When One Ninety closed in early 2005, Miami lost much more than a neighborhood restaurant. Located on the bottom floor of an old house in historic residential Buena Vista, just north of the Design District, the funky, friendly food/entertainment spot was hip in a way that was the antithesis of…
Critics mowed down Grass when it opened in the Design District in 2003, if only for the velvet ropes and snobbery encountered at the door. Despite such grumblings, or perhaps because of them, Grass grew quickly as a club destination with a reputation for passable pan-Asian fare. Alas, the scene…
At age twelve Adrianne Marie Calvo was pulling in $200 a week baking chocolate chip cookies and selling them at school. At sixteen she was voted one of the top ten up-and-coming chefs in Florida. At seventeen she captured the bronze in a national bake-off. Shortly thereafter, Calvo began training…
Are there any two cities more different than Key West and Coral Gables? The self-described “City Beautiful” is as anal-retentive as a bucketful of Imodium AD. There are regulations that tell you what color you can paint your house, what animals you can keep as pets. You have to get…
Natural disasters — tornadoes, tidal waves, whatever — are hardly unique to our little weather zone. Nor is thumbing one’s nose in the face of Madre Nature’s power-tripping. But hurricane parties are a form of gallows humor that distinguishes the Tropics from our left-coast and plains-states peers. The main reason:…
Take one part Stir Crazy, the choose-your-own-ingredients wok-fry chain located in Boca Raton (and elsewhere). Mix two parts Moon Thai & Japanese Restaurant in Coral Gables (and elsewhere). Stir together briskly and — voilà! — Stir Moon. (If you can properly visualize this, there is really no need to read…
“The One and Only! Nothing But the Best for Less.” What restaurant reviewer specializing in cheap eats could resist such a come-on? Especially when it’s plastered beneath the place’s name — Conch Town USA — even more of an enticement, because good conch is harder to find than a good…
Our waiter came to the table and began speaking in a foreign tongue. Granted, we were at La Dorada, a Spanish seafood establishment with a predominantly Hispanic clientele. But one would think that when management determines the language to be spoken by employees, a restaurant’s country of residence would take…
Ever walk down the street in some funky part of town and almost trip over a twenty-dollar bill, pick it up, and think, Hey, God likes me? Walk down Biscayne Boulevard around 72nd Street, definitely a still-funky part of town, where it looks like an army of giant gophers has…
It is the loudest dining room I have ever witnessed. Not only is every one of the hundreds of patrons talking at full pitch, and incessantly, but also the ricocheting acoustics in the large, lofty space make it seem as if they are screeching at the top of their lungs…
Finding Zuperpollo Biztro the first time didn’t take quite as long as it took the starship Voyager, marooned in the Delta Quadrant, to locate Earth again. But it was close. Or at least it seemed that way. Nestled inside an office building — all the way through the long lobby,…
Sasha Issenberg, in his new book The Sushi Economy, implies that to eat raw fish on rice is to become an assiduous participant in 21st-century global capitalism. By way of illustrating sushi’s cultural adaptability, the author cites the California roll of avocado and crab — invented in Los Angeles during…
Cheap restaurant in South Beach” is dangerously close to being an oxymoron. “Good cheap restaurant in South Beach” is so oxy you almost have to be a moron to believe that such a greed-defying miracle actually exists. Well, I don’t mean to sound stupid or anything, but there’s at least…
If you want to feel like a tourist in your own town, go to Balans. It’s on Lincoln Road, for god’s sake. When was the last time you hung out there, oozing along with the flow of bug-eyed Midwesterners in their neatly pressed shorts and Tommy Bahamas, elegantly dressed Latins,…
When it comes to culinary firsts, Miami seldom beats Manhattan. So when an article in New York magazine virtually swooned itself silly last December about the opening of Pardo’s (a twenty-year-old Peruvian rotisserie chicken chain) in NYC, it was hard to believe. There’s been a Pardo’s Chicken in Miami for…
There are seven days of the week, wonders of the world, colors in a rainbow, points on a sheriff’s star, digits in a phone number, dots on a common ladybug’s back. The Egyptians had seven gods, the Phoenicians seven kabiris, the Persians seven sacred horses, the Parsees seven angels opposed…
On its business card, this strip mall joint is actually called Michele European Bakery, Gelateria & Caffe, one of those names so long and unwieldly, you’d assume it says it all. It does not. In back of the cafe (named for owner Michele Pompei, who trained and worked as a…
Printed atop the old-timey logo of the new-timey Michael’s Genuine Food & Drink are the words “fresh simple pure.” Not very original. In fact so many chefs have been professing this same pledge, that “fresh simple pure” is to contemporary American cuisine what “snap crackle pop” is to Rice Krispies…
In a neighborhood where signs in front of every other restaurant advertise traditional Haitian favorites like lambi (long-stewed conch) and soupe joumou (meat-packed pumpkin squash soup), the Lunch Room is more than just a little bit different. The soup at this pleasant, if eye-poppingly bright green, indoor/outdoor cafe in Little…
Miami-Dade’s prime waterfront real estate seems marred by more mundane eateries than that of any other coastal resort in the world. And the bayside address that has housed the highest number of unfortunate dining establishments in the county’s history just may be 1601 79th St. Cswy. Remember the Russian Fairy…
Twenty seven million pigs get slaughtered, processed, and wrapped each year by Smithfield Hams. That’s roughly the equivalent of butchering and packaging the entire human populations of America’s largest 32 cities — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas…. This grisly image, indelibly caged…
Telling your average Miami foodie to drive to Homestead for really good Cuban cuisine is like telling an Eskimo to fly to Miami for snow. But you better lose the mukluks and have your boarding pass in hand, because even if you live in Miami, it’s worth the journey to…
