The future’s so bright I have to wear … a corset. Make that a corsé. I suffered pangs of disappointment when the Michael Schwartz/5061 deal went south for two reasons. Schwartz has been one of my fave chefs since he opened Nemo and Big Pink more than a decade ago,…

I’ve always wondered about so-called bad-luck restaurant locations that have earned, after the initial restaurant has departed, a rep for failure. Take the old WPA space on Washington and Eighth or thereabouts. It’s been ten years and about that many different restaurants since that one single — yet brief –…

A million bucks. In this era of dot-com millionaires, most of whom remain just as geeky as they were in high school, it just doesn’t seem so exciting, does it? Not to mention that since our standards have been so inflated, you can become an instant millionaire just by eating…

The opening fete of Café Boulud in the Brazilian Court in Palm Beach raised one immediate question: Why didn’t superstar chef Daniel Boulud, proprietor of New York City’s Daniel, Café Boulud, and DB Bistro Moderne, debut his first eponymous venture outside the Apple in the Magic City? The simple answer…

Now that the scent of rotten mangoes has (mostly) ceased to waft across my yard, thanks to an early peak season, I have begun to detect other aromas in the air: the prix-fixe, all-you-can-eat, kids-eat-free, free-wine-with-entrée, early-birds-get-soup-or-salad, twenty-percent-off-the-total-check, twenty-bucks-off-checks-over-fifty-bucks, buy-one-menu-item-get-one-at-equal-or-lesser-value-free specials. Yup, I can sniff out just about any restaurant’s…

The year was 1991. The setting, after-hours at a seafood restaurant at the end of a pier in Newport Beach, California, where I worked as a waitress. The main players included me, and a bartender named Lee Ray (pronounced with the same emphasis you would put on John Boy). Here’s…

My review of the Wet Olive a couple of weeks ago prompted a flood of responses. Most of them defended the ePoetry event that I was unlucky enough to witness while attempting to dine, called me a bigot, and belittled the discrimination I experienced as merely a joke. Only one…

The link between New York and Miami is like that of a torso and an amputated leg: The latter might be expendable, but the physical memory lingers. Which city is the sacrificial limb depends on perspective. Usually I consider New York the phantom itch. No matter how hard I try…

Dave Jay Gerstein, a musician friend who fronts a band in New York City called the Sound of Monday, recently noted in an e-mail that “EVERYBODY needs a theme song.” Which is why he penned, along with “a whole horn arrangement idea too — lots of brass,” the following lines:…

If I could make the newsprint glow neon and blink on and off for the following phrase, I would: Feast Among the Grapes to Be Held at Parrot Jungle Island. Why the hoopla? Feast Among the Grapes, which benefits the Diabetes Research Institute, is not a debut event; in 2003,…

The mangoes are falling, the temperature is rising, and the tourists are leaving. What does it all mean? The obvious and inevitable, of course — summer, with all its vacation implications, is upon us. The bad news is that this is going to be a very domestic summer. Wars and…

I admit I was put up to it. While judging the third annual “Iron Chef” competition for Zeta’s (WZTA-FM 94.9) Paul and Young Ron morning show, which was held for the occasion at the Johnson & Wales campus in North Miami, Chef Allen Susser (sitting to my right) and I…

As I watch TV, I hear the familiar commercial jingle: “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony” and see the trademark-red Coca-Cola logo before it even flashes on the screen. In my heart, I feel the swell of so much goodwill toward my fellow human beings…

Talk about making the best of underutilized space. The Delano Hotel has initiated “Cabana Dining,” an option for the shy celebrity — yeah, that’s an oxymoron — to take advantage of the private, poolside cabanas. For $190, which actually isn’t all that pricey, you get a candle-strewn cabana from 7:00…

When you enter the lobby of a Ritz-Carlton hotel, you expect to experience several ineluctable elements that give the chain its platinum reputation: liveried doormen greeting you with the respect accorded to royalty, superb floral arrangements with flowers that appear to have been flown by Lear jet from Holland’s finest…

It could be that I’ve been working so hard on the “Best of Miami” issue that my juices have been whetted. It could be that the time change has me waking up far too early in the morning for anything but mostly evil thoughts. Or maybe I’ve just been holding…

I must admit to suffering a little pang of disappointment, in intensity just a bit less than a hunger cramp, at the Friday-night events of the recent Boca Bacchanal wine and food festival. Not by the setting — a series of dinners, each prepared by a renowned chef and paired…

On the scale of anticipation, Timo is a ten. Just mention the restaurant, chef-owner Tim Andriola’s first proprietary project that is about to debut on Collins Avenue in Sunny Isles, and the reaction is immediate. “Is it open?” “What’s the address?” “What kind of food?” “Wanna go?” Potential customers aren’t…

“If you can imagine it,” Nahum Frenkel says, “I can make it out of chocolate.” The new owner of Confection Connection, a specialty chocolate shop in North Miami, already possesses a thousand molds from which he and his staff can make anything from baby rattles to bunches of grapes, and…

Pay close attention to the following restaurants, listed in alphabetical order: Carmen’s. Chispa. Elia. Il Giramonde. Isabela’s. Locanda Sibilla. Mundo. Pao. The Prime Grill. Talula. Taverna Opa. Timo. Wish. A few have new owners, chefs, or retooled menus. Several have opened doors in the past couple of weeks. Some more…

Prepare yourselves — there’s a new political correctness on the horizon, and it concerns our food. We’ve probably all heard by now that North Carolina restaurateur Neal Rowland, angry about France’s passive stance on our aggression, renamed French fries in his Cubbie’s eatery as “freedom fries.” Media-savvy colleagues, who took…

It took the end of the South Beach Wine & Food Festival and the arrival of the invitation for the upcoming Aspen Food & Wine Magazine Classic to come to a realization: I am tired of plastic-forking a tiny piece of something atop a minuscule dollop of something else, all…