Wilma was on the way when we walked into The Press Room, a newish eatery on the butt end of Lincoln Road. The sky was ominously gray and full of foreboding. The restaurant takes its name from the collage of antique presses on the wall of its brick-faced, back-of-the-room sports…

One thing you have to say about Miami diners: We know our retro. We might be seduced by celebrity chefs who assemble their dishes with tweezers and sauce them with eyedroppers, or distracted by bling-laden rappers flashing their grills in this week’s latest hot spot, but when a restaurant begins…

Taverna Pizzeria and Risotteria: conceptually genius or excessively ambitious? Although pizza and risotto are two pillars of Italian cuisine, they don’t have a whole lot in common. Pizza is essentially street food, a quick and inexpensive meal consumed by the slice at modest sidewalk cafés. Risotto is far more elegant,…

If the road to hell is paved solely with good intentions, the road to heck is paved with good intentions and imperfect execution. Take Bella Cuba. The intentions of chef-owners Juan Carlos and Larisa Jimenez are clear: Serve contemporary Cuban-Caribbean food — inventive but not off-the-wall — stylishly presented in…

Ambrosia is variously defined as the food of the gods and a salad of oranges, bananas, pineapple, and shredded coconut. I don’t know about you, but if I were a god, I’d be eating my weight in foie gras, slathering my body with fresh truffles, bathing in Cristal, and snorting…

Consider the crêpe a universal food delivery system. In Italy it’s called crespelle; in China, pok pang. In Mexico it’s the tortilla; in Vietnam, banh tranh. In India it’s chapati; in Ethiopia, injera. No matter what you call it, this humble mixture of flour and liquid — sometimes with yeast…

I don’t mean to put any pressure on it or anything, but the future of Miami as a serious restaurant town rests on Bistro Bisou. Okay, so maybe that is a little pressure. And maybe a bit overstated too. But the point is still a good one. See, just about…

Now I know what my car feels like when I take it in for an oil change. It’s been days since my dinner at Jumbo Chinese Restaurant, a depressing little dim sum joint in North Miami Beach, and I can still taste the grease from just about everything I ate…

Having eaten at my share of bookstore cafés over the years, I must admit that while the melding of good books and good food is sometimes a great notion, the result usually is more bone in the throat than budding prospects. As restaurateurs, most booksellers are great … booksellers, typically…

“Give me liberty or give me Parrilla Liberty.” I think a famous freedom fighter said that. If he didn’t, he should have, because a meal at Parrilla Liberty — an ink spot of an Argentine steak house just blocks from Lincoln Road — will definitely set you free: free from…

Wouldn’t it be nice if every restaurant were named as truthfully as Le Bon (an Italian dialect for “it’s good”)? Then we’d be seeing restaurant names like these: “It’s Okay: We suck only a little bit.” “It’s Mediocre: We suck a lot but the tourists don’t know the difference.” “It’s…

Judging by appearances, Sushi Chef is definitely plain-Jun. On a charmless stretch of that tree-lined drag strip we call Coral Way sits an unassuming storefront, its drab façade giving no clue that this little place is anything other than one of those yawn-and-you’ll-miss-it South Florida sushi bars that have the…

If Merrick Park were a real village, then Villagio would be a real Italian restaurant. Wait a minute. Villagio is a real Italian restaurant. Is it possible? Can this fashionable village of presumptive consumption — whose inhabitants drive shiny new Mercedes, glide around on Manolo Blahniks, and gorge on designer…

Getting old is a bitch. Take Grass, for example. When it first sprouted two years ago, the open-air space in the heart of the Design District was the hottest, coolest kid on the block. It became instant flypaper for all the self-anointed hipsters — the celebrities and big shots, models…

Doesn’t it seem sometimes that half the restaurants in Miami are yelling at you? “We’ve got the wackiest-ass décor on the Beach!” “Our food is so cutting-edge it doesn’t have to taste good!” “Some dipstick movie star threw up in our bathroom!” The noise is endless. It’s enough to make…

Island Delight is a delightful island. It’s not actually a patch of land but rather a small generic space in a huge generic shopping mall. To get there you brave not the sea but the sea of cars that rises up to swamp the streets of Kendall with teeth-grinding regularity…

Back in the days when cars had tail fins and Elvis was a hound dog, the Morris Lapidus-designed Eden Roc hotel was one of the hottest celebrity hangouts in town. But cars got smaller and Elvis got fat and, like a lot of Miami Modern structures, the Eden Roc went…