Best Bread 2000 | Wolfie Cohen's Rascal House | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Miami | Miami New Times
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Best Bread

Wolfie Cohen's Rascal House

What sets this Jewish diner apart is the bread, made fresh every day in the adjacent bakery. Three plates of goodies are served with every meal. Besides your traditional soft and chewy rolls, they toss in white toast swirled throughout with sweet cinnamon. Also offered are chunks of raisin bread dotted with the gooey black stuff and covered with a thin coat of sugar. Real butter and cream cheese are served on the side to spread across the delicacies. For diners who can't finish the bread, servers offer a doggy bag to enjoy it at home or the office. Don't feel like waiting for the sometimes slow service or interminable lines? Then walk straight into the bakery, where the selection grows to include buttered toast, pumpernickel, and sticky honeybuns. And don't fret when you get a craving -- they're open 24 hours.

Best Early Bird Special

Mama Jennie's

You just made it. Booth okay? Care for a beverage? Will that be the pasta fagioli or the garden salad? And your rolls: plain or dripping with garlic? For dinner there's lasagna, stuffed shells, eggplant rollatini, chicken parmigiana, veal cacciatore, linguine in clam sauce, ziti with sausage, or something else ... I forgot; I'll be right back. What do you mean you're full? No dessert? Either way it's $7.95. Come on, take the cannoli! (Oh well, just come back: The early bird special is offered seven days a week, 4:00 to 7:00 p.m.)

Best Restaurant For A Power Lunch

Bice

The ambiance is one of restrained elegance. The menu is one of distinct priciness. And the clientele is easily of the double-breasted caliber. So there's no doubt, whether you're a long-time lawyer entertaining clients or a Gen X dot.com millionaire meeting potential venture capitalists, you'll want to invest in fine northern Italian fare: delicate seafood and pasta for the fluttery of stomach, hearty meat dishes for the cast-iron all-business body. Whether you're betting on a jury or taking a ride with a pre-IPO CEO, at least you'll be able to keep your chops in fine form by biting down on a, well, chop.

Best Mall Kiosk

Picklelicious

Got a hankering for a half-sour? A craving for sauerkraut? The palate for a pickled green tomato? Relax, you're covered. The only pickle stand in Miami that's called a kiosk, Picklelicious imports its barrels of pickles, about ten varieties, directly from the Lower East Side in New York. And don't worry if you don't feel like purchasing a pint or a quart of the briny goodies. Picklelicious also sells the ever-popular pickle-on-a-stick, which leaves you one hand free for flipping through the clothes at Macy's. Just be careful not to get yourself in a pickle, and have the courtesy to buy whatever you manage to squirt with garlicky