This past July, one of Miami Beach’s landmark restaurants, the Forge, spewed more smoke and soot than in the Roaring Twenties, when the site was an ornamental blacksmith’s shop. A fire had started in the restaurant’s new automatic wine dispenser – said to be the world’s largest – and before…

If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to eat less red meat, you’re probably already planning to explore more seafood restaurants. If another of your goals for 1992 is to keep a tighter rein on the old purse strings, you’re in luck. Bahama’s Fish Market & Restaurant, nestled in…

It seems impossible that another year has passed, but by next week 1991 will be as dead as many a Miami restaurant trend (not to mention many a Miami restaurant). So many culinary fancies come and go each year that it’s easy to miss them if you’re not paying close…

In 1990 we saw the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1991 we’re bidding farewell to the Soviet Union. In the midst of an era of great change, it seems not even Miami restaurants are spared. Seldom does a dining establishment survive turnover in ownership, management, and chef, but Cafe…

The bad news in the Grove is that B.C. Chong moved to Miami Beach earlier this year. The good news is that Susie Cheng’s, the restaurant’s successor on Commodore Plaza, continues B.C. Chong’s tradition of serving outstanding Chinese cuisine. Little has been altered in the small, friendly room on one…

Barocco is the style of art and architecture typified by scrolls, curves, and other elaborate ornamentation. In English, we call it baroque, having stolen that word from the French as we did with so many haute things. But even the French are not above such linguistic appropriation – they lifted…

With Thanksgiving Day – and all the eating that it entails – looming large, the last thing my dining consort and I wanted was a huge meal. So we headed to a couple of new eateries with scaled-down menus but, as it turned out, not scaled-down calories. Our first stop…

There are a lot of restaurants with unusual names in Miami, Tu Tu Tango, Momotombo, and MamboJambo, the newest addition to Coral Gables’s Restaurant Row, which goes the others one better. As if their name weren’t enough, the husband-and-wife chefs John and Laura Pariseau (formerly of Mark’s Place, Chef Allen’s,…

Don’t look for Jackie Kennedy or other publicity-shy types at a place named for free-lance photographers. But you will almost always find a contented group of diners at i Paparazzi – a sumptuous restaurant where the food is as bold as those quick-witted, celebrity-spotting shutterbugs. No one popped out from…

On a recent trip to The Old Cutler Oyster Co. & Raw Bar in South Miami, my dining (and driving) companion and I took a wrong turn and wound up on a dark stretch of Krome Avenue. The trip was a little spooky and so, by the time we got…

You can never be too rich or too thin or spend too much of your money on pricey (but pretty) morsels at chichi Miami restaurants, right? Wrong. Enough Mediterranean delicacies from seaside, Eurostyle bistros. We hankered for something different. Ethiopian or Moroccan or Polish would have cured our epicurean malaise,…

Aficionados of Laurenzo’s Italian food-and-wine emporium in North Miami Beach have long clamored for a sit-down restaurant, and after a number of false starts, the venerable establishment – Miami’s answer to Manhattan’s Balducci’s – reopened Laurenzo’s Grill at the Cotillion in late August. Housed in a missionlike structure, the dining…

Despite recent changes and additions to my home (i.e., a lake where the front yard used to be), I was feeling decidedly housebound during last week’s rainstorm. Seeking respite from my newly water-logged decor of mops, buckets, and hip waders, I enlisted the aid of my dining companion, and together…

In South Beach, where restaurants come and go nearly as often as the tides, earning consideration as one of the best local eateries is no mean feat. However, for Cafe Carezza the distinction may be a double-edged sword. Housed in the Boulevard Hotel on Ocean Drive, the cafe is a…

Last year while CocoWalk was still in the construction stages, I wandered around the rubble shaking my head. The three-tier, open-air, Disneyesque complex would go the way of the dinosaur, I was sure. No one with any sense would fight the gridlock of cruising teens and the paucity of parking…

At 11:00 on a recent Saturday night, the long, broad stretch of Lincoln Road Mall looked more like a ghost town than a commercial neighborhood only blocks from busy South Beach. B.C. Chong’s, the Grove transplant in Johnny’s old digs, and Espresso Bongo, a new bohemian nightclub with live music…

In Miami, the word pub – like the word bistro – does not necessarily connote good cheap eats or a working-class atmosphere. English Pub, which sits next to the pink Key Biscayne Galleria shopping center on Crandon Boulevard, is veddy, veddy upper crust, with a clubby atmosphere and the obligatory…

If you ascribe to the bigger-is-better school, the underwhelming size of Tani Guchi’s Place might deter you. It shouldn’t. What it lacks in space, this little eatery more than makes up for in quality, and quantity, of food. Carole and Terutoshi (“Terry”) Taniguchi provide a warm atmosphere and excellent fare…

La Terrasse may not be everyone’s cup of cafe au lait – the place is very European (or at least the SoBe version of a hip continental hangout) – but we not-so-trendy locals had a very tasty meal there recently. The restaurant doesn’t rank among the greats, but if you…

The secret to success in the Italian-restaurant business here has little to do with designer food. Forget miniravioli stuffed with shitake mushrooms, radicchio pesto, or other exotica. Restaurants that seem to consistently draw the biggest crowds offer hefty portions of perfectly cooked pasta and simple sauces at inexpensive prices. This…

After nearly a year in operation, everything at the Fishbone Grille should be going swimmingly. But while some of the restaurant’s offerings are outstanding, heavy-handed preparation of various seafood dishes and well-meaning but haphazard service provide bones of contention. An offshoot of the 79-year-old Tobacco Road, Miami’s oldest and most…

Many restaurants don’t survive Miami’s off-season, but judging from the number of new kids on the block (especially the South Beach block), this is no ordinary South Florida summer. After a nostalgic Friday Night Live concert a few weeks ago, my dining companion and I shagged up Washington Avenue to…