If cooking is an art, the hamburger is a blank canvas. Make it very big or very small. Paint it with ketchup, mustard, mayo, sun-dried tomato aioli. Texture it with lettuce, tomato, cheese, bacon, coleslaw. Frame it with a sesame seed bun, ciabatta roll, hunk of sourdough, crusty baguette. Whether…
Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover, and by the cover of Les Halles, the judgment is: We are sooo French. French as the 35-hour workweek, French as 10,000 handmade cheeses and gloriously crusty baguettes, French as sipping a glass of rustic red wine at a cute little…
Oh, Lord, not another Italian restaurant!” “Yes, Bill, another Italian restaurant. But be of good faith and despair not, for verily and forsooth I say unto you that you will not have to consume one more crappy caesar salad — I can see Julius rotating in his grave already —…
When you think of neighborhoods, the sprawling, traffic-gagged morass of Kendall doesn’t exactly leap to mind. Neighborhoods are bucolic little areas with quiet, tree-lined streets, full of quaint old buildings and cute new boutiques, where everyone knows everyone and says hi when they run into each other at the store…
You know what kind of guy Pilar is. Nice guy. Good-looking, quiet. Dresses well, not flashy. Solid, honest; no cheesy come-ons. Other guys might have more money, a fancier car, firmer pecs. But when it comes time to stand and deliver, well, let’s just say he stands up straight and…
Miami has a great many things — sun, sand, spectacular ocean views, trolling celebutantes with more plastic parts than an Xbox. One thing Miami doesn’t have much of is great bread. Sure, some of the upscale so-called gourmet markets do a passable variation on the classic baguette, ciabatta, pan au…
Are there any two cities more different than Key West and Coral Gables? The self-described “City Beautiful” is as anal-retentive as a bucketful of Imodium AD. There are regulations that tell you what color you can paint your house, what animals you can keep as pets. You have to get…
Ever walk down the street in some funky part of town and almost trip over a twenty-dollar bill, pick it up, and think, Hey, God likes me? Walk down Biscayne Boulevard around 72nd Street, definitely a still-funky part of town, where it looks like an army of giant gophers has…
Cheap restaurant in South Beach” is dangerously close to being an oxymoron. “Good cheap restaurant in South Beach” is so oxy you almost have to be a moron to believe that such a greed-defying miracle actually exists. Well, I don’t mean to sound stupid or anything, but there’s at least…
If you want to feel like a tourist in your own town, go to Balans. It’s on Lincoln Road, for god’s sake. When was the last time you hung out there, oozing along with the flow of bug-eyed Midwesterners in their neatly pressed shorts and Tommy Bahamas, elegantly dressed Latins,…
Telling your average Miami foodie to drive to Homestead for really good Cuban cuisine is like telling an Eskimo to fly to Miami for snow. But you better lose the mukluks and have your boarding pass in hand, because even if you live in Miami, it’s worth the journey to…
You have to admire Yankee ingenuity. Take some chewing gum, tissue paper, and a ball of twine, and pretty soon you’ve got a sleek aluminum sausage capable of flinging hundreds of drunken customers and surly flight attendants across the continent at 35,000 feet. Take a nitwit collection of wannabe pop…
I want to slip French Kiss some tongue. I love this restaurant. The culinary ménage à trois of Marc-Antoine, Joanne Gimenez, and chef Keith Becton has created an absolutely ravishing little cafe in the nether regions of Coconut Grove, one that displays all the warmth and unpretentiousness of a neighborhood…
Is there any animal more abused than the chicken? Most begin and live their brief existence in mammoth farm-factories under conditions so dire they make the black hole of Calcutta appear merely gray. Then it’s off to the poultry processing plants, Dante’s seventh circle of finger-lickin’-good hell, where they’re killed…
If you want to know why San Francisco is a great restaurant town, go to South Miami. Bear with me; it’s not really that big a stretch. San Francisco is a great restaurant town not because of its handful of uber-luxe, four-star establishments, but because just about every neighborhood in…
It’s all Starbucks’ fault. Coffee used to be the equivalent of regular leaded. It was cheap, strong, and uncomplicated; you poured it in your tank, revved up your motor, and were good to go. Then some boy genius got his fancy knickers in a twist and all of a sudden…
Some words are just natural red flags. When a politician says, “Honestly,” it means he’s getting ready to spew a load of horse effluent. When an insurance company talks about its “good hands,” it means you’re about to get the big finger. When an actor whines about “exhaustion,” it means…
Karma is the Buddhist principle that says what a person does in this life will determine his destiny in the next. If that’s the case, then the folks behind Karma, a très moderne pan-Asian restaurant just off the eatin’ path in downtown Coral Gables, should be raking in some serious…
Boring old hot dog — mustard, relish, maybe a little chopped onion. Trendy new haute dog — wasabi mayo, banana chips, avocado. That’s the idea behind Franktitude, a way-slick eatery that appears intent on doing to the wiener what eateries like Lindburger and Oneburger have done to the hamburger, essentially…
They are the unclean, the defiled. Outcasts. Outlaws. Social pariahs, shunned by the righteous for their apostasy. They’re smokers, the only group it’s still PC to hate. But even these bottom-dwellers, the dregs of the dregs, smokers of the Duffel Bags of Death known as cigars, deserve a place to…
It seems Portugal has never quite gotten out of the shadow of its bigger, more renowned, more influential Spanish neighbor. Think Sonoma to Napa, St. Paul to Minneapolis, Shrub to Darth Cheney. It’s too bad, really, because Portugal is a fascinating country in its own right, with a distinctive culinary…
The recipe for successful crêpes is easy: eggs, milk, flour, a little butter or oil. Cook in a nonstick skillet or one of those odd-looking French crêpe pans that resembles an upside-down pot. The recipe for a successful crêpe restaurant … well, that’s a little more complicated. French Box Café,…
