Would-be restaurateurs, take note: It is possible to move up the waitstaff ladder into ownership. But you might not want to ask Vicki Pruitt and Neal Spangler for pointers. Ten years after she and Spangler took over Cisco’s Cafe, until then an outlet of a Mexican bodega-type chain run by…

My first boyfriend was Korean, and I think I fell in love with his culture’s cuisine as much as I did with him. While the other kids had lunch at Burger King or a pizza joint, Steve and I would dash over to his house, where he’d pull all manner…

Imagine waiting tables in a fantastically busy new restaurant. Imagine your section filled with hungry people, parties that all sat down at the same time. You have to greet the customers, hand out menus, fill water glasses, open wine, deliver bread, describe the specials, take orders, distribute food. You panic…

Everyone knows about hotel restaurants. How they used to be terrible, the last refuge of lone business travelers and budget weddings. How they started to improve in the last decade, hiring four-star chefs and presenting provocative menus that reflect the latest food trends. How they’ve made every effort to draw…

I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions. My husband will tell you it’s because I have no willpower and can’t live up to whatever silly vow I make. But the truth is I think they’re a waste of time. Almost all of them have to do with improving the health…

I must appear ethnically generic, because people frequently mistake my nationality for something other than what it is. The most memorable time this happened was in California. An Iranian cab driver asked me if I was Italian. When I replied that I was Jewish-American, he intentionally got lost and charged…

Many people find big, noisy, sophisticated eateries intimidating. I, on the other hand, am scared of the small, cozy, intimate kind. The fewer seats in the restaurant, I figure, the more likely it is the diner will be noticed. The clang of your cutlery echoes off the walls. Your conversations…

I was already planning on grabbing a bite at Tempo in North Miami Beach when an old high school friend of mine from New Jersey called. “I’m in Miami,” she said. “Wanna do dinner?” I couldn’t have engineered a better coincidence. I spent more time with this woman sitting in…

Catering and restaurateuring are similar occupations. Both involve serving tasty meals to finicky clientele. Both require putting in punishing hours. Both demand creativity. It should follow, then, that the skills learned in these jobs are interchangeable A that the caterer who so desires can also be a restaurateur, and vice…

I don’t ever want to be mistaken for a tourist in this town. Unless I’m on Ocean Drive, in which case I don’t want to be mistaken for a local. On Ocean Drive, tourists have the advantage. They don’t get asked for directions. They don’t get annoyed when boutique-keepers ask…

As a young girl, I was sick frequently enough that my mother and I developed a ritual: On the way home from the doctor’s office, pockets full of penicillin, we would stop off at a little Cantonese place around the corner. Forget chicken broth. Strep throat, flu, tonsillitis — whatever…

I’m watching The Sound of Music for the zillionth time, and I’m craving Greek cuisine. Okay, I know edelweiss are hardly reminiscent of olive trees, even when they’re in bloom. And I’m perfectly aware that while the Von Trapp children may sing and dance, they don’t end their performances with…

In a recent Vogue magazine article, hotelier Ian Schrager told writer Charles Gandee that his newly renovated property, the 238-room Delano Hotel, “has zero to do with South Beach — absolutely zero. I wouldn’t invest millions of dollars based upon the continued existence of models walking up and down Ocean…

First-time restaurateurs Michael Edges and James Sands didn’t intend to situate their South African eatery on Las Olas Boulevard. Their concept, they felt, was ideal for the Miami market, where funkiness is unquestionably embraced. But rents were too high, even for relatively out-of-the-way locations in Coconut Grove and on South…

I met a chef for dinner at Two Sisters Restaurant. A happy coincidence, which I discovered when I got there: He had helped open the restaurant in 1987. Glancing around the stately stone and marble dining room, accented by a square bar at one end and a long open kitchen…

When it comes to eating out, I’m a trouble magnet. If there’s food to be dropped, it’ll be my dinner that hits the floor. If there’s water to be spilled on someone’s lap, my lap will be the one drenched. A reservation gets lost? That’d be mine, too. Really, such…

“Wow. This really sucks.” My companion gazed at the brokenscape that is now Lincoln Road: muddy rubble where red sidewalks once were, chicken wire and barricades to keep pedestrians at bay, hardhat-yellow heavy machinery parked everywhere. “When did Lincoln Road become Biscayne Boulevard?” Jackhammers broke ground on the $16 million…

I’ve learned English composition from teaching assistants. I’ve had my teeth cleaned by dental interns. I’ve had my hair styled by beauticians-in-training. So I guess it was no great stretch for me to entrust my appetite to culinary school students. Chef & Apprentice is Johnson & Wales University’s practicum facility,…

When an established restaurant opens a branch, habitues of the original location quite naturally anticipate an equivalent culinary experience at the new address. I never actually reviewed Las Rias Gallegas, a budget Spanish seafood restaurant in Coral Gables. But I ate there often when it opened across from my former…

Soon after I learned to read, I discovered that good food makes good words taste even better. From then on, I could never thoroughly enjoy a book without a snack in hand, and the two pastimes — reading and eating — became inexorably linked in my mind. That almost subconscious…

A friend of mine who’d just returned to the States from Dublin warned me that Murphy’s Law Irish Pub & Restaurant is a pseudo-pub. An impostor. I could see what he meant: The design of the place, located on McFarlane Road next door to Senor Frog’s, is too polished. Granted,…

I’ve heard Kerry Simon thinks I hate him. If he harbors that suspicion, it’s probably due to the unfavorable opinions I expressed in these pages about Starfish, the restaurant he launched with partner Debbie Ohanian in 1993. But really, it’s nothing personal. I was crazy about his Blue Star, the…