NORTH MIAMI, FLA. (WSVN) - Employees at a North Miami restaurant are in the process of cleaning up after an overnight fire sparked at the business.
The Little Havana restaurant, located along Biscayne Boulevard near Northeast 127th Street, went up in flames just after 1 a.m., Monday.
Doron Reznik, who saw the blaze, contacted authorities and recorded the blaze from his home nearby.
“This is the restaurant, Little Havana,” Reznik said via cellphone video. “I just called 911. This is behind my house.”
The video showed the fire minutes after it started.
Reznik told 7News how quickly officials responded. “The police came. It took them like less than two minutes,” he said. “The fire rescue took three, four minutes.”
He continued to record video as the fire burned and as officials arrived on scene.
Upon their arrival, smoke could be seen seeping from the roof. Miami-Dade Fire Rescue recorded the scene also.
It took crews about an hour to get things under control. Fortunately, no one was inside at the time the fire sparked.
According to the restaurant owner’s son, Jorge Alvarez, the blaze started with an electrical box on the roof.
“Everything was outside, exterior damage, nothing inside,” Alvarez said. “The thing is that smoke travels down too, so it smells a little bit like smoke, but we’re cleaning it out. We have a team there cleaning it out, and we should be open by the end of this Friday — a couple days.”
The Little Havana restaurant has become a staple in the North Miami community. They’ve been open for business since 1991, and Alvarez knows that people count on them.
“We have a lot of employees that have been here for a long time,” Alvarez said. “We’re just a big family. We want to open up fast so [our employees] can start making some money also.”
MDFR has not released an exact cause of the fire.
Copyright 2024 Sunbeam Television Corp. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.