Of course the question on every diner’s mind is not which restaurants will open this year. It’s which ones of the slew will survive the season and which ones the media will feed on like carrion. Fortunately I have come up with a foolproof method of predicting the formative successes…
Read Part 1 or Part 2 Flattery easily can turn a restaurateur’s head. Too easily, as it turns out. In 1997 snowbirds loyal to Dennis Max convinced the man and his company that the Northeast was ready for his concept. Specifically this group of investors wanted Unique Restaurant Concepts to…
When restaurateur Mary Anne Richter initially dined at Café Max in Pompano Beach, about three days after it opened in 1984, she was hardly impressed. “I went in for dinner with two friends, and everything that could have gone wrong went wrong,” she laughs. “They lost the exhaust, you couldn’t…
Prologue: About six weeks ago, in Bal Harbour Shops, a restaurant called Max’s Place opened in the space where Petrossian formerly held court. It was only a few months after Petrossian had gone out of business, and the entire space needed to be revamped to fit the new concept. But…
One Rascal is never enough, it seems. Jerry’s Famous Deli Inc., a.k.a. the Starkman family, which also runs Wolfie Cohen’s Rascal House and Epicure Market, has leased the space at 1450 Collins Ave. The location will be developed as a Jerry’s Famous Deli. According to Jason Starkman, operating proprietor of…
There’s an old restaurant joke currently recirculating: Three restaurateurs are chatting about old times. The first recalls a fire in his place. Rather than reopen he decided to take the insurance money and retire. The second remembers how robbers broke in and vandalized his eatery. He, too, got out of…
Blame it on The Spitfire Grill. In that 1996 film, an ex-con persuades an aging restaurateur, whose eatery has been on the market for ten years, to run an essay contest. Entry fee: 100 dead presidents. Prize: the Spitfire Grill, a rustic diner in backwoods Maine. Four years later, thanks…
If you’ve ever danced on a table at Mezzanotte, the Italian restaurant hailed for breathing new life into South Beach back in the late Eighties, consider it a treasured memory: The twelve-year-old Mezzanotte finally has closed up shop. But chair-jiggers shouldn’t despair. The new owner of the location is Tim…
Marvin Woods, author of the recently released The New Low-Country Cooking, sounds mildly surprised when asked about his reception here in South Florida. “I’ve got nothing but positive writeups and warm welcomes from the people here,” he says. “My best book signing was in Pembroke Pines. I sold 55 books,…
Restaurateur Mark Soyka shocked just about everybody in the restaurant industry when he announced this past June that News Café, his inaugural eatery that helped revitalize Ocean Drive, would be moving from its location on Eighth Street and Ocean Drive. This fall the 400-seat News Café will be reinvented on…
My “Dish” column about why service is so bad in South Florida (“Shirt, Shoes, but No Service,” August 17) seems to have struck a nerve. Via e-mail I’ve received both complaints (think customers leaving restaurants with stains on their clothing) and compliments (try Basilico, and bring along those picky visitors)…
One of my editors recently wanted to celebrate a special occasion with his wife at a new, stylish restaurant. So he made a reservation at one of our celebrated chef’s outposts. But he was concerned about the noise level and the hustle and bustle. Perhaps, he asked me somewhat anxiously,…
North Beach is hot. North Beach is happening. North Beach is the successor to South Beach. Since the late Eighties, when South Beach developers began to exploit the potential of the Art Deco district, the word on the street has been that North Beach, a section of Miami Beach that…
When I first moved to South Beach almost a decade ago, I was afraid to walk down Lincoln Road late at night. And by late I mean 10:00 p.m. Although the bohemian-style walking mall, with its cracked sidewalks and bizarre art galleries and fledgling cafés was full of character, it…
Looks as though the Denny’s at 19313 S. Dixie Hwy. in Miami lost something in lawyers’ fees but gained remuneration by way of reputation: A civil lawsuit filed last October by Ronald Flagler and Janet Jones alleging race discrimination has been dismissed by the U.S. District Court. The pair claimed…
Restaurant service sucks in South Florida (see Opium review). It’s a given, almost part of the Miami mystique: Our restaurants are so hospitality-poor we’re darn near proud of it. At least some of us are — those who hate the tourists. Don’t like the way we treat you? Good. Don’t…
Two women were seen at La Paloma last Saturday night. Both were so drunk they couldn’t utter a coherent sentence. Both clearly were in no condition to get behind a wheel, and both were headed for a doozy of a hangover the next morning. These two women, however, weren’t companions…
He wasn’t a local but the South Florida food world will miss him all the same: William Garry, the editor in chief of Bon Appetít, died June 29 at age 56. The passage hasn’t yet been reported in the magazine; in fact the August issue features one of Garry’s tongue-in-cheek…
For the average food-oriented consumer, the Internet and Web-related technology have been a blessing for several years now. You can log on to read restaurant reviews, research recipes, order food, and even make reservations on countless sites: Food.com, Epicurious.com, Pheast.com, OpenTable.com, iSeatz.com, iDine.com, ireserve.com, Yougottaeat.com, ad nauseam. There’s so much…
So how long does it really take a chef to open his own restaurant? According to fortysomething Pascal Oudin, who says he came to the United States from France when he was 24 years old to do just that, it takes two decades. And how much does it cost? “My…
You’ve just finished dining in a new restaurant, and your companion asks if you liked it. The food was good, but somehow you can’t respond that you really liked “it.” Perhaps that element you can’t stab your finger at was that the food arrived on blue plates. Or the restaurant…
Generation Chef speaks up: Kris Wessel, chef-proprietor of Liaison in South Beach, objects to my use of the word “fusion” to describe his restaurant. “Liaison’s menu and my style of cooking stem from the strong French influence in New Orleans and a Southern freshness found both in Louisiana and Florida…
