olema rosé, Bombay Sapphire. The notation taped to the boxes is marked, “Ask Bruno.” That would be Bruno Barbato, the store’s new manager.
“If you look at the shelves, they’re ragged now because as long as I think Larry and I have been here it’s been a bottle room,” says Bittel, 69, sharing a bit of lore from a site that contains plenty of stories over the years.
This room was all of Sunset Corners during the earliest years. In decades since, Sunset Corners has grown around the room, adding space and merchandise.
And now, the landmark business is going through changes again. New owners have taken over for the first time.
How it all started
Bittel almost become a rabbi. In 1973, as a young graduate of Beloit College in Wisconsin, he spent two years at an Orthodox yeshiva in Jerusalem.
He turned to wine instead, and thousands of customers in South Florida got to know him as an expert. Since 1975, Bittel has helped guide customers inside Sunset Corners, the shop his grandfather founded in 1954.
Rudnick initially counseled his grandson to get a job elsewhere. He wanted Bittel, who was working part-time at the store on Saturdays, to get experience working for others. So Bittel says he went to work for a small advertising agency where he was a copywriter.
That lasted for about six months. He’s closing in on 50 years at Sunset Corners.
And that small room was there at the very beginning.
“If you look at the shelves,” Bittel said, “you can see it’s kind of finished varnished wood, which you wouldn’t normally do for a junk room. Because it wasn’t a junk room. It was literally the entire store.”
Sunset Corners is sold
In May, Sunset Corners was officially sold, passing from the founder’s grandsons to Eduardo “Eddie” Cruz, from another pioneering family in the spirits business.
His father, Eduardo Cruz Sr., once ran Seminole Liquors on Southwest Seventh Street with a business partner, and the senior Cruz soon bought a bar and package store named Jensen’s in Little Havana near Calle Ocho in 1978, his son Eddie Cruz said.
The junior Cruz, a South Miami Senior High grad — “a Cobra,” he makes sure you know — is now the face of Jensen’s Liquors, a chain of six stores spread across Miami’s neighborhoods, including Little Havana, Allapattah, near the Miami River, North Miami Avenue, near Marlins stadium and in Little Haiti.
Now, Sunset Corners is the seventh.
Cruz has renamed the neighborhood landmark that opened a month after Mike Bittel was born, and about 20 years before he started working regularly in his grandfather’s store, alongside his cousin Larry Solomon. Bittel and Solomon are Miami Palmetto Senior High Panthers.
But the new name of the business pays tribute to past and present.
Paying homage to history
The shop is now officially known as Jensen’s at Sunset Corners.
As soon as new permanent signs go up on the sun-bleached Kendall-area facade that’s being repainted and refurbished, everyone who passes by — longtime patrons along with customers across the street at the Sunset West Shopping Center — will see the venue’s new name.
This 5,700-square-foot store began in a rural “‘chuckwagony farming community,” Bittel once described the now busy neighborhood intersection of Sunset Drive and Southwest 87th Avenue.
“There were hitching posts outside where people would tie up their horses,” Bittel told the Miami Herald in 2005 when Sunset Corners celebrated its 50th year. After securing their horses, customers would idle up to the small bar, standing side-by-side atop its sawdust floors.
There was a sandwich shop and liquor store on the property, too, and a small gas station. Across the street today there’s a Marathon gas station attached to the strip mall with the Winn-Dixie and Shinju Japanese Buffet, and a Chevron across the other corner. Kampai Sunset Japanese restaurant shares a parking lot.
Bernard Rudnick, Bittel and Solomon’s grandfather who died at age 89 in 1998, and his wife Rosalind, bought the property nearly 70 years ago, despite admonishments from friends who wondered why they would invest in a 300-square-foot bar and store to initially sell sherry and muscatel “so far west.” In the 1940s, the couple had lived in Miami Beach, where Bernard was a sales rep for a liquor company.
The trio involved in the 2024 sale of Sunset Corners — Cruz, Bittel and Solomon — declined to reveal the price of the property. “But please mention that this is a corner that comes along once in a lifetime and I’m very proud to have acquired it,” Cruz said.
Over the years, Rudnick built up the Hex bar, named for its hexagonal shape, and expanded the shop for the first time in 1962, when it grew from 300 to 2,000 square feet. Bernard ran the liquor store, Rosalind worked the bar. His young grandsons, Michael and Larry, were around to pitch in. Their parents were not in the business.
