My most memorable dining experiences often have occurred outdoors, which doesn’t mean on the patio. There was that chardonnay and chilled oysters experience out in the Everglades one sunset; or the simple yet perfect taste of a sliced mango in a Puerto Rican rain forest following a light rain; or…
When I first moved to South Beach almost a decade ago, I was afraid to walk down Lincoln Road late at night. And by late I mean 10:00 p.m. Although the bohemian-style walking mall, with its cracked sidewalks and bizarre art galleries and fledgling cafés was full of character, it…
The crowd that gathers at Opium is attractive and mostly dressed in black. Many talk on cell phones. Handsome bartenders and waiters also are clothed in black, while comely barmaids pretty much wear the same outfit that Gwen Verdon or Shirley MacLaine (take your pick) wore in My Sweet Charity…
Pulcinella’s Marketplace & Café is a large, bright, white gourmet marketplace, a “purveyor of fine foods,” as they put it. It also is a café, which, if you come in from the front as opposed to the side entrance, is what you’ll encounter first. The décor is casual: green marble…
Alice Waters is the person most often credited with pioneering, in this nation, the notion of fine cuisine as fresh, high-quality, locally procured foods prepared as simply as possible. That’s just what she served at her Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, which opened April Fool’s Day 1980 and coincided with…
He’s got the best rock-star name of any local chef: Johnny V. And the coolest dub: “Caribbean Cowboy.” Never mind that Mr. Vinczencz is from St. Louis, Missouri, the important thing is that he’s come back in the kitchen of Astor Place, where before leaving in early 1999 he had…
Years ago, before moving here, I found myself on Douglas Road in the Gables, half an hour early for some business meeting I had flown down to attend. With time to kill, and my knees practically buckling from the relentless intensity of the summer sun, I stumbled into an unassuming…
Bissaleh Café is a kosher Israeli dairy restaurant/pizza place/ juice bar/coffee bar. Not, you might say, your typical, everyday dining establishment. The décor can best be described as a Yiddish Vacas Gordas, with more space between the tables. Like that Argentine parillada, it’s a small, informal room with 30 to…
This review will only be of interest to those who plan on heading out to catch a Marlins baseball game. All 60 of you. Of course the Fish, as the team is endearingly called, cannot hope to contend this year because their player payroll is only slightly higher than what…
The Palm Plaza Shopping Center is just another nondescript strip mall, one of hundreds, maybe thousands, marring Miami’s landscape. My feeling has always been that if you’re going to uglify a neighborhood, the least you can do is offer good food, and Palm Plaza does just that. It’s got Chinese,…
Key Biscayne and Virginia Key boast breathtaking views of sunsets over the bay and of Miami’s skyline as it transforms first into dusky silhouette, then into glittering lights as night falls. Naturally there are seafood restaurants eager to take advantage of such snapshot vistas, the Rusty Pelican probably being the…
I’ve lately found myself insisting, to whomever will listen, that when it comes to dining in ethnic restaurants I’m no nitpicking stickler for authenticity; I simply wonder why those who serve watered-down, clownlike mockeries of such cuisines even bother at all. When those who will listen happen to be the…
The Palm premiered in Bay Harbor Islands in 1986, but it has the Joe’s Stone Crab, old-timey feel of an institution that’s been around forever. The original Palm in New York does go back pretty far — to 1926, which is when John Ganzi and Pio Bozzi, two immigrants to…
It was on the drive to Tequila Sunrise that one of my dinner guests inquired as to what sort of place we were headed. “Mexican,” I replied, though it turned out she had already surmised that. I really didn’t know any more, other than having been told by someone who…
Deborah Calderon is the “D” and Clare Kelley the “Clare” of I Do D’Clare, a cozy 65-seat breakfast and lunch spot on Ponce de Leon, just off South Dixie Highway in the Gables. The same location used to house another restaurant, Loffler’s, where Deborah cooked and Clare waited tables. Two…
Like many curious New Yorkers whose acquaintance with Cuban food was largely limited to the tasty but pretty basic mom-and-pop Cuban/Chinese joints that once sprouted on every block of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I devoured the New York Times piece that came out shortly after Douglas Rodriguez’s Yuca first opened…
A civilized Latin supper club seems out of place amid the raucous scene of South Beach’s Washington Avenue, but that’s exactly the point behind Bolero Bar & Grill — a place on kid row for adults to enjoy. Apparently the mature elements of Miami have gotten word, as this 72-seat…
Icebox Cafe. 1657 Michigan Ave, Miami Beach; 305-538-8448. Open every day except Monday, 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. (lunch/brunch) and 7:00 to 11:00 p.m. (dinner); on weekends open till 1:00 a.m. for pastries.
Rarely has a restaurant in South Florida been so anticipated as pan-Asian Bambú, largely because of its co-owner, Cameron Diaz, who hooked up with her restaurateur/hotelier partners Karim Masri and Hubert Baudoin while shooting There’s Something About Mary in Miami. For months preceding the opening this past February, strollers regularly…
Countless adjectives can be used to describe the multitudinous restaurants of Miami-Dade. “Adventurous” is not one of them. Our ethnic-dining establishments seem particularly snakebit when it comes to exploring the more intriguing realms of their native cuisines, and Spanish restaurants reach even lower than the rest. Phillipe Restaurant, a 40-seat…
Fast food joints failed to deliver a knockout punch to diners, but they did have those American institutions on the ropes and looking hopeless for a while. That was back in the early Sixties, and one of the main attractions of the then-new national burger chains was their consistency of…
There are times when it’s awfully difficult to explain why one lives in Miami. Like now, during this period of embarrassing Elianmania, with the national media trumpeting the arrogant antics of one small but stupid-as-a-stump group of right-wing refugee residents as they loudly and proudly point out that our county…
