Music
Bougainvillea's Old Florida Tavern offers late-night live music, as does The Irish Times Pub & Eatery. The major mall of South Miami, The Shops at Sunset Place, has hosted "National Talent Search TV Showcase Miami Auditions."
Parks
South Miami has a great many parks, including Palmer Park, with playing fields for Baseball, T-Ball, Softball, football, and soccer; Fuchs Park, a natural area with a pond where the ducks are friendly and pleased to be fed; Marshall Williamson Park, with tennis courts and a gazebo; the Jean H. Willis Flowering Tree Park, a small area next to the South Miami Police Department featuring a gazebo, picnic benches and a variety of native flowering trees; Brewer Park, with tennis, handball, and basketball courts as well as a playground area and picnic area; Murray Park (adjacent to the Community Center), with lighted basketball courts, a T-ball field, two soccer fields and a flag football field. There are other parks, too, as South Miami is suburban and family-friendly.
Media
South Miami is served by the Miami market for local radio and television. The three newspapers are as follows: the hyperlocal "South Miami News", apart of the Community Newspaperschain, the Miami Herald, which publishes a weekly zoned "Neighbors" section serving South Miami and adjacent communities, and the weekly Miami New Times and The South Miami News, that latter of which is part of the Community Newspapers chain.
Cuisine
South Miami has a diverse offering in its restaurants. There are a great many Japanese restaurants with sushi bars; the Kyojin Japanese Buffet, as its name suggests, provides only buffet meals, though with Chinese hot dishes as well. The Kyojin, in a strip mall on U.S. 1, is located just a few doors away from the former site of one of South Miami's top most popular family-owned businesses, Sunrise City Liquors, which for decades had been owned by Fred Salazar and co-managed by his son, Adam Salazar. To serve the community, they kept late hours and offered cheerful chat and good advice about liquors, beers, and wines. The New Chinatown restaurant, a couple of miles eastward on the Highway, had been a popular spot for lunch and dinner for decades but is now permanently closed. Italian restaurants are also easy to find, such as the Carrabas Italian Grill and Trattoria Sole.
The Deli Lane Cafe & Tavern, a family-friendly eatery with outdoor seating, offers a variety of American food; so does the popular Two Chefs Restaurant, and the Whisk is rated #1 by the TripAdvisor site.One can also find French dining (sandwiches, salads, dinners, French wines, and desserts) at the Cafe Bonjour on U.S. 1. There are popular lamb and duck meals alongside the steak and chicken at the Cafe Pastis, served up by its French chefs, and at Georges on Sunset Drive they offer "hangover helpers" as well as an array of dishes from eggs to pizza to creatively styled burgers. Le Royal French Bakery, offering fresh breads, pastries, and other treats, received high marks ("Miami's best croissant") from the Miami New Times. There is Cuban authenticity at the former Casa Larios Restaurant (now Casacuba), and Portuguese at the Old Lisbon – Sunset. Khoury's Mediterranean Restaurant excels at Middle Eastern food, while Marhaba Mediterranean Cuisine is in the heart of downtown South Miami, just north of the Shops at Sunset mall. To stroll through downtown South Miami, in fact, is to stroll past dozens of restaurants of all kinds, and even the pocket-sized ones can be excellent.