Cocopelli Café is a curious name for a French bistro, not much better than calling your brasserie Vinnie’s Diner. An outdoor deck leading to the café is a concrete mess, with a few tables and some scraggly shrubs surrounding the periphery. The awning looks to be about twenty years old,…
A deluge of rain cascaded over our car as we drove toward the Spanish restaurant Costa Mar. We were approaching Rascal House, which tempted me to pull over, grab some shelter and corned-beef sandwiches, and try Costa Mar another night. But we were just blocks away, and so continued past…
Concerning culinary schools, I’ve been on both sides of the lectern. The moment I remember most vividly as a student occurred at the Culinary Institute of America, when my teacher picked up a bowl of hollandaise sauce I had just finished making and hurled it against the kitchen wall. My…
For those who love to dine out, strolling along Giralda Avenue in Coral Gables is like being a kid again and traipsing through the aisles of a candy store — a global one at that, with alluringly packaged delights from Spain (La Dorada), Italy (La Gastronomia), Vietnam (Miss Saigon), and…
As we entered Chef Curtis’s Village Café in downtown Miami Shores, inattentiveness manifested itself immediately in terminal yellow roses on the tabletops, barely clinging to life in chintzy vases. A coffee-shop counter runs in an L-shape across one long and one short wall in this rather charmless dining room, stainless-steel…
Caramelo Restaurant has beautiful plateware: elongated rectangles of red and clear glass, white teardrops and triangles, bowls that look like miniature Morris Lapidus sculptures. Weighty silverware sparkles atop meticulously crisp white linens, as does impeccably clean glassware. The two main dining rooms in the 200-seat Gables establishment are gorgeous too,…
Texas and Brazil are both sizable, sun-drenched territories inhabited by cattle, cowboys, and proud, beef-eating people with hearty appetites. Makes sense, then, that the Texas de Brazil Churrascaria chain would post its first restaurant in the Lone Star state. That was in 1998; there are now seven such Brazilian steak…
“Axis of evil” status notwithstanding, North Korea, and South too, are actually very good when it comes to provoking a proliferation of potent flavors from their cuisine. This has been the case since the Sixteenth Century, when the Portuguese introduced the chili pepper and Koreans responded with a resounding “Woo!”…
Chocolate Fine Argentinian Cuisine is a cheery and colorful spot, its mellow yellow walls and alcoves covered with vivid paintings, the tables topped with crisp white linens, the wait staff dressed in bright orange T-shirts. A dark wooden wine rack toward the far end of the room is amply stocked…
I had figured my wife would be thrilled at the prospect of dining at Benny’s Seafood Restaurant. After all, a reliable source recommended it to me as a “real Puerto Rican joint,” and my wife is a real Puerto Rican gal. As it turned out, her reaction to the idea…
The history of hotel dining in twentieth-century America was dominated by a period we’ll call the Reign of Duck l’Orange. During this time, which covered many decades, you couldn’t walk into a well-regarded hotel restaurant without encountering this glazed bird, along with steak tartare, trout amandine, and other Continental classics…
While it’s true that Chinese food isn’t as favored in this country as it was before the Asian invasion of Thai and Japanese eateries, it remains a staggeringly popular dinner choice. According to a recent article in the New York Times, there are nearly 36,000 Chinese restaurants in America, which…
Some years ago, while living in Boulder, Colorado, I took my parents out for dinner in a former mining town called Gold Hill. After a harrowing car ride up a steep, twisting, barely illuminated mountain road, we arrived at the tiny community. There was no restaurant in sight, but an…
Dining establishments tend to be busiest at night, more relaxed and inexpensive during lunch. La Loggia Ristorante & Lounge is the opposite, which can be attributed to its location across from the county courthouse in downtown Miami. If you enter the restaurant around noon, a buzz will tickle your ears…
Arranged on a white plate, the slender four-ounce medallion of American Kobe beef tenderloin and the dwarfish five-ounce standing rectangle of American Kobe meat loaf, with an insubstantial squirt of white potato purée in between, looked to me like a domed sports stadium and an office building side by side,…
There is no plant on earth that promises a broader plethora of purportedly restorative properties than sage, which comes from the Latin “salvia,” meaning “to cure.” As far back as Greek and Roman times this pebbled, silvery green leaf has been used to treat snake bites, sweating, anxiety, infections, epilepsy,…
Our initial twenty minutes at La Gastronomia foreshadowed nothing more than a middling dining experience at a moderately priced Italian restaurant. The 50-seat room was comfy enough — bright yellow walls adorned with scenic, blue-hued photos of Italy that conspire with tiled floors, painted vases, hanging plants, wooden tables, and…
No one has a problem when it comes to finding appealing ethnic joints in this town, where authentic foods are cooked with gusto and spirited to your table for only a song. Tourists or locals seeking that special night out are also in luck — we’ve got plenty of fine-dining…
Atrio restaurant sits off the 25th-floor Sky Lobby of the new Conrad Miami hotel, located in the Espirito Santo Plaza high-rise, that indented glass monolith on Brickell Avenue. Conrad is Hilton’s upscale line of hotels; the pedigreed corporate surname is conspicuously absent from the premises. Atrio’s décor reflects the sleeker,…
Michael Collins is the warrior who in 1919 led the Irish Volunteers in their revolt against the British Empire. He has inspired a movie (Neil Jordan’s eponymous biopic) and the Michael Collins Grill on Lincoln Road. Actually one of the owners of the grill is also named Michael Collins, which…
When people ask me about my approach to reviewing restaurants, a quizzical look of dismay inevitably crosses their faces as I offer my stock reply: “Everywhere is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.” They’d likely be even more disappointed if I told them E.B. White wrote that,…
Arnold Pompos, physics researcher at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, has calculated that if Santa Claus were to travel at nearly the speed of light, he could drop presents off at more than 75 million homes in approximately 500 seconds. I wonder whether Emeril Lagasse might bend the time/space continuum…
