Einstein Bros bagels are round, chewy breads with holes in the center, and tasty in tandem with sandwich fillings, but have little in common with true bagels. Mostly they lack the proper color and texture — bagel crusts should have more golden brown crunch to them than these pale softies…
It doesn’t intrigue me that much when people report excitedly on new Mexican restaurant finds that have great red or green salsa. Sure I love the stuff, but great Mexican tomato/tomatillo salsas don’t depend on the kind of precision, balance, timing, and educated know-how that a great French sauce does;…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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”…
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…
Perhaps it’s time to start marking Miami restaurants on a curve — this way I could say only nice things about Granny Feelgood’s, because, in relation to other local “health food” establishments, there’s a lot to feel good about. If compared with a real health-conscious eatery like, say, one that…
“Are you Jewish?” the guy behind the counter at Tea for Two asked skeptically. “No,” I admitted, “but I was born in Brooklyn. That’s about the same thing.” “Nah, I can always tell,” he laughed. My non-Jewishness, he went on to explain, was noticeable because it was a novelty; evidently…
The people of Pinecrest and South Miami don’t go for a whole lot of fancy stuff. That’s probably why hoity-toity eateries that open here, often to great fanfare, find themselves turned inside out as quickly as cheap umbrellas in a windstorm. Two Chefs has weathered all sorts of competition by…
There is a big problem with chef/owner Carmen Gonzalez’s new restaurant Carmen. The problem is that there are no problems. Who is going to believe a review that says something like that? Okay — the location could be a problem, judging just from past history. The restaurant is in the…
I don’t deny that the reason I decided to eat lunch at this particular sandwich spot was because of its quacky moniker. I thought: Surely any food shop called the Rubber Duck has to put out a pretty creative product, right? Well, as it turns out, not really, but this…
While in Edinburgh two years ago, I went to buy a city restaurant guide at Cooks Bookshop, owned by Clarissa Dickson Wright, formerly one of the Food Network/BBC’s Two Fat Ladies. They were a notoriously butter- and beer-swilling duo (until partner Jennifer Patterson died in 1999) who roared through the…
