As a food writer, my best moment this millennium came during an interview with chef Andrea Curto last month, when I asked for the usual sound-bite definition of her dishes at SoBe’s Wish. “Fusion,” she declared immediately, “because that way I can cook whatever the heck I want to.” Honesty…

In SoBe it’s easy to get spoiled when it comes to sushi. Great grub of most other Asian nations isn’t easy to find in Miami, but visiting know-it-alls from New York, or even Asian food mecca San Francisco, are unusually impressed by my Japanese-food tour de force — a strolling…

There were two undying rumors about Big Fish back when I moved to Miami six years ago. One was that this renovated shack-complex-turned-restaurant on the Miami River had once dispensed the best cheapo fish sandwich in town. Wait: “Best”? Legendary! Mythic! To hear it told, neither Jesus himself nor even…

Last Night at the S&S Diner, the 1987 Mel Kiser/Corky Irick flick about pretrendy Miami, brought national fame to this classic counterspace-only eatery, along with an unending rush of trendy directors seeking instant authenticity. Most recently scenes for The Versace Murder were shot there. But the S&S Diner had been…

It’s high season, time once again for the ravenous hordes from the North to descend. Time again to schlep the ravenous hordes out to the Everglades, for the obligatory gator-gaping expedition. And time again — assuming they don’t get eaten trying to stump-jump their rental bikes over Shark Valley’s snoozing…

Of all the significant trends in the food world over the last decade of the last century, the most exciting for travelers was the revolution in hotel cuisine. And encouragingly, it wasn’t just in sophisticated cities that hotel restaurants transformed from lowest-common-denominator food factories for tasteless (presumably) tourists into kitchens…

When Beatlenut first opened last winter, neither I nor any of my foodie friends were tempted to try it, for one main reason: the nauseatingly cutesy misspelling of the name. The betel nut, the natural mood stimulant that Bloody Mary (the amply fed Hawaiian earth mama to all singing sailors)…

Back in the non-foodie Fifties, when I was a pre-adolescent child in a lower-middle-class, aspiring-to-the-stars family, I ate a great deal of chow at resort hotels — food that signified my clan’s efforts at upward mobility. And I adored the stuff. Not for its taste, mind you, because frankly it…

Miami may be the kind of town where reader restaurant polls regularly cite hokey American-Asian suburban steak chain Benihana as Best Japanese Restaurant, but South Beach, at least, is on the cutting edge of the sushi knife. Between east-west outposts Sushi Rock on Collins Avenue and Yoko’s on Alton Road,…

France today possesses what is probably the most intelligent collective palate. [Whatever] France eats she does it with a pleasure, an open-eyed delight quite foreign to most people…. There is a gusto, a frank sensuous realization of food, that is pitifully unsuspected in, say, the … corner cafe of an…