Few things are as dismaying as returning to a favorite restaurant and discovering it has slipped. Worse is when you recommend the place to a friend — a needless squandering of their money and your credibility. It occurs with large, corporate-owned ventures that possess the capital to overstaff the kitchen and dining room in order to make solid first impressions, and then downsize once the tables get filled. It occurs with smaller eateries when they study grim first-quarter operating expenses and feel an urgent need to tweak. There are countless cost-cutting measures that can lead to lowering quality, the two most popular being to purchase lesser brand products, and to ax the big-salaried chef and trust lackluster cooks to replicate the recipes. But such short-term tactics rarely work. Positive word-of-mouth is like a battery that can provide enough energy to sustain an establishment for the first six months; consistency is the electric cord that allows it to plug in with the public for the long haul. Timó, whose 2003 debut broke the shashlik/latke lock on Sunny Isles, is the same as it ever was: a... More >>>