In like a lion, out like a lion: Heralded in by the South Beach Wine & Food Fest, March looks to be a month of little respite for the gastronomically weary. The rash of restaurant openings is like poison ivy on the tender skin of a baby. We’ve got, first…
It’s understandable if you haven’t yet heard about Casa Tua (pronounced “too-ah”). After all it doesn’t advertise, and there’s no signage on the restaurant, which, to daytime passersby on Seventeenth Street in South Beach, appears to be nothing more than a stunning stone Mediterranean-style beach house. An iron fence and…
Does the old expression discuss going “from feast to famine” or “from famine to feast”? I’d always thought the former, especially while trying to find a decent pizza when I first moved down here from New York City a decade ago. But after experiencing Pizza Libre, the latter won’t leave…
A great sandwich consists of great bread plus great filling (GS=GB+GF). What makes a great bread is freshness, flavor, and texture. The breads at Zooz are baked on site, right before your eyes if you arrive early enough, steam rising from a seven-grain bread as the baker sliced it into…
The quality of the culinary news this week amounts to a rhyme scheme in a children’s poem (or a Sheryl Crow song): sad, mad, and just plain bad. And not just because Mr. Rogers passed away after a bout with cancer. For starters there’s been a death in the gastronomic…
If you have read anything about the Coral Gables restaurant Cacao 1737 (though there hasn’t been much to read — the lack of buzz especially odd since Edgar Leal was perhaps the most buzz-producing young chef in Venezuela before he relocated to the now-defunct restaurant Zur in Miami Beach not…
From the outside, this small, unassuming downtown lunchroom with the ubiquitous coffee/pastry window on the street looks like a typical Cuban joint — and sure enough, it was La Carreta for almost a quarter-century. Then Argentine owners took over a couple of years ago. Now rechristened and redecorated, Floridita, as…
I’d like to offer a big warm welcome to all you frigid foodies flying in from afar for the second annual South Beach Wine & Food Festival this weekend, and at the same time ask that you please remove your galoshes at the door. Congratulations to those who’ve managed to…
It’s tough giving birth to two babies at the same time, especially when they’re not twins. Just ask Andrea Curto-Randazzo and Frank Randazzo, who have been in precisely that uncomfortable position for the past eighteen months or so. The former executive chefs of Wish and the Gaucho Room, respectively, became…
“Spin? There’s no spin. Things were not working out and it was a mutual, agreed-upon departure.” That’s the answer I got from China Grill Management reps when I asked about the replacement of Blue Door chef Elizabeth Barlow with chef Damon Gordon, who opened Saint Martins Lane in London for…
I was sipping a glass of Australian Shiraz at Vin Amante, a new wine bar on Española Way, marveling at just how many crummy dining establishments could be crammed into one short stretch of this quaintly sweet street. On the night of our visit Vin Amante’s tiny dining room contained…
Early one morning several years ago, speed-reading through the e-mail that had accumulated overnight, I found a long letter that appeared to be from a friend. It started like a continued conversation among people who knew each other well enough to totally dispense with formalities: “Here’s a story.” Though I…
Many moons ago (about 98, actually), I pulled a culinary prank for April Fool’s Day: I made up a restaurant called Tastes Like Chicken and wrote a review on it. In the text I tried to place as many weird and downright disgusting items as I could imagine — I…
It’s that time of year when the annual horde of houseguests descends from the north yet again, demanding to be schlepped out to the Everglades yet again. What they claim they want is to experience our region’s great natural wonders. What they really want is one of our region’s great…
So what exactly did the “First Annual Cheeca Lodge & Spa Food & Wine Festival February 2003,” held over the course of three evenings in the infamously laissez-faire Florida Keys community and attended by chefs from other resorts and spas around the country, offer the consumer? Aside from a wordy…
In 1991 Hectór Rolotti opened a modest little café in New York City called Novecento Soho. A few years later he instituted a more extensive bistro menu there, and since that time has added four more Novecentos in Argentina and Uruguay. Two months ago the sixth branch premiered on Alton…
To think of restaurant reviewing as an Xtreme Sport may at first seem overly dramatic to readers who are more accustomed to thinking of the genre in terms of, say, rock climbing without ropes, or racing down ice-coated mountains in unprotected vehicles that have no brakes and are the size…
Just when we think it’s gone and done it — little Miami has finally grown up — we get whacked in the baby teeth by yet another example of just how unsophisticated and clueless we really are. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been rallying for this town since I moved…
Most-asked question of the past two weeks: Why did Michael Schwartz leave the executive chef position at Atlantic in the Beach House Bal Harbour only four months into the job? Easiest answer: Personality conflict. “We just weren’t a match,” Schwartz says. “I went into it thinking about the future opportunities…
As the original supervising architect of Coral Gables, Phineas Paist established a board of review whose approval was required for any new construction or remodeling. That board is still in place today, but somehow The Village of Merrick Park shopping complex slipped past Paist’s precept, and sprawls luxuriously across quite…
It takes more than some gallons of blue paint and some gallons of white to make a Greek restaurant look authentic; you also need murals on the walls, preferably of white sun-bleached domes against blue ocean waters. A little of that tinkly Greek music doesn’t hurt either. Ouzo’s Greek Taverna…
After a weekend afternoon in the park with the family, there is nothing like ice cream. So it’s just as well that Tasti D-Lite Café isn’t open on weekends, because Tasti D-Lite “ice cream” is nothing like ice cream. Unlike its competitors in the field of low-fat desserts that attempt…
