Back another lifetime ago when 2020 was just another, only slightly off-kilter year, Michael Beltran and Justin Flit opened Navé as an elegant space for seafood and pasta where diners could be whisked away by a bottle of white wine and a glass-encased pasta production room where bucatini and oxtail-filled ravioli (among other delicacies) were rolled out daily. The universe had plans, and Donald Trump didn't. Thus, when the pandemic hit, such whims became an ethereal, almost forgotten thing of the Before Times. Only Beltran and Flit did not forget. They rallied. They shortened the menu, focusing on pizza and pasta for takeout. They reanimated the "Proof Burger," named for Flit's former midtown-Miami restaurant where everything except the cheese was produced in-house. Toward the end of the year, the sophisticated space has been doing double duty as a seafood shack, plying lobster rolls ($20), fish and crab dip with salsa roja and cilantro ($10) and beer-battered fish ($16). Though nothing this year has gone as planned, Beltran and Flit, like the rest of their ilk around town, have been forced to tap deeper into wells of creativity and grit just to survive. It's unfair. It's wrong. In the case of the leaders "handling" everything, it's borderline criminal. That being said, perhaps the experience will give our culinary community an arsenal of new concepts and recipes that will burst forth with greatness whenever this nightmare finally comes to an end.