February 19, 2025
Seminole Brighton Bay Hotel & Casino Names Eduardo Rodrigues Executive Chef
Seminole Brighton Bay Hotel & Casino has named Eduardo Rodrigues as its Executive Chef.
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Reporting to the Director of Food & Beverage, Andrew Poliquin, Rodrigues will be involved with the resort’s dining venues including the 126-seat EE-TO-LEET-KE GRILL, a steak house (Josiah Steakhouse) with 62 seats and a fast-service and carry-out cafe offering a combination of items from a coffee bar (Constant Grind) and pizza kitchen (Slice).
Rodrigues, who moved at an early age from North Carolina to Florida, has an extensive background leading upscale resorts, iconic hotels, and private clubs in South Florida. He has mastered various cuisines including Portuguese, Italian, French, Spanish, American Southern, Caribbean, and Latin American.
With 18 years of experience, Rodrigues was most recently at the Sheraton Miami Airport Hotel & Meeting Center. Additionally, he worked at the Islamorada Resort Collection in the Keys, where he led Islamorada’s famous Tiki Bar and the Ciao Hound Italian Bistro. He also worked with the raw bar restaurant and catering department within the resort.
Rodrigues has also managed venues like the historic National Hotel on South Beach. He was part of a cooking event there that included such notables as Emeril Lagasse, Susan Spicer, Wylie Dufresne, and the late Anthony Bourdain.
Other previous employment stops included the Miccosukee Resort & Casino and Mangos Tropical Cafe, where he was featured as one of the top chefs on South Beach by the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce’s Chefs Care Cookbook.
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About Seminole Brighton Bay Hotel & Casino
The new resort, which replaced Seminole Casino Brighton (first opened in 1980), includes a casino with a total of nearly 38,000 square feet, including space for a total of 640 slot machines and 18 tables for blackjack, craps, roulette, and other house-banked card games, along with high-stakes bingo action. Included in the totals are a smoke-free gaming space with 104 slot machines and a high-limit gaming area with 42 slot machines and four table games. Dining options include EE-TO-LEET-KE GRILL with 126 seats, a steak house (Josiah Steakhouse) with 62 seats and a fast-service and carry-out cafe offering a combination of items from a coffee bar (Constant Grind) and pizza kitchen (Slice). The resort also boasts an indoor event space with 400 seats for banquet events or bingo games, or 900 seats set up as a performance hall. In a first for any Seminole Casino, the new resort offers a ten-lane bowling alley (Brighton Bay Bowling) of 7,044 square feet. The complex includes the first hotel to be built on the Brighton Seminole Reservation, featuring 100 guest rooms on four stories, totaling 72,000 square feet. Guest rooms include a mixture of rooms with either one king bed or two queen beds, plus three suites and a fitness center. The resort’s name salutes popular sportfishing sites of nearby Lake Okeechobee, where Fisheating Bay is a little more than two miles from the resort. Fisheating Bay and Fisheating Creek get their name from the Seminole name recorded on a military map of 1839, Thlothlopopka-Hatchee, translated as “the river where fish are eaten.”