Among his recommendations for preparing a career as a truly informed restaurant critic, legendary food writer Craig Claiborne listed — right up there with actually working in top chefs’ kitchens, or extensive reading about food — gourmet world travels, learning by experiencing, and analyzing dishes at their source. When asked…
Three ways to draw unwelcome attention to yourself at Parrot Jungle: Climb the monkey tower, yelling, “I am king of the primate world!” Teach the parrots to squawk, “Come here, little girl. Want some candy?” or simply walk around the exhibits with a young child firmly clasped in one hand…
In 1989, 24-year-old homeboy chef Douglas Rodriguez opened Yuca in Coral Gables and set off a wave of culinary excitement that almost immediately ignited imaginations and tastebuds far beyond Miami’s borders, particularly in other urban centers with large Cuban-American populations. Up in Manhattan, where I then lived, I can remember…
Joep Habets, currently the most well-known writer from the Netherlands who writes about Dutch food, claims that there is no such thing. “There are no characteristics to Dutch food,” Habets explains, because cuisine in the little country with the big seacoast, which has historically specialized in both sending out and…
It was only 10:00 a.m., but at the Cuban eatery El Crucero on a recent Saturday, it seemed more like 10:00 p.m. That’s to say that it seemed more like dinner time than breakfast time, judging from the brimming plates of arroz frito con costillas (fried rice with spareribs) in…
When people ask me about my approach to reviewing restaurants, a quizzical look of dismay inevitably crosses their faces as I offer my stock reply: “Everywhere is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.” They’d likely be even more disappointed if I told them E.B. White wrote that,…
Here in our surreal hometown, foodies who follow local media reports might think the hottest restaurant trend is the sudden explosion of new eateries from national superstar chefs, who, mere centuries after Ponce de Leon, discovered Florida last year. Nope. Out there in the Real World, according to restaurant industry…
Of the many things for which the Forge restaurant has been noted — or notorious — since it was first converted from a real blacksmith’s to a chichi supper club, food has been perhaps the least notable element. First the establishment’s Thirties alter ego as a dance club and casino…
Arnold Pompos, physics researcher at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, has calculated that if Santa Claus were to travel at nearly the speed of light, he could drop presents off at more than 75 million homes in approximately 500 seconds. I wonder whether Emeril Lagasse might bend the time/space continuum…
Small print at the bottom of Zuperpollo’s menu offers a free glass of wine to any diner who can spot seven “orthographic” errors contained within. “I didn’t even know words had bones,” I lamented, but my mood brightened considerably when my wife explained that orthography pertains to spelling. Finding typos…
Not that Tutto’s toppings are anything to sneeze at. Ingredients are fresh and adhere to the crust well so there’s no embarrassing topping slippage — meaning that thing that always happens on first dates where you aim your slice down toward your mouth and all the cheese instantly slides off…
Part of the joy derived from eating out are the conjured associations with comparable experiences indelibly cooked into one’s memories. While sampling a bran muffin at Morning Call, a homey bakery/café in South Miami, I found myself drifting back to Odessa, a 24-hour Polish-American restaurant in New York’s East Village…
In the restaurant reviewing game, food critics with souls sensitive to criticism from readers go work in more polite areas of the country, such as Hell’s Kitchen. Here at New Times, on the other hand, there is absolutely nothing we like better than a good crank letter, unless it’s three…
Certain foreign foods adapt better to Americanization than others, just as certain sit-down dishes adapt better as street eats than others. Pizza, for instance, adapts both ways excellently when the adapted version is at its best, like good New York-style pizza by the slice. Sure, a typical N.Y. “vegetarian” slice…
Bangkok native Thanu Sinevang got his culinary feet wet in a little hometown joint called the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. That was in 1968. Four years later Thanu moved to America, whereby an apparently pronunciation-challenged chef dubbed him “Joe.” This has been his moniker ever since, though after a maturing tenure…
Chihuahua” is a tricky word. It defines both a teensy dog and the largest state in Mexico, and, depending upon which linguist you ask, translates to either “dry and sandy land” or “place where sacks are made.” The reason I bring up Chihuahua at all is because this is where…
At New Times we restaurant reviewers basically get to pick our own review victims. Oops, I meant subjects. Anyway, this is a good thing, because when editors get to think up the story ideas, one sometimes ends up writing stuff that is so weird it leaves one’s head reeling. Last…
In the Midwest, diners line up outside frozen custard joints. This may seem strange to East Coast gourmets, who are used to thinking of hot-ticket eats in terms of, say, Emeril’s, not Dairy Queen. This is likely because those of us who grew up along the Atlantic seaboard think of…
I did not spend my childhood frolicking amid the fig trees of Calabria. I did, however, grow up on the sixth floor of a Brooklyn apartment building, where the aromas of meatballs and garlic and tomato sauce drifted upward from the Casciano household three stories below. While these olfactory memories…
In some countries the best typical food is generally found in restaurants; in others the best food is home cooking. But in general the trend in almost every country I know for nouvelle interpretations of traditional cuisine is certainly shifting the “where to find the best” toward where the pros…
Statistics tell us we’ve got ourselves a nation full of fat, dumb kids who apparently can only tear themselves from television sets long enough to stuff a couple of Big Macs down their chubby little throats. So now we have the new Miami Children’s Museum helping out by giving young,…
Why I originally went to La Fe turned out to be not the reason I ended up rather liking it after several visits. I went because I’d read an ad that claimed the place was an eat-in café as well as a bakery, with salads and sandwiches that sounded hipper…
