Best Café Con Leche 2000 | Oasis Café of Key Biscayne | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Miami | Miami New Times
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Best Café Con Leche

Oasis Café of Key Biscayne

As all the best Cuban cafeterías do, Oasis has plenty of counter. Most patrons simply go to the window and order. They usually ask for the café con leche. Creamy and not sickeningly sweet, Oasis puts out a concoction that restores balance to even the most addled brain. For 32 years Oasis has served café con leche out of a little store near the entrance to Key Biscayne. That's more than three decades of liquid well-being. Of course once your equilibrium is re-established, it's hard not to notice the place also offers hearty lunches and tasty desserts.

Best Expensive Italian Restaurant

Escopazzo

It's their hand-rolled pasta specials, such as amaretto and pumpkin ravioli with white-truffle cream sauce, and pappardelle with buffalo-meat ragout. Or those rich risottos ingrained with ingredients ranging from broccoli rabe and foie gras to langoustines and porcinis. Could be the thick, juicy veal chops stuffed with fontina cheese and smothered in truffle demi-glace, or the homemade desserts like a distinctly superior tiramisu. Okay, it's many dishes that make Escopazzo deliciously Italian. Entrées can push past the $30 mark, categorizing the place as expensive. But it's the romantic piazza-style dining room with gurgling fountain, extensive wine cellar, stellar service, and ebullient host and owner Pino Bodoni seeing to it that everything is just right, which make this expanded, 70-seat trattoria the very best. Honorable mentions go to Osteria del Teatro and Bice.

Best Restaurant For Intimate Conversation

B.E.D.

If you weren't already nominally sure that the ol' mattress was the likeliest place to conduct heart-to-hearts, this uniquely decadent restaurant and nightclub just might convince you. In fact it's pretty darn difficult not to go up-front and personal with your dining partner here, given that your table is a modified version of a latter-day sheik's bed. All that's missing, really, is the harem (and depending on the guest list for the evening, sometimes even those appear to be a possibility). Verbal communication, not to mention body language, gets even more confidential when fueled by a bottle of champagne or two. But a word of warning: Beds are built on platforms here, and aren't exactly private. So unless exhibitionism is your definition of intimacy, a hands-off policy might be just the ticket when that sparkling conversation tends to bubble over.

Best Chinese Restaurant

Macau Bakery & Deli

That bowl of curly fried noodles on the table at every conventional Chinese restaurant doesn't exist here. The soup at Macau is too good to desecrate. Not going to find duck sauce or that vile hot mustard, either. No, siree. Macau is not hoity-toity. Clean, nondescript, friendly, unpretentious. Granted lunch deals that consist of ordinary yet tasty items such as pork fried rice, egg rolls, and egg drop soup are available. But when owner/chef May Yuen gets cranking in the kitchen and begins whipping up specialties, this restaurant transcends far beyond the mediocre chow mein purveyors. Take the salty pepper scallops: Succulent mollusks are lightly breaded, fried, and served on a bed of crisp flash-fried seaweed and piquant green chilies. Delicately steamed sea bass with ginger and scallions dissolves in your mouth like a substantial, slightly spiced Communion wafer. Tender snow pea tips lightly sautéed with garlic make you forget that dark-green leafy vegetables are good for you. Steamed white rice is so tasty it could be eaten alone. Running through the dining room: that's May's little son, Mackenzie. Running back to this restaurant over and over again: that's you.

Best Iced Tea With A Reservation

Miccosukee Restaurant

You can work up a desert of thirst out on the River of Grass, whether you're fishing, enjoying an airboat ride, or watching a man tangle with an alligator at the Miccosukee Cultural Center. A twenty-minute drive west of Krome Avenue, this tribe-owned establishment is the perfect spot in which to rehydrate. Here the iced brew is served the way it's supposed to be. The age-old formula: tall glass full of ice cubes (ice quantity is crucial); real tea, robust and unsweetened (you can take the country boy out of the country but you can't take the sugar out of the presweetened tea); a quarter of a lemon (not a dinky piece like some places); and finally, free refills.

Best Waterfront Dining

Big Fish

This has always been the perfect riverfront location. The view, the feel, are so fine, so Miami: You're practically sitting in the Miami River, but as you lean back and sip your wine, your gaze drifts up to the drawbridges creaking apart to let pass all manner of funky cargo ships. Bright neon lights on the Metrorail tracks point the way through the downtown skyline. Somehow even in the dankest summer heat, Big Fish is just a little cooler and breezier. Or maybe it only seems that way, because you're focused on the pleasures of place and time. Big Fish recently changed hands and its new owners have made it more riverside-friendly, with new decks and roof, and a better view from the indoor dining room. The menu has become more Italian, and the house specialty, tagliatelle Big Fish, receives constant raves. The zuppa di pesce and generous fried calamari appetizer also are favorites.

Best Restaurant For A Romantic Dinner

The Strand

The lighting is dim. The doorways are hung with flowing white linen. The banquettes are squishy-cushy. And the tiger skin on the wall makes you long to take it down and lay it before a fireplace. What this adds up to is sex -- we mean, romance -- of the South Beach kind: decadent, seductive, and plentiful. Executive chef-proprietor Michelle Bernstein's classically innovative cuisine only enhances the mood provided by the décor. After all, it's pretty hard to engage in anything other than sex -- oops, did it again, romance -- when noshing on parfait of tuna tartare layered with caviar, or whole boneless squab stuffed with duck breast and duck pâté and sliced over figs. In other words the fare also is designed to stimulate your appetite for sex -- darn it, romance. Who wants to argue with that?

Best Chino-Cubano Restaurant

Kong Ming Restaurant

Don't be fooled by the menu, which reads "Autentica Comida China." At this Chino-Cubano joint, only the cook is 100 percent Chinese. Even the statuette of Buddha that sits on a counter is guarded by Our Lady of Charity on one side and San Lazaro on the other. Here the won ton soup is better known as sopa de mariposa, the fried rice is called arroz frito, and the beef with bok choy is really just carne de res con acelga china to most of the Cuban clientele. The house specialty isn't Peking duck but palomilla steak with a side of papitas fritas, and pork chops plus arroz and maduros. For the best of both worlds, try the char sue ding: steamed meat chunks with almonds and fresh vegetables.

Best Haitian Take-Out

Chef Creole Seafood Take-out

Sadly the Little Haiti Chef Creole at 77th and NE Second Avenue is no more. New Times can still smell the cinders floating through the air the day after the explosion of a propane canister set off a chain reaction that burned out the insides of this beloved take-out storefront and sent one of the chefs to the hospital. Gone is the floor-to-ceiling mural of fishermen in a Haitian seascape on one wall. Gone, too, the gallery of visiting Haitian celebrities opposite. Although the ambiance is not the same, Chef Creole continues to serve the best fish fresh -- stewed, fried, or grilled -- from their bright and shiny location in North Miami. Here, as at the countless festivals where the Chef sets up his kiosk, you will find flaky, spicy conch fritters, three-alarm conch salad, and tart lemonade. Expect lines out the door at lunch and dinnertime, but your stomach will tell you: It's worth the wait.

Best Cuban Sandwich

Versailles Restaurant

Cuban sandwich and Versailles -- in Miami, they go together like, well, José Martí and poetry. Like most everything on Versailles' extensive menu, this Cuban sandwich is a credit to its cuisine. Lots of ham, generally more than in other versions, and melted Swiss cheese between not-overly-flattened slices of very fresh Cuban bread. No gratuitous grease. The only thing that could make it better: a little less stinginess with the pickles.

Best Of Miami®

Best Of Miami®

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