The Purple Dolphin. The phrase brings to mind (1) a psychedelic Sixties rock band that once opened for Moby Grape, or (2) a seedy seaside disco lounge, or (3) Dan Marino after a bevy of hard sacks. In fact, the words are reminiscent of almost anything but a restaurant that…
The costliest real estate is that which sits vacant, unleased, or unsold, generating no income for its owner. No one knows that fact of life better than the city of Miami, landlords of Firehouse Four restaurant. Government officials took four long years to approve new tenants for the empty eatery…
Heard this before? “It’s the next South Beach!” How about “It’s another SoBe!” At one time or another people have made such declarations to me about downtown Hollywood, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach. Even Savannah. Depending on the person making the claim, it was meant as a boast or…
My recent panning of some of Miami’s Hispanic eating establishments seems to have gotten folks wondering if I’m a bigot. After my negative reviews of the new (and dreadful) Malaga and the historic (and dreadful) Botin, the mail poured in. In a letter to me, Donald Berger of Hollywood was…
Back in the non-foodie Fifties, when I was a pre-adolescent child in a lower-middle-class, aspiring-to-the-stars family, I ate a great deal of chow at resort hotels — food that signified my clan’s efforts at upward mobility. And I adored the stuff. Not for its taste, mind you, because frankly it…
No doubt the name causes many people to do a double take: Sango Jamaican and Chinese Restaurant. Jamaican and Chinese? Does the place serve General Tso’s jerk chicken? Natty Dread egg rolls? What gives? A little history goes a long way toward understanding how national cuisines evolve, and in this…
A few years ago New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl postulated that because Italian restaurants are so common, new ones need an angle in order to attract customers. At the time she was reviewing yet another mediocre Manhattan caffe, this one attempting to distinguish itself from the other strands…
Just recently I was sipping a martini at the Deco Bar in the National Hotel during happy hour when a woman approached me, crossing over from the other side of the room to do so. “Is that your baby?” she asked. “Yes,” I answered with a smile, full of justifiable…
I grew up in the kitchen. It started with miniature cakes in an Easy-Bake Oven, which cooked by the heat of a standard light bulb. Inspired by a talented mother, I soon moved on to the real stuff. Most days after school I tied an apron over my plaid jumper,…
Something terrible has happened to Victor’s Cafe. I feel sick to be so blunt about it, but not any more nauseated than I was during a recent dinner at the restaurant. Since it opened on SW 32nd Avenue eight years ago, I had always considered Victor’s, the Miami outpost of…
I’m a little ticked off at Food & Wine. To celebrate the magazine’s twentieth year of publication, writer Jonathan Hayes chose what he considers the world’s top twenty food cities, including “culinary capitals” such as Paris, Rome, Bangkok, and Oaxaca. In a short paragraph about each city, he mentions premier…
These days it seems as though nearly every woman I know under the age of 40 is pregnant or just had a baby. I’ve even been asked to be a godmother for the first time. So far, however, I have resisted the urge to have a child of my own…
My husband has a problem with our relatives receiving medical treatment from residents (doctors in training). So when there’s an injury in our family — something that occurs more than you might think, given the fact that we’re all avid athletes — we avoid teaching hospitals such as Jackson Memorial…
I’m always sucked in by the aura of mystery that surrounds Miami’s Russian restaurants, several of which have popped up in recent years. Perhaps the cuisine — which seems exotic compared to the fare offered by the glut of Italian and Cuban-American places here — catches my fancy. Maybe it’s…
When a barbecue restaurant in Muskogee, Oklahoma, was recommended to writer Calvin Trillin, a true barbecue enthusiast, his first instinct was to ask whether it used plates. “Of course they have plates,” he was told, at which point Trillin lost interest. “I have eaten fine barbecue on plates,” he explained,…
Miami may be the kind of town where reader restaurant polls regularly cite hokey American-Asian suburban steak chain Benihana as Best Japanese Restaurant, but South Beach, at least, is on the cutting edge of the sushi knife. Between east-west outposts Sushi Rock on Collins Avenue and Yoko’s on Alton Road,…
The media’s relentless monitoring of the fire aboard the Carnival cruise ship Ecstasy had smoke coming out of my ears. For one thing, the live press conferences informing the public that the cause of the fire was still unknown — not exactly breaking news — kept interrupting my personal daily…
Perhaps the last person you’d expect to be running the Panamanian eatery Las Molas, located on the site of a former Nicaraguan restaurant in the Hispanic enclave of Sweetwater, would be a woman with the Irish surname McNish. But then this is Miami. You can’t necessarily tell someone’s nationality by…
In the past, the areas around the University of Miami have failed to cater to the undergraduate, live-on-campus student population, which numbers more than 8000. Defined on the east by busy South Dixie Highway and on the west by homes, the campus’s perimeter has always lacked a certain collegiate vitality…
For months I’d watched that banner flap enticingly above the Alton Road storefront. Bold red script promised Johnny V’s Kitchen would open soon, offering Killer Hoagiesª and vegetable wraps. Frankly, it was the wrap part that caught my attention. It seemed about time. After all, am I the only person…
A friend recently filled me in about the oily origins of bruschetta. It seems that official olive oil tasters roaming the Umbria region of central Italy years ago were getting a little nauseated dipping directly into huge vats of the pungent stuff, so they resorted to drizzling it onto pieces…
Tung Nguyen came to the United States in 1975, one of seventeen Vietnamese refugees sponsored by Kathy Manning through the St. James Lutheran Church in Coral Gables. Five years later the two women opened Hy Vong (which means “hope”) on Eighth Street. The place became renowned for solid home-style Vietnamese…
