Something seemed amiss as soon as we entered Jason’s at the Harrison. The vaguely Vegas room, with black-and-white tiger-skin motif and thumping club music, didn’t gel with the Mediterranean/Asian/American comfort cuisine of chef Jason McClain — who just a couple of months ago, and with much fanfare, had taken over…
The intersection of 71st Street and Rue Vendome in Miami Beach is what many would call a “cursed location” for restaurants. The list of victims includes a Turkish place, a Russian place, and most recently Ouzo’s, a Greek/Med place that has since moved to South Beach. If this were a…
Sake Room Sushi Lounge is a chic little restaurant that tries very hard to please … when it’s not trying almost as hard to annoy. On one hand, you have fitful, graceless service by a haughty young waiter who had evidently decided we were neither beautiful nor Latin enough to…
Where: Asaka, 20355 Biscayne Blvd., 33180, (305) 682-9331 What $15 Gets You: Miso soup, salad, several california rolls, chicken katsu, vanilla ice cream tempura (or wine). Sushi is one of those foreign dishes that have become as American as apple pie (apple fish pie). It’s not strange to ingest the…
It’s said that Jewish history, along with the religious holidays that celebrate it, can be summed up in three sentences: They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat! At no time of year does this ultimately concise historical summary seem more accurate than now. Thursday is Purim, a holiday…
Does bad service negate good food? Not necessarily. Many restaurant recommendations come riddled with caveats explaining the place isn’t much to look at and the service is shoddy but the food is fantastic; I have never heard somebody tout an establishment by saying the cuisine was awful but the décor…
Mary Brickell Village still isn’t much of a village, with many of the storefronts as empty as the concept of a downtown urban mall. Think of it more as a quaint clustering of that rapidly replicating creature known as the casual-upscale restaurant chain. On the plus side, Brickell Village has…
If you go by the menus of the Italian restaurants in our little town, you can only conclude that one of the world’s most glorious and diverse cuisines consists mainly of pizza, fried calamari, pasta with red sauce, and tiramisu. Italy’s great artisanal and regional specialties — hand-crafted salumi and…
When was the last time you ate chicken tikka masala on a rustic riverfront deck, as a manatee drifted by and a footlong, eye-poppingly bright green lizard watched you from under a nearby table? It was probably the last time you ate at Taj Mahal, though this colorful Indian restaurant…
The most utterly predictable comment from a New Yorker in a Miami pizzeria: “It’s not like a New York slice.” Culprits often cited are humidity, water quality, and brand of canned tomatoes. In fact, the real deal has been available for about a year and a half at Primo Pizza,…
Where: Graziano’s Gourmet in the Gables 2301 Galiano St., Coral Gables, (305) 460-0001 What $15 Gets You: Parrillada with a side salad (or fries) and an Anchor Steam…
“Fine dining” once conjured images of elegant salons, white-glove service, and the type of meals you would never, and could never, cook at home. Nowadays it is a label affixed to restaurants that charge a lot of money. Bourbon Steak is a contemporary American steak house, and as such does…
When it comes to chain restaurants, Miami diners are like masochists at a convention of sadists. Steak house, Mexican, Italian, Chinese. Seafood, burgers, chicken, hot dogs. Chains are the culinary equivalent of the undead, sucking much of the quirky, weird, wonderful life out of preparing food for the nourishment and…
Where: LC’s Roti Shop, 19505 NW 2nd Ave, Miami Gardens. What $15 Gets You: A chicken roti, a sugar cake, a doubles, and a Coke. Caribbean cuisine is hard to define because of the mixing of cultures that exist in the area generally referred to as the Caribbean. When a…
The 70th annual Food Network South Beach Wine & Food Festival gets under way Thursday. I mean seventh — it just feels longer because the whole shebang has gotten so big so fast. In fact it was only in 2002 that Lee Brian Schrager, director of special events and media…
Before Hurricane Wilma blew out all the windows of the Conrad Hotel’s 25th-floor lobby/restaurant, the space consisted of intimate 80-seat formal restaurant Atrio; Bar Noir, a dark corner lounge whose vibe was more Hernando’s Hideaway than happy hour; and a huge, high-ceilinged atrium comprising a couple of sofas and a…
Where: Japanese Market Inc. 1412 79th Street Cswy North Bay Village, (305) 861-0143 What you get for $15: The Deluxe Sushi combination (8 pieces Nigiri) plus a fat beer. Sushi in this town sucks. It’s either prohibitively expensive or poorly done or some combination of the two. Fortunately for us…
Where: American Adobo, 633 NE 125th St., Miami What $15 Gets You: Teriyaki chicken, longaniza, rice, cabbage soup and a Coke Don’t let the name American Adobo fool you, the only thing American in this restaurant is the ketchup. The restaurant focuses on Filipino cuisine. As me and my friend…
Remember macadamia-crusted yellowtail snapper in mango sauce? And papaya salsa, yuca mash, and a single plantain chip rising Iwo Jima-style from the plate? Ah, the bad old days. Not that New Florida cuisine wasn’t a noble concept at the start, but it reached the point where you couldn’t enter a…
If the devil is in the details, Little Saigon is a church. For years this North Miami Beacher has been one of the few bright lights in the local Asian dining scene, which is otherwise inhabited by mostly terrible Chinese restaurants, mediocre Thai eateries, and dozens of roll-by-numbers sushi joints…
Where: DJ’s Diner (Best Western Windsor Inn), 12210 Biscayne Boulevard, Miami. What $15 Gets You: A Mexican-style burger, fries, mozzarella sticks, and a drink. DJ’s Diner at the Best Western Windsor Inn on 12210 Biscayne Boulevard is easy to overlook as most people are usually speeding by on that street…
Few things are as dismaying as returning to a favorite restaurant and discovering it has slipped. Worse is when you recommend the place to a friend — a needless squandering of their money and your credibility. It occurs with large, corporate-owned ventures that possess the capital to overstaff the kitchen…
