Is this cozy little gem of a restaurant near Little Havana Miami’s best kept secret?

In an unassuming gray and blue building just south of the Miami River, next to a shop that sells Cuban coffee and lottery tickets, culinary magic is brewing.

You can taste it in the crisp bites of baby corn, slathered in pecorino cheese. In the crudo with culantro tahini served with mild habanada peppers (not to be confused with spicier habaneros) and sweet slices of plum. In the perfectly cooked beef nestled against crispy grilled gem lettuce that’s more revelation than leafy green.

The restaurant is Palma, a cozy spot that seats 20 at tables and five at the counter, with an eclectic, imaginative, reasonably affordable tasting menu — and big ambitions.

Palma, which opened earlier this year and is quietly drawing a following, is the creation of South Florida-born chef Juan Camilo Liscano, 28, who serves what he calls a modern menu steeped in South American and French flavors. You’ll find meat, fish and produce on the menu, which is carefully curated and created by Palma, who works with a sous chef and server and not much else.

Is this cozy little gem of a restaurant near Little Havana Miami’s best kept secret? — Chef Juan Camilo Liscano prepares the sweet plantain brioche at Palma, a 25-seat restaurant near the Miami River.

This is a small operation. Palma is not a corporate giant from the north or across an ocean: Liscano has no partners in the business. Instead, he indulged in a time-honored tradition: Borrowing money from his dad, raiding his savings and maxing out his credit cards to open the restaurant.

It’s not located in Brickell or Wynwood or South Beach or the Gables or any other likely spot for an upscale, chef-driven dining experience. The restaurant at 240 NW Eighth Ave. isn’t exactly in a trendy neighborhood, but it’s not more than 15 minutes or so from any major neighborhood in central Miami. Brickell’s close. So is Edgewater. There’s parking, and Miami is a city where diners are willing to drive.

There’s another, more practical reason for its location, according to Liscano: “It was quite literally the only option.”

A neighbor rides past the small but mighty Palma restaurant, which opened earlier this year.

“It was the only one I found that had a hood, a grease trap and electricity,” he admits. “It was an empty shell I could decorate how I wanted.”

It’s fitting that Liscano’s dad, who worked for American Airlines and moved his family around the country throughout Liscano’s childhood, helped him out (Liscano ended up in Weston with his mom, where he graduated from Cypress Bay High). He was the one who suggested his son consider cooking when Liscano felt aimless, attending community college in Los Angeles but unsure what he wanted to do with his life.

“I was kind of feeling stuck, and he knew exactly how to guide me into trying different things. It’s the only way you can possibly know, to immerse yourself in something and see if it’s something you’d like to explore,” Liscano says now. “He knew I enjoyed cooking at home. He said, ‘Why don’t you just get any cooking job that you see?’ I got a job making French fries at a small burger place in El Segundo for three months. It was a lot of fun.”

Lobster claws for the lobster tartelette’ that are part of the menu at Palma. The restaurant serves a tasting menu Wednesday through Saturday and a more laidback, a la carte menu on Sundays.

Liscano ended up returning to Miami and got a job at the Vagabond Hotel in the MiMo neighborhood. His first night of work was the wildest of all wild nights: New Year’s Eve.

Liscano loved every moment.

“I can’t think of a crazier night to start working at a restaurant,” he says. “I thought it was something I wanted to get into more.”

He worked at the Vagabond until it closed — “it makes me think of really fun parties from the ’60s,” he says now fondly — then embarked on a kitchen career that took him back to Los Angeles, then on to New York and off to Europe, with stops at the now-closed Animal in L.A. and Momofuku Ko in New York as well as London’s Ikoye, which had just earned its second Michelin star and was making its way onto the 50 Best Restaurants list.

“It was an incredible experience,” he says. “It’s such a small kitchen. The guys there were so locked in.”

Chef Juan Camilo Liscano bundles sage which is part of Palma’s granita dessert.

After his European jaunt (which also included Paris because of course it did), Liscano returned to Miami with his girlfriend and started looking for a place to put down roots, both personal and culinary.

With the Palma menu, he wanted to offer a reasonably priced seven-course tasting menu — $85 is not inexpensive, but it’s significantly less than most high-end tasting menus in town. The idea is that the offerings will change monthly, depending on what produce is in season and what meats and seafood are available. You may fall madly in love with one dish’s fresh figs only to find they’re gone the next time you go. Such is Liscano’s commitment to a seasonal menu.

The most recent menu also included a lobster tartelette with dried tomato; steamed fish with mussel sabayon (a custardy sauce), embered cabbage and espelette (a pepper); and a dazzling bread-and-butter service with sweet plantain brioche and coconut caramel butter that deliberately arrives halfway through the meal.

Farm-fresh ingredients that are the cornerstone to Chef Juan Camilo Liscano’s menu at Palma.

“Bread often gets overlooked or is an afterthought served before the meal,” Liscano explains. “I just think you put more intention into it this way. And I like serving it with the fish, which will have some kind of flavorful sauce. You can just mix the bread around in it and get messy with it. That’s how I want people to eat it.”

Despite Miami’s growth as a culinary destination, Liscano was surprised at the number of diners unprepared for a tasting menu. But most settle in to give it a try.

“Most people are willing to go with it, especially when they realize we do a wine pairing,” he says. “It’s like ‘Let me give you full control — give me what you have!’ Which is great. They’re letting go and trusting us.”

Chef Juan Camilo Liscano checks the table settings at Palma.

For diners who are a little more wary or budget-minded, Liscano has created a different sort of dining experience on Sundays, offering an a la carte menu and more of a laidback wine bar vibe.

“It feels more like choose your own adventure,” he says, adding that he picks out an expensive bottle of wine that normally only sells by the bottle to sell by the glass in hopes of broadening Miami palates.

The summer, as always, has been a bit slow. Nothing odd there; that follows the natural rhythm of Miami. But Liscano believes in his menu and in his small but mighty restaurant’s prospects.

“I wanted to live here and stay here,” he says of Miami. “I really have a ‘Field of Dreams’ feeling about it. If you build it, and put 100 percent into it, everything will work and they will come.”