In 1973, Rudnick imported the late Chip Cassidy, a wine steward from Palm Beach’s The Breakers, and later the Florida International University professor who started the wine education program at the school’s Chaplin School of Hospitality. Cassidy, who died in 2019 at 72, helped the Rudnicks develop Sunset Corners for 12 years by curating rare imported wines into its inventory, something much closer to its current design that caters to a multi ethnic neighborhood that is worlds away from its rural roots.
By 1988, under the grandsons’ leadership, the shop grew again, adding gourmet deli with cheese, caviar and coffee, when changes in liquor liability insurance made the bar a thing of Sunset Corners’ past.
Melding the family business
This melding of the two names — Jensen’s at Sunset Corners — pleases both families. There had been other offers to buy Sunset Corners, said Bittel, the front man who hosts the weekly Saturday wine tastings, and Solomon, the behind the scenes man who runs much of the business end from the office.
They went with the Cruz family.
“There’s a certain synergy that exists and I think that if you look at the parallels between the Cruz family and our family — multi-generational in this industry, very well known in this industry, multiple generations involved in the stores. And you see it not simply in the ones who are directly involved, but even in the other family members,” Bittel said during an interview with the Miami Herald at the store.
“I leaned towards Eddie because he’s familiar with family and family and business. And it was sort of like giving your child away. So you give it away to an investment broker versus a family guy who is very familiar with the business and well respected in the business? On that end, it made me feel good,” said the 68-year-old Solomon.
When Cruz visited the store earlier this year to check it out before signing the papers of sale, he brought along members of his family, including his wife, his son and son’s girlfriend, and his dad. Bittel was impressed.
“Listen, I have a brother and a sister. My siblings. They grew up here, too, in the same way we did. And while they’re not involved, I assure you, they all have opinions because that’s appropriate. So we saw the same kind of gestalt for lack of a better word. That was extraordinarily attractive to us. And when Eddie said that he was going to keep the name, that was significant to us. Emotionally that was significant to Larry and I, and to our families also. We’re proud of what our family accomplished here,” Bittel said.
Cruz nods from a nearby folding chair in the back office.
“I think it’s harder for them ... than for me to buy it, for them to give it up, because they’ve been here for so long. And I know the day I leave I will feel the same way,” said the 58-year-old Cruz.
“This is a journey my dad started in 1978 and I grew up in,” Cruz said about his path in the spirits business. Sons Eric and Kevin Cruz are in the family liquor business, too. “I was always helping [my father] after school. I want to keep the tradition here like I did there. I want to keep their grandfather’s vision alive and that’s what I plan to do here.”
Cruz says he plans to keep at least one of the grandfather’s traditions alive.
“Something that our grandfather started many, many, many million years ago, is we keep a box of lollipops up in front of the store. And when little kids come into the store, we give them one,” Bittel said. “You cannot imagine the amount of people who come into the store as adults to buy wine or spirits, they say, ‘I come here because you used to give me a lollipop.’”
Cruz is quick to add that Bittel and Solomon aren’t walking out the door despite the sale. Neither are some of the veteran employees. John and David McGriff, brothers who have been with Sunset Corners for decades, will now work with some new faces.
Store favorite stays on
John McGriff has had many roles at Sunset Corners since he became Bittel’s first hire in 1975, nearly 50 years ago: manager, beer buyer, cashier, all-around in-house expert resource for customers.
“I’m 71. I was gonna retire when they said, ‘We’re gonna sell the place.’ So I said ‘I’ll stay with you till you sell it’ and then the new owners said they wanted me to work so I decided to keep working,” McGriff said. “I feel great about this place.”
For McGriff, a widower, the family aspect at the Sunset shop keeps him loyal.
“The grandfather was so nice,” he said. “The grandfather never went to a wedding on a Saturday. He never left the store on Saturday. But he came to my wedding. They were like, ‘Oh, Johnny. He never leaves the store on a Saturday. So that was like an honor to work for him.”
Changes at Sunset Corners
For the former owners, Bittel and Solomon, their roles will be reduced, naturally. The daily operations at Jensen’s at Sunset Corners will be Cruz’s responsibility.
Cruz envisions keeping the Saturday wine tastings but adding days devoted to liquor tastings.
Cruz is a rum guy, not a wine expert. So he plans to tap into Bittel’s knowledge. “I know Caymus, which everybody sells. He now knows of Sea Smoke. “My son was talking about that one. Sea Smoke. See I never heard of that in my life. And I’ve been in the business all my life.”
