Chefs For Hire, Chefs On Stage, Tap Tap on TV, And A Yelp For Vegetarians

Happy first year anniversary to Yelp Miami. To help celebrate, take a blogger to lunch.North One 10 and Cacao Restaurant are the most high profile closings of the season. This leaves us with two less really good chef-driven neighborhood restaurants, a genre in which our city already comes up way...

By Lee Klein

October 1, 2009

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Happy first year anniversary to Yelp Miami. To help celebrate, take a blogger to lunch.

North One 10 and Cacao Restaurant are the most high profile closings of the season. This leaves us with two less really good chef-driven neighborhood restaurants, a genre in which our city already comes up way short.

Happy Worldwide Vegetarian Day and happy Vegetarian Awareness Month. To help celebrate, take a rutabaga to lunch.

This whole idea of paying big bucks to see chefs talk and demo on stage at Arsht Center seems absurd -- and even more so for Food Network chefs, whom you can see talk and demo ceaselessly on TV. What are Emeril, Pepin, and the Latina gals going to tell us and show us that they haven't already told us and shown us via their hundreds of telecasts and countless cookbooks? It may be true that nowadays chefs are like rock stars, but I wouldn't pay money to see rock stars talk either.

Speaking of the Food Network, this Monday, October 5th, at 10 p.m., our own very worthy Tap Tap Restaurant (819 5th St., Miami Beach) will be featured on Guy Fieri's "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives". Tune in, turn on, eat goat.

Edgar Leal is supposedly heading to Caracas, but if you're a restauranteur looking to upgrade at chef -- and I can think of a hundred or so that should consider doing so -- Dewey LoSasso is seemingly out of work at the moment. And I don't see Jeffrey Brana or Michael Bloise in any kitchens either, so it's possible they're available as well. It isn't every day that culinarians of this caliber are on the market.

This just in: In honor of Vegetarian Awareness Month, folks in Argentina have agreed, for the next 30 days, to put extra peppers on their steaks.

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