I’ve always wondered about so-called bad-luck restaurant locations that have earned, after the initial restaurant has departed, a rep for failure. Take the old WPA space on Washington and Eighth or thereabouts. It’s been ten years and about that many different restaurants since that one single — yet brief –…
The Park Central Hotel on Ocean Drive used to have a cool Deco lobby replete with pool table. Now, as a dining room for Quinn’s, it is filled with linen-covered tables that extend onto a comfortable outdoor patio and up the crowded street. Alfresco dining on this pedestrian thoroughfare always…
The future’s so bright I have to wear … a corset. Make that a corsé. I suffered pangs of disappointment when the Michael Schwartz/5061 deal went south for two reasons. Schwartz has been one of my fave chefs since he opened Nemo and Big Pink more than a decade ago,…
If you enter a restaurant in China and ask for “egg foo yung,” a puzzled look will most assuredly cross your waiter’s face. The term is meaningless in that country, the dish nonexistent, yet it’s long been a popular staple in Chinese-American eateries. At Sang’s Chinese Restaurant in North Miami…
On a recent evening at Pan-Asian restaurant Soco, all of the half-dozen nightly specials were Italian except for one appetizer. Which was Spanish. At the bottom of the regular menu — which features dishes like a Thai fish hot pot, a Chinese Peking duck spring roll, and a Japanese sushi…
A million bucks. In this era of dot-com millionaires, most of whom remain just as geeky as they were in high school, it just doesn’t seem so exciting, does it? Not to mention that since our standards have been so inflated, you can become an instant millionaire just by eating…
The upside to our modern-day obsession with food is the increase in availability of all things culinary, from greenmarkets to green-apple martinis to green restaurateurs. The downside is that it is an obsession, and obsessions nearly always turn ugly. We are already dealing with consequences such as rampant obesity, the…
On the Website where I first found Le Petit Bistro, it sounded like a terrific concept. Categorized as French, the eatery touted itself as combining “the convenience of quick service with the tastes and selections found in an upscale bistro.” Since I subsequently noticed two other Miami-Dade Le Petit Bistros…
Now that the scent of rotten mangoes has (mostly) ceased to waft across my yard, thanks to an early peak season, I have begun to detect other aromas in the air: the prix-fixe, all-you-can-eat, kids-eat-free, free-wine-with-entrée, early-birds-get-soup-or-salad, twenty-percent-off-the-total-check, twenty-bucks-off-checks-over-fifty-bucks, buy-one-menu-item-get-one-at-equal-or-lesser-value-free specials. Yup, I can sniff out just about any restaurant’s…
The opening fete of Café Boulud in the Brazilian Court in Palm Beach raised one immediate question: Why didn’t superstar chef Daniel Boulud, proprietor of New York City’s Daniel, Café Boulud, and DB Bistro Moderne, debut his first eponymous venture outside the Apple in the Magic City? The simple answer…
Tap Tap, South Beach’s only Haitian restaurant, has exhibited precipitous ups and downs since opening on Fifth Street nine years ago. What started out as a fun, funky, crowded joint with enchanting island fare turned into a not-so-happening joint with not-so-enchanting fare. Then the place enjoyed an upward tick, followed…
Upon hearing the name of Miami Beach’s new upscale Chinese restaurant, Pao, my Food TV-fan brother, who is professionally in sales, immediately attributed it to South Beach celebrity-identified public relations shrewdness. “POW!” he marveled approvingly. “So people think of Emeril’s ‘BAM!’ Clevvvvv-er! Commercial.” The bad news, for other sales-oriented folk,…
The year was 1991. The setting, after-hours at a seafood restaurant at the end of a pier in Newport Beach, California, where I worked as a waitress. The main players included me, and a bartender named Lee Ray (pronounced with the same emphasis you would put on John Boy). Here’s…
I recently poked gentle fun at Granny Feelgood’s for its pseudo-approach toward health food, so I guess you could file my experiences at Food Without Fire under “Better watch what you ask for because you just might get it.” There is nothing phony about this “gourmet raw market & deli”…
My review of the Wet Olive a couple of weeks ago prompted a flood of responses. Most of them defended the ePoetry event that I was unlucky enough to witness while attempting to dine, called me a bigot, and belittled the discrimination I experienced as merely a joke. Only one…
In terms of romantic ambiance, the location of this Italian-American eatery would initially seem best described as convenient; it’s in the supremely low-rent Redbird Mall, and except for some very cute 3-D paintings of Italian street scenes (similar to the Scull sisters’ playful old Havana constructions), the décor is basic…
It was a full decade ago that a few Argentine culinary pioneers like Prima Pasta’s Gerardo Cea began transforming Miami Beach’s rundown (often dangerously druggy, at best boring) eastern 71st Street area into a haven for lovers of Argentina’s Italian-influenced fun food in a festival atmosphere. Still the neighborhood didn’t…
There were crullers and beignets aplenty in New England circa 1803, but Elizabeth Gregory, of Portland, Maine, added nutmeg, cinnamon, and lemon rind to her batter and placed a nut in the center of each one. She called these “doughnuts.” Her aim was to create a pastry that her son,…
The post-9/11 climate, from SARS to orange alerts to worrisome economic conditions, has led to a dining trend toward affordable neighborhood restaurants that offer simply designed, well-prepared foods served with a friendly face — upscaled Happy Meals for nervous adults, if you will. Tim Zagat goes so far as to…
There’s KFC, but then there’s Church’s; there’s Taco Bell, but then there’s Baja Fresh; there’s Blimpie, but then there’s Quizno’s. Which is to say, just because food is chain-restaurant fast food doesn’t mean it’s bad and/or boring food. Case in point: Golden Krust, which is certainly a chain, if a…
In the category of current food trends, there are those that are easy to understand — Back to Basics, for instance. Who doesn’t get steak and potatoes? Other trends, like Ferrán Adria’s Deconstructed/Reinvented Food, are considerably harder to grasp; dishes one expects hot come cold and vice versa, with taste…
The link between New York and Miami is like that of a torso and an amputated leg: The latter might be expendable, but the physical memory lingers. Which city is the sacrificial limb depends on perspective. Usually I consider New York the phantom itch. No matter how hard I try…
