It took a grueling telephone conversation with Lynne Wacholder to find out the name and location of Confiteria Buenos Aires Bakery & Café — I’m not entirely certain she’s even told her husband Victor about it yet. Apparently Lynne didn’t want hordes of people discovering her favorite neighborhood spot for…
With its red walls, checkerboard terrazzo floor, fabric-wrapped columns, fiber-optic lighting, and caped, oversize chairs, the two-level KISS Steakhouse and Lounge looks like the Mad Hatter’s tea party on location in Vegas. Which is an appropriate design for the late-night club that evolves at about 11:00 each night, when the…
Nothing made me realize more dramatically just how different living and eating in Miami was going to be than a conversation I had with a new Cuban-American friend shortly after I moved here; we were chatting about the main reason she could never live anywhere else in the United States…
Dining establishments are composed of innumerable components: service, ambiance, soups, entrées, wines, and so on. Certain restaurants end up being exactly the sum of their parts — some more so, others less. Generally speaking, though, if you are pleased with the individual aspects, you’ll most likely enjoy the whole experience…
Some people equate the Yucatán with Cancún or Cozumel, with lying on quiet white-sand beaches by day, guzzling margaritas in boisterous clubs at night. Mention the Yucatán to me, and all I think of is the town of Ticul (pronounced “tee-cool”), home of Gloria Del Socorro’s pollo pibil. Well all…
To judge by sheer number of outlets, sushi has long been South Beach’s favorite food (and I do mean outlets — one day on the beach, years ago, I encountered a guy selling maki rolls from a Jet Ski). And SoBe’s sushi has basically been darned good, too. But until…
It wasn’t long after chefs Jan Jorgensen and Soren Bredahl (from long-established Two Chefs restaurant) took over Scotty’s gourmet market a year ago August that they realized they had a problem: The addition of a top-end butcher operation was producing a lot of meat scraps. Fancy prime scraps to be…
The Incan word tambo refers to small inns that once populated the mountainous terrain of pre-Columbian Peru. Tambo, the new Japanese-Peruvian restaurant in Miami Beach, resembles neither a small inn nor anything you’d ever stumble across in mountainous terrain. In fact with its mosaic tile floor, sand-color walls, white tablecloths,…
Of the nine countries normally referred to as Southeast Asia (Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, Laos, Indonesia, and, stretching it a bit geographically but not culinarily, the Philippines), the cuisines of the first two are by far the most well-known over here. But despite far more American contact with…
There’s been a lot of talk lately about airline security, but precious little about being able to secure a good airport meal while waiting through the delays that these defensive concerns necessitate. I wouldn’t mind having to bide my time at the Houston airport for an extra hour or two…
With a name like Jacky Chan’s Superbowl, what diners would expect is ramen. And in fact Jacky turns out quite a super bowl of this soup; unlike the cheap, packaged, supermarket ramens that got most of us through our impoverished student days, the broth tastes like real stock instead of…
A fresh piece of fish doesn’t require a lot of dressing up to be alluring. Salt, pepper, drizzle of olive oil, sprinkle of lemon juice, and smattering of chopped herbs are more than enough. For some people. Others like their seafood adorned with additional flavors and textures and sauces and…
Since September 11 diners have been holing up at home instead of going out to eat. Not that this survivalist homing instinct has necessarily extended to doing our own home cooking. While formerly hot-ticket restaurants may be relatively empty, many shops selling ready-made gourmet food have found a new market…
On the first day, Mark Soyka declared: “I am opening News Café on Ocean Drive, and a thriving beachside boulevard shall spring up around it.” And that came to pass. Soyka next declared: “I am opening Van Dyke Café on Lincoln Road, and a thriving pedestrian mall shall spring up…
South Florida tourist agencies are gauging where the local economy stands by reading lines on comparative graphs. I got to thinking that a more accurate way to assess the matter would be by studying a real line — like the one that forms at Joe’s Stone Crab. Or used to…
Its proper name may be the 1909 Café but everybody calls it the 1909 Sandwich Shop, for good reason — several, actually. One is that “café” is an awfully optimistic description for a totally unatmospheric lunch-counter space in a downscale minimall, with only four or five tiny tables lining one…
The sign on the door of the little storefront window reads, “A Couple of Basketcases.” That’s the name of Caron Coles’s gift-basket company on 151st Street in North Miami that shares space and uses the specialty food products of her larger enterprise, Foodalicious, to fill those baskets. Upon entering the…
If Nobuyuki Matsuhisa’s name is less known nationally than Wolfgang Puck’s, it is only because the latter is easier to spell. And also because Austrian-born/French-trained Puck’s rep-building restaurant Spago had already established itself as the spot for rich-and-famous Angelinos years before Japanese-born-and-trained Matsuhisa arrived in la-la land, after a culinary…
When we heard the first explosion through an open bedroom window, my wife and I thought it might be thunder. This occurred the day of our arrival. Soon afterward military helicopters buzzed precariously low overhead, and every now and then a jet fighter would crack the silence of the city…
All over New Jersey this time of year, people brave parking-lot-type traffic jams to drive west to the Poconos to see the fall foliage. This is true even of those who live in tree-studded “garden” suburbs like Montclair, where there are plenty of leaves of all colors right at home…
Home Depot and the Latin-flavored bakery chain Don Pan are inextricably linked in my mind, and not just because I am an unabashed fan of both places. Whenever I pull into the Depot parking lot, I salivate with Pavlovian anticipation, knowing from habit that after stocking up on house supplies…
Would you compare Norman’s to Piola Pizza? Well, neither would I. Each is great at what it is. In fact the only fair way to judge restaurants is not by one scale but by trying to evaluate how well any given restaurant succeeds according to its own individual definition, which…