Cruz and his staff will learn. Bittel envisions educating the sales staff via the wine tastings so they can make recommendations to customers.
What else is coming?
Longer store hours that may include opening on Sundays, Cruz said. New windows, painting, a redesigned and raised roof. Modernizing the look of the store.
“What I hope is going to occur, and that I think is going to occur here, is to make this kind of like an amalgamation between what a typical Jensen’s store is and what a typical Sunset Corners was,” Bittel said as he sat next to Cruz. “So that’s the challenge and I actually think that both for the Cruz family and for our family part of the fun, part of the excitement, will be the creation of really a brand new entity that takes the best of what Jensen’s has and what the Cruz family did with the best of what Larry and I accomplished here at Sunset Corners and kind of meld them into something that is better.”
At a wine tasting
For customers like Ellen Dressler, Bonnie Blomberg and Paulette Johnson, keeping some familiar faces and features of the old store is welcome news, they said. The three came for a June 1 wine tasting where regulars had a choice of new drink arrivals from Spain and Portugal.
Among the six offerings she and a handful of customers could consider: Costa del Sole Vino Verde from Portugal, a $13.99 bottle. There were a few in the $25-$35 range like a Bhilar Graciano “Lagrimas de Bhilar” from Spain and a Valderiz 2000. Some of the samplings of higher-priced bottles featured a Luis Canas Seleccion Familia Reserva 2018 that sells for $54.99 and the Telmo Rodriguez Matallana 2020 from Spain that is priced at $95 a bottle.
“Paulette and I have been coming here for a very long time. I mean, decades,” said Blomberg, a microbiology and immunology professor at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. “I like the family that’s here. And I like the wine tasting. And I like the camaraderie. I come because Mike’s very knowledgeable about all the wines we’re drinking and I like that. I don’t remember all of it, but it’s fun.”
David McGriff arranges the cheese guests will nibble on this day. Dressler celebrates the decades she’s been coming to Sunset Corners as a customer and for these tastings with her friend Rachel Waggoner, who she met here around 2008. Both ponder the future with hope. They, too, have heard the two families want a smooth transition that settles like a neat sip of bourbon whiskey.
“This is like an institution that’s been on this corner for as long as I can remember,” Dressler said. “It’s concerning to the neighborhood that it should continue.” She remembers visits that started with her husband and the wines, brandy and other liquors they’d buy here and built into a nice collection at their home after conferring with staffers like Bittel and the McGriffs over the years. Then came the Saturday wine tastings.
“Retaining the name Sunset Corners is very good news. So my hope is that we can continue and, of course, Michael, because of his knowledge and expertise about wine. He makes the tastings so meaningful for people like me not knowing much about wine. I learned a great deal from Mike,” Dressler said.
Her friend Waggoner raises a glass with a wish just out of earshot of Bittel as he pours a taste for customers. He might spill some if he overheard.
“That Michael stays,” Waggoner says of her wish. “He could be 90 years old and still doing my tastings. I just like the whole family atmosphere.”
Long hours in the spirits business
Both families know the hours and days can be long in the liquor business when it’s your family’s business to run.
Cruz notes that when his school friends were going out on weekends he was in one of his dad’s Jensen’s stores until 10 at night stocking, cleaning up, chatting with the customers, helping out.
Solomon may have been of legal age when he “officially” started in the business at Sunset Corners. But that didn’t preclude bagging and carrying out orders as a kid, sweeping up the shop, or organizing the “bottle” or “junk” room in the bowels of the store when it was the whole store before several remodels.
“For me, personally, I was just tired. I was tired of dealing with the back of the house. And I think I was much more ready than Michael was. But after a lot of discussions, I think we both got on the same page,” Solomon said. “I officially started at 23, 24, OK? But then, as Michael pointed out, I spent an enormous amount of time in here. You know, most kids when they get out of grade school, they’re not going to the liquor store.”
Liquor stores with attentive, knowledgeable and regular staffers that know the customers are there for the highs and lows of everybody’s life, Bittel says.
“You have a baby and people over to meet the baby? You serve drinks. You have a wedding? You serve drinks. You do a quince or a bar mitzvah? You serve drinks at the same time,” Bittel said.
“If someone passes away, whether it’s a shiva or a wake or whatever it might be, often they serve drinks,” he said.
“So we go through all of that with our clients and we know all about their lives. And, by the way, they know all about our lives.”
