These days honest-to-goodness mom-and-pop restaurants seem about as endangered as family values. For one thing, there are fewer and fewer of them. Doubtless, people have concluded that to live, rear children, and run a business together isn’t a prescription for a fruitful long-term relationship: The 24-7 marriage can be downright…
“I read the review you got in New Times,” my husband said to the owner of Oasis Cafe a few months ago as he placed a take-out order. “You must be pretty happy.” “Yeah, we are. Surprised, though,” said the proprietor, who obviously had no clue he was talking to…
I have a recurring nightmare about an all-you-can-eat buffet. I enter a dark, two-story building, whereupon a grim hostess shoves a hotel-white china plate into my hands. Then I trudge after a line of people up a flight of musty stairs, through an endless series of dining rooms, and finally…
I got my first taste of caviar-and-champagne life on my honeymoon. The hubby and I flew to a gorgeous Puerto Rican luxury beach resort for ten days to recover from the trauma of the marriage ceremony. When we arrived, we went from the plane straight to the chaise longues arranged…
To say that Mark Militello’s closing of his landmark North Miami restaurant was a surprise would be fair. Though his publicist Barbara Raichlen told me he had been thinking for two years about giving up the place, his decision — announced to his employees on a Thursday last month, appearing…
Miami has plenty of pretty good international restaurants. (Some are even great.) What’s missing are authentic French bistros. Places like Le Bouchon du Grove and L’Entrecote de Paris come close, but the one’s atmosphere is a bit too trendy, the other’s menu a little too limited. Miami will never be…
FADE IN: INT. TOWNHOUSE LIVING ROOM — LATE AFTERNOON (JUNE) The sun streams through a west window, highlighting contemporary wicker furniture and walls that could use a paint job. Lounging on the couch and watching early Eighties classic The Breakfast Club, a RESTAURANT CRITIC reaches lazily for the phone. Without…
School’s out, and my husband is delighted. Not because his wife has stopped muttering about kids misbehaving in class. Not because she has a smile as permanent as ink on her face. But because of what she has found: Her cutting board. Her grill pan. Her coupons. That’s right: I’m…
This is a warning: Don’t dine outside. Not this summer, anyway. Forget that an actual TV forecast the other night stated that the following day would feature “sweltering heat and miserable humidity.” Forget that the current weather patterns have spawned so many tornadoes we could be living in Kansas. Forget…
Imagine not appreciating food. Imagine not savoring the creamy delicacy of a room-temperature Brie. Not admiring the ruby redness of a perfectly ripe springtime strawberry. Not delighting in the aroma of a roasting turkey, or salivating over a crisp spear of asparagus smothered in silky Hollandaise sauce, or treasuring the…
When I was in college, one of my roommates wanted to throw a dinner party for some elite international friends, including her boyfriend, the son of a Saudi Arabian oil magnate, and a Jordanian prince. Only problem was, she couldn’t cook very well, and she didn’t trust herself not to…
“The past is like shelter,” Ricardo Pau-Llosa told me over a recent dinner at Doc Dammers Bar & Grill. “Everybody needs one.” We were discussing the “dramatic erosion of Latin culture” he has observed in the second generation of Cuban Americans. A poet, art critic, and professor of English at…
I subscribe to a variety of culinary publications not so much because I cook, but because I like to keep up with those professionals — you know, chefs and restaurateurs — who do. Since I can’t go to restaurants all over the world, I figure the least I can do…
Once upon a time, the kitchen was a great place to hide. Men and women could choose the cooking biz not only to showcase their talents in the culinary arts, but also for the privacy that was afforded them as they toiled in obscurity behind those swinging doors. Celebrity chefdom…
Every time I’ve gone to Little Havana for Cuban food lately, I’ve come home without having had any. It’s not that I can’t find a decent Cuban restaurant on Calle Ocho; some of the best cafeterias and bodegas line this strip. But in the past couple of years, rents on…
It’s that time again. Every year some local incident reignites the Great Language Debate. Who should speak English and risk miscommunicating? Who should speak Spanish and risk offending others? Clearly the issue will never be resolved. But it’s too juicy a piece of meat to leave uncut, so year after…
I often find myself wondering, as the millennium approaches, where this country’s cuisine goes from here. In the Seventies overseas chefs introduced us to nouvelle cuisine, with those perfect, tiny morsels set in the middle of huge plates and served in elaborately stuffy restaurants or beneath mirror balls in nightclubs…
Remember that old saw, “You can’t judge a book by its cover”? Sure, it’s a cliche, but like all cliches it has a basis in truth. We all make assumptions based on appearances, every day of our lives. Even in these politically proper Nineties, when everyone works so hard not…
Late in the afternoon, look at the sky: cerulean blue, marred like a bruise with the portent of thunderstorms. A sure sign of summer. But how can that be when the tourist season hasn’t ended yet? Daylight Savings Time, a marker that to most of the country signals spring but…
This past fall, when I took a job as an elementary school teacher, I didn’t give any thought to what havoc this career move would wreak on that most sacred hour of the day: lunchtime. In the grade-school biz we get half an hour, which is often chiseled to twenty…
As human beings, we’re all pretty much assured that whatever happens to us has, at some point, happened to somebody else. An experience can be wonderful or horrifying, but it’s almost certainly not unique. Simply by virtue of being able to use our thumbs, walk upright, and talk, we belong…
As I inched my way toward my master’s degree in poetry at the University of California in Irvine, I took solace in one thing: After every brutal workshop in which we deconstructed each other’s work until at least one of us cried in the bathroom and the rest vowed never…
