For three short months in 2011, Aniece Meinhold and Cesar Zapata spent nights running the wildly popular Vietnamese pop-up Phuc Yea inside downtown Miami’s Crown Bistro. Then, like a midsummer squall, the place vanished. At the time, contemporary Miami cuisine was just taking shape. Michael Schwartz’s James Beard Award was…
No matter where in the world you go, you’ll find eerily similar dishes spun out with regional ingredients. They’re humble, universal plates. Dishes such as chicken soup (pho ga and aji de gallina, for example), skewered and grilled meat, and savory fillings wrapped in tender dough…
The Chang family, which New Times profiled over the summer, is no longer involved in 26 Sushi & Tapas following the settlement of spiteful lawsuit in which investor and real-estate developer Morris Kaplan accused the family of financially mismanaging the restaurant. At the same time, the Changs accused Kaplan of…
“I love waiting tables,” Marco Gonzalez says as he tears into a meatball sub at Miami Shores’ Pizza Point. The short 42-year-old with olive skin and large, piercing brown eyes wears his hair close-cropped after serving three years in the Marines. In the decades since his discharge, luxury restaurants have…
The sound of hot oil sizzling and popping can curl anyone’s lips to smile. But to what end should that oil be used? Should it turn thinly sliced potatoes to French fries? What about crisping thin rounds of sweet potato that when partnered with crunch pork belly and piquant salsa criolla, form Peru’s beloved butifarra sandwich?
The medianoche. The Elena Ruz. The frita Cubana. All iconic sandwiches that are as woven into the fabric of Cuban life as coffee and mambo. And though a there’s a never-ending procession of travel shows and blogs dedicated to the panoply of portable Cuban culinary ingenuity, there’s one they all forget.
Miami is the hardest place in America to open a restaurant. “But wait,” one might respond. “What about the fierce rents and competition in places like New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco?” None of them has as finicky, diverse, and downright unpredictable customers as Miami. That brutal truth has…
After 15 years as a fly fishing guide in the Florida Keys Jon Milchman couldn’t take it anymore. It wasn’t the sun, the azure water, or the relaxed, heat-stifled lifestyle. He couldn’t spend another year watching the destruction of an ecosystem he’d grown to love. “I watched species decline, algal…
Margie Pikarsky barely remembers the last time she took a real vacation. It was 2010, and while on the way to drop her daughter off at college in upstate New York, she and the family meandered through Delaware, western Pennsylvania, and the Empire State’s vast western reaches. Besides that, she’s…
A vast portion of the menu at Teixeira Portugal Restaurant is dedicated to one ingredient: bacalhau, known as codfish to English speakers and bacalao to los que hablan español. Order it “a nortenha,” and a fat, pearly lobe of the fish is deep-fried, lathered in a creamy pumpkin-hued garlic sauce,…
By year’s end the polished steel Biscayne Boulevard eatery that once served steak-frites and butter-drenched escargots will reopen as Mignonette’s second location offering nearly a dozen oysters alongside a menu of several simply pan roasted fish and a handful of more gussied up offerings. The first Mignonette opened in Edgewater late…
How do you take your coffee? Light and sweet? A drop of cream? Perhaps with some sort of nut-based so-called milk or whatever faux dairy is in fashion? All of that’s fine for the mass-produced hodgepodge of grounds that come off supermarket shelves or even a higher-end cappuccino or cortado,…
Since opening in late 2014, 27 Restaurant & Bar has served its food on plates that look as if they were culled from a grandmother’s house, a kitschy tourist attraction, or a bastion of fine dining. Many dishes come from thrift shops in Miami and beyond. “Everyone [working here] has…
Time stops when Antonio Bachour steps into his Brickell bakery. It’s just before 9 a.m., and the din of construction and rush-hour traffic is audible even inside. A line of leggy, pencil-skirted women and suited men with strong jaws and pocket squares stretches across the dining room, past the ivory,…
This year marked the second time Ferran Adrià, often called the world’s greatest chef after more than two decades leading Spain’s wildly creative elBulli, visited Miami for a gastronomy congress hosted by Barcelona-based brewery Estrella Damm. Yet his much anticipated, hour long talk left many looks bored. Eyes darted back…
Each morning in Mumbai an army of home cooks rises to the sweltering heat and heads to their kitchens to prepare the day’s meal. They’re not cooking for their families. They’re cooking for a delivery man, called a dabbawala, who will arrive in a matter of hours to ferry the…
The kitchen can be magnetic place for your average couch potato or cubicle creature. The heat, the noise, and the instant satisfaction seem a galaxy away from answering emails and suffering through dull meetings. But like everything glamorized for television the harsh reality is glazed over or even worse wholly…
Since July, City of Miami Beach officials and Ocean Drive property owners have been working on a plan to tidy up the iconic Art Deco thoroughfare into something better than than a neon-vomit-and-drug-baggie receptacle. Yet in order for there be any hope for the laundry list, which includes a self-taxing…
The question isn’t whether to order a Chongqing hot pot at North Miami Beach’s year-old CY Chinese Restaurant. You must. No, the real quandary is what you will ask for inside it. Chef and owner Yang Xian Guang suggests beef tripe, gelatinous pork blood cakes, and fat-ribboned slices of lamb,…
Tomas Strulovic always planned to sell sandwiches out of his quaint, whitewashed bakery, but since opening in 2014 the space where they’d be assembled has sat dormant. No more. About a month ago his True Loaf bakery began offering a handful of them Thursdays through Sundays. This past weekend five…
The Southeast Overtown / Park West Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) says negotiations are chugging along between itself and Marcus Samuelsson for a restaurant, lounge, and supper club in a onetime Overtown pool hall. Yet a spokeswoman for the Ethiopian-born, Swedish-raised chef and his restaurant company says otherwise. “Marcus (and his…
The hidden treasure at Sweet Liberty Drink & Supply Company in South Beach is the “She Said Yes.” It’s a flowery, aromatic affair that includes sherry spiked with gin, sharpened with muddled raspberries, and then dashed with cucumber. “It’s a low-alcohol cocktail,” says a raven-haired, curvaceous beauty behind a glass-and-steel…
