On a particularly sticky Saturday night, amid bursts of a rainstorm that’s been sweeping the city, a queue is snaking around the Red Rooster restaurant in Miami’s Overtown district. The diners inside watch with bemusement as new arrivals, emerging glamorously dressed from their cabs, try in vain to shield their dresses, shoes and hairstyles from the weather.

One by one, the queue files past the restaurant’s entrance through a side door to the venue’s upstairs pool hall, from where the sounds of Caribbean music drift down to the streets. This is The Shrine, a weekly Afrobeats party that has quickly become the night of choice for the city’s young creatives, who are steadily streaming in. It is not, to put it mildly, a good night for the claustrophobic.

Greeting guests – and spotting those who’ll require table service – is the night’s ebullient and magnetic host, Ms Jeanie Joseph. “It’s crazy,” she says. “I’m meeting everybody tonight.”

A former bank worker, Joseph began working at the Red Rooster earlier this year, after a chance meeting with the venue’s owners. “I was like, ‘You guys were sitting on this?’” she remembers. “I literally got fired from the bank on a Friday, the Rooster called me on Monday, and I think I was doing bottle service there by the end of that week.”

She describes the venue as a much-needed social space for the city’s Black community. “A lot of the places for us can be cheesy,” she says. “So it’s a beautiful thing to be the face of a Black space that’s positive. There’s always love here.”

How would she sum it up? “Sexy. We’re gonna keep it sexy. Dope music. Black creatives. Hispanics. Whatever. It’s just a vibe.”

Away from the dead-eyed Instagrammers of South Beach and the stadium-sized superclubs, a new scene is emerging in Miami. The city has long been a haven for revellers, thanks to its year-round warm weather, expansive beaches and late-night alcohol licensing. More recently, Florida’s lax Covid restrictions meant that, as the nightlife scene in other cities dwindled and died, Miami flourished. But what emerged from that crucible is something different and a counterpoint to the cliched, bottle-popping homogeneity that was for so long associated with the city.

“There’s definitely that side to it, and it definitely still exists,” says Mr Zack Mars, a club promoter, consultant and self-described “creative entrepreneur” in Miami’s emergent scene. “But to pay, like, a thousand dollars minimum for a table is just not gonna be doable for the average person. And even if you can, it creates a different atmosphere – you’re going to have a very specific kind of night. Whereas, at my nights, you’ll maybe spend a hundred bucks the entire night. And you’ll have a fucking awesome time.”

A Miami native, Mars has been throwing parties in the city since his time at college. After hosting an event for the rapper Wale in 2011, collaborations swiftly followed with artists including Meek Mill and Pusha T. Before long, Mars was being profiled in Dazed, DMing with Mr Virgil Abloh and scoring an internship with Live Nation. By 21 – once he had reached the city’s legal drinking age – Mars was throwing weekly events on South Beach. Today, he’s involved in some of the city’s most dynamic new nights, including the roaming monthly hip-hop party Sumthin’ Special, which he co-hosts with Joseph, alongside a few friends.

“The vibe I’ve always gone for is less pretentious,” he says. “I’m not trying to do these huge, wild parties. It’s more like 200 people.” Mars doesn’t charge people for entry to his nights, and tries to work with venues that can offer lower-priced drinks. “It just helps the vibe,” he says, “and means that different types of crowds can come. Not just the rich kids. Like, you don’t have to be dressed up to get in.” He pauses. “Though we’re definitely trying to get people to dress up anyway.”

The club nights that Mars, Joseph and their peers are putting on across the city take place in the unlikeliest of places, popping-up after hours in taco restaurants, food halls and dive bars. At the same time, they’re drawing punters towards historically underdeveloped parts of the city. The very building in which the Red Rooster now sits once played host to performers from Ms Josephine Baker to Mr Duke Ellington. But decades of neglect had deprived the area and left its mainly Black residents with few places to socialise.

“They were relegated to this district,” says Mr Derek Fleming, the venue’s co-owner. “But the folks who live there are entrepreneurial, and self-sufficient. So they developed and leveraged the culture, the music, the art, the aesthetic, the food, to create something unique.”

Mr Jason Panton, a former artist and clothing designer who developed The Shrine with Fleming, is surveying the crowd from the DJ booth, from where he has been playing music all night. “There’s no other venue like this in the whole of Miami,” he says. “We’re the number one place for Black people that don’t want basic shit.”

He regards this part of the city’s nightlife scene as a vital way to celebrate the culture of the Caribbean diaspora and to create a space for the music that he loves. “It was very, very hard for Black folks to get a Saturday night,” he says. “So, when this opportunity came up, I didn’t want to compromise. And I didn’t want it to get muddled.”

Panton is firm about the music he’ll play and the way in which the event is marketed. “I didn’t want it to look ‘inclusive’, in that tokenistic way,” he says. “I’m not trying to do the United Colors of Benetton.” For him, the club remains first and foremost a space for his community: early flyers for the night were printed onto images of braids, Bantu knots and other Black hairstyles. “I don’t care who comes,” he says, “but you need to know what you’re coming here for.”

By 1.00am, the venue is at capacity and some in the crowd are drifting onwards – the local DJ Mr Adam “Silent Addy” Alexander, is playing a pop-up set in support of his own night, Peach Fuzz. The community here is tight-knit; Alexander has collaborated with Panton, Joseph and Mars on nights in the past, and makes a concerted effort to support their new ventures.

“I do a Sunday party right across the road from Rooster,” Alexander says, “so people can head from one place to another. It’s a network and there’s a real sense of pride in growing the community down here.”

To that end, he and the others in his circle are continually trialling new venues, new nights, new parts of the city. “As much as Miami is so cultured, so much of it is like Disney,” says Joseph. “This a city where you have to seek culture out and find it. So right now, we need to keep making space for each other. That way we can all eat and we can all make money.”

Space, though, is at a premium. Despite the Art Basel fair looming – and bringing with it an influx of wealthy visitors looking to blow off steam – there’s a paucity of venues willing to trial something new. As a result, the creative underclass will likely be called upon to host and perform at the hotel bars and Soho House outlets dotted across the city, as a means of making money. The hope, though, is that as the scene grows, they’ll be able to afford themselves more creative control.

“I’ve made a lot of venues popular, but I’ve never just done it for myself,” Alexander says. “If it was my place, every night’s gonna be alive.”