Shrimp tempura $12.95

Sautéed chicken with chili paste $13.95

Whole snapper $18.95

Sushi boat (for two) $38.00

Thai sticks $2.85

Having a hard time deciding where to dine? Not sure what you want to eat tonight? Try turning to your sign. It gives dining under the stars a whole new meaning. Astrologer and columnist Sydney Omarr, along with deceased chef Mike Roy, put together a cookbook of culinary constellations, Cooking…

One day several years ago I answered the phone on the first ring, as is my habit because the darn thing sits right next to my computer. “Give me room 38,” a woman said. “Sorry, I think you have the wrong number,” I replied to the cheeky caller. “Bullshit!” she…

Good literature may not necessarily change your life, but it can revolutionize the way you feel about certain foodstuffs. For instance after reading Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen, a Japanese novella about death, transvestitism, and cooking school, I came away not with a new understanding of love and grief, but with a…

In the June issue of Vogue, food writer Jeffrey Steingarten, fed up with snooty maitre d’s and perpetual busy signals, decides to “not make one reservation for the entire week. I will just show up.” So he does, and has some moderate success at good New York City eateries, winding…

If I could sum up Miami in one word, it would be “transient.” The good weather attracts drifters. Folks don’t settle in Miami, they merely reside for a time. Some people are only here to party on South Beach before getting down to the serious business of making a living…

It’s probably me, but I just don’t get Fish 54. The seafood restaurant opened about three months ago in the Loehmann’s Fashion Island space formerly occupied by Fish, a high-end eatery run by the Nemo and Big Pink folks, Myles Chefetz and Michael Schwartz. The pair had invested a cool…

Utter the phrase “food by the pound” and any self-respecting gourmet will run for the hills, (okay, the swamps). Say it to a gourmand, and you’ll witness a different reaction completely; most likely a stampede toward the nearest eatery offering comida por libra. What’s the difference? A gourmet is someone…

Sometimes my relationships with restaurants are like the ones I have with my kid and husband. They require lots of work and involve those interminable growing pains, but both can bring great pleasure on a good day. That’s kind of the way I feel about Bishop’s. This six-month-old Southern-cuisine restaurant…

Several years ago a fellow writer approached me at a party and said, “I read your column, but I don’t go to any of the restaurants you recommend.” I’m used to backhanded compliments, even downright insults. So I just shrugged, “Why not?” “I’m lactose intolerant,” he admitted. When he and…

“I know what good home-style Mexican food is supposed to be about,” a friend of mine told me recently. “I’ve just never had it.” That’s understandable: She lives in Miami. Oh sure, we’ve got a couple of long-standing joints (Paquito’s in North Miami Beach and El Rancho Grande in South…

It’s no secret the waiting room in the doctor’s office is the most aptly named space on Earth. But one experience there left a long-lasting scar. Over the course of several presurgery appointments to fix a broken knee, I checked my watch and clocked the waiting period at no less…

In the food of American folklore, the hamburger has gotten short shrift: It’s overshadowed by the ever-present hot dog. While the wiener has come to represent our nation as surely as baseball and apple pie, the burger stands for nothing more than greasy spoons. The exclamation “Hot dog!” has positive…

For starters I was not looking forward to dining at Bice. The new Italian restaurant in the Grand Bay Hotel in Coconut Grove replaced one of my favorite eateries, the Grand Cafe, where I’d enjoyed chef Pascal Oudin’s Old World French technique practiced on New World ingredients. And in a…

It’s easy to criticize the service in South Beach restaurants. Too many waitstaffs are rude and clueless, too many managers uncaring, and too many restaurateurs oblivious to the way an eatery should be run. In short too few people seem dedicated to serving fine food and creating a fine-dining experience…

Season has returned to South Beach. I know this not because Lincoln Road is so jammed with tourists that shopkeepers routinely ask, “Where are you from?” (God forbid you should have a semblance of a sunburn: Automatically you’re assumed to have fled the Midwest.) I know it not because jogging…

Even if a character in the 1989 movie When Harry Met Sally hadn’t declared something about restaurants being akin to theaters, the analogy would have found its way into the dining public’s consciousness sooner or later. That’s largely because, as with most cliches, it’s rooted in truth. Judith Stocks, a…

Note: No animals were harmed in the writing of this article. But a helluva lot of plants went down screaming. You see, Wish, the new, high-end eatery located in the Tony Goldman-owned property known simply as the Hotel (the refurbished Tiffany Hotel) on Collins Avenue in South Beach, doesn’t serve…

Humor writer Dave Barry admits he loves sushi. But he can’t help making fun of it. In a recent Tropic magazine column he defined sushi as “a type of cuisine developed by the Japanese as part of an ancient tradition of seeing what is the scariest thing they can get…

Up ahead we saw the revolving spotlights — the kind that cast wasted energy into the night sky in honor of a nightclub opening or a movie premiere — almost immediately after we turned left on Ponce de Leon Boulevard from Miracle Mile in Coral Gables. “Ohmygod,” my husband groaned…

The strangest item I ate in the Peruvian Amazon river basin, where I once spent a week, was not the piranha we’d caught in a tributary off the main river and then deep fried. It was not the capybara, a tailless rodent that can grow to four feet in length,…

The costliest real estate is that which sits vacant, unleased, or unsold, generating no income for its owner. No one knows that fact of life better than the city of Miami, landlords of Firehouse Four restaurant. Government officials took four long years to approve new tenants for the empty eatery…