When Manny Becerra moved back to Miami with his wife after years of living out of town, their calendar filled up almost as quickly as their date nights disappeared.
After spending their first year of marriage away from home, the couple had developed a routine: movies on Tuesdays, dinner on Fridays and trips to the dog park on Sundays. Back in Miami, birthdays, family dinners and reunions with friends began taking over.
“You never make time for yourself,” Becerra told Refresh Miami. “I wish there was something prescheduled that I could just tell everybody, ‘Hey, sorry. I have something in my calendar. It’s already set up,’ and that it was a great night.”
That frustration inspired ACE Club, a Miami dining startup Becerra co-founded with his longtime friend Daniel Planos. Its proposition is deliciously simple: Let someone else handle the decisions, coordination, and logistics behind a memorable night out.
The founders met at Belen Jesuit, where they bonded over wakeboarding and formed a student organization that brought classmates to a local park. Years later, that instinct to share something they loved resurfaced with ACE Club.
This time, the passion is food… and the enemy is the group chat.
“People throw up plans in the group chat. Nobody can agree on a time, on a place or even when to go out,” Planos said.
ACE Club offers recurring, prearranged dining experiences. Members provide their preferred dates, dietary needs and dislikes. The company then matches them with a chef who designs a five-course menu, paired with wines, for a single table. The chef personally explains the inspiration behind each dish.
For Becerra and his wife, that can mean reserving the first Friday of every month before other invitations take over. For Planos, it helped reunite college friends who had not gathered in roughly a year and a half.
“We finally had a night worth remembering with my friends,” Planos said. “ACE just sets up the date. We say, ‘I’m going.’ We show up, and the chef does this really personal connection with you.”
ACE Club opened reservations in April and sold out its initial experiences in less than two days, according to the founders. When diners began asking whether they could return the following month, Becerra and Planos launched memberships in May. At the time of the interview, around 170 people had attended an ACE experience.
“It was honestly the most selfish product build ever because it was literally for Planos and I,” Becerra joked. But growing demand turned their personal solution into a club.
Its three membership levels offer different degrees of access. Platinum includes a private driver for the evening. Gold guarantees a monthly experience on a preferred schedule. Access members can book reservations not claimed by the other tiers.
Membership has largely grown through invitations and word of mouth. The exclusivity, the founders said, reflects a practical limitation: To preserve the experience, a chef focuses on only one ACE table at a time.
ACE Club is also developing a mobile app, which the founders said was slated to launch in the fall. It aims to solve the everyday version of the same problem by recommending restaurants based on what a member is craving, who they are with, how much time they have and the atmosphere they want.
“The ACE Club decides where our members go eat,” Planos said.
The company relies on a group of local food authorities, dubbed ACE Experts, to select participating chefs. A smaller group of those chefs hosts the personalized experiences.
In a city where a hyped new restaurant seems to open every week, ACE Club is betting diners are hungry for curation as much as cuisine. Its real product may not be dinner at all, but the rare luxury of having no decision left to make, and no group chat still buzzing in your pocket.
Pictured above: ACE Club co-founders Daniel Planos. left, Manny Becerra.
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