“All of our restaurants are casual,” the owner of the Seaside Inn on Sanibel Island told us, “and none of them is great.” On a brief weekend getaway from Miami, I had only a few chances to experience local flavor, so I did something I hardly ever do when I’m…
Every night at about ten o’clock, my phone rings just once, as if someone had pinged the bell with a forefinger. If I answer it, I hear only the dial tone. “Power surge,” my husband suggests. But I know better, and my psychic agrees: My grandmother passed away last year,…
I love summer projects, and this year I’ve taken on a doozy: overhauling our restaurant capsules. Revisiting restaurants I haven’t been to lately, checking out places that have undergone alterations in chef, menu, or management. I can’t rewrite the capsule on every restaurant — that would take years — but…
“It’s all about balance,” my dinner companion, a fellow writer, said to me over cocktails a few evenings ago. She paused to sip her Cuda Red Ale thoughtfully. “Yes,” she said, swallowing appreciatively, holding up her pint glass as if to catch and drink the setting sun. “Balance.” My friend…
When I got married, my mother-in-law gave me the family bible –the cookbook her temple had put together as a community fundraiser one year. All of her son’s favorite childhood dishes were in there. I thanked her and assured her I’d never let him starve. I didn’t have the heart…
I have a love/hate relationship with high-priced brunches, buffets, salad bars — virtually any all-you-can-eat meal. I adore the endless variety, and the idea of sampling, taking little tastes of dishes without being obliged to order or consume an entire portion, appeals to me. I’m also a big fan of…
In the Eighties, when consumerism was at an all-time high, Americans became adventurous, willing to try anything without thought of the consequences. Extreme sports. Junk bonds. And food: sushi. Steak tartare topped with raw egg. In the Nineties, we’re still bungee jumping and whitewater rafting. The stock market thrives. But…
In order to maintain my anonymity, I caution my guests about being obvious. Don’t call me Jen, I warn them. Don’t mention New Times. Don’t be too enthusiastic about the food. Talk about something — anything — else. I’ve yet to be found out in a restaurant while I’m working…
Surfside. Bal Harbour. North Bay Village. Bay Harbor Islands. A war brews in the least likely of neighborhoods. Only this one isn’t about drugs, guns, or gangs. This fight’s about noodles. Prompted by my remark a few columns ago linking Oggi Caffe to Cafe Prima Pasta, Prima Pasta’s owner Gerardo…
Dedicated to the proposition that all restaurant customers are created equal, I have a recurring dream: I walk into Mark’s in the Grove, where I have made a reservation, and don’t have to wait more than half an hour for my table, buying seven-dollar glasses of wine at the bar…
My husband opened the refrigerator, stuffed with the rich remains of tony meals we couldn’t finish. He closed the door and sighed. There was nothing he wanted to eat. “Time to find a dive,” he said. My editor marked up yet another in a series of reviews of New World,…
Like a beacon to the untalented, a white baby grand piano sat in the middle of the terrazzo floor of South Beach’s Astor Place Bar & Grill. Next to it was a rowdy table of ten, five guys and their model-type girls. One man, encased in tight black pants and…
In a recent article titled “Why I Disapprove of What I Do,” New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl reflects on a piece of advice given to her in the Seventies by the late M.F.K. Fisher. To be a restaurant critic, Fisher told her, you have to be “one of…
I have a friend who likes to order his pasta al dente. I laugh every time we go to a restaurant together. In this age of trend-conscious restaurateuring, springy noodles cooked “to the tooth” are a given, his have-it-my-way directive equivalent to ordering a Whopper “on a bun, please.” Or…
I’m homesick for New Orleans, though I’ve never actually lived there. Moist breezes blowing into sudden summer pyrotechnics. Distinctive architecture housing distinctive modern-art galleries. Tugboats guiding cargo ships up and down the muddy river. Dialects and accents blending as if in a Cuisinart switched on high. And over it all,…
Certain candies have commemorative powers for me. I can’t see a Heath bar without remembering cramming for college exams, a Milky Way without recalling the Sunday night stuff-my-face ritual before the starvation diets that always began on high school Monday mornings, a Charleston Chew without tasting once again the sea…
In last year’s movie Safe, Julianne Moore plays a well-to-do homemaker stricken with environmental illness. She becomes allergic to the chemicals floating around her A not just to car exhaust, cleaning solutions, and pesticides sprayed on supermarket fruit, but to her new sofa, her husband’s cologne, her own makeup. So…
In my mother’s kitchen, I am pupil. I am disciple, apprentice. In my mother’s kitchen, I am prep cook and sous chef. And in my mother’s kitchen, now that I’m grown, I am also sometimes rival. My mother’s kitchen is not only in her house. My mother’s kitchen is every…
Midseason, midbeautiful weather, I am, like most Miamians, inundated with houseguests. Which means eating out in my neighborhood almost every night, not for the purposes of writing critical reviews but for pleasure, visiting restaurants I’ve liked in the past in the hope that my guests will find South Beach dining…
Fans, by definition, are enthusiastic admirers of someone or something, ardent in their appreciation. You’d think they’d be easy to please, more willing to forgive small lapses than those who are indifferent. But I’ve found some fans’ expectations to be so high that they’re often the harshest critics of all:…
Miami didn’t need a second Yuca. The original fine-dining nuevo cubano restaurant in Coral Gables is a Latin-theme culinary mecca, having drawn Dade diners for six successful years. It’s consistent enough to bring ’em down from Broward and Palm Beach and pull ’em up from the Keys. Distinctive enough to…
Homestead gives me the creeps. All that fresh air. The crops. The flat, wide-open spaces. The townspeople, who all know each other by name, as if anonymity were the eighth sin. The vaunted historic downtown district, which rolls up its sidewalks at sundown. The stuff, in short, of which my…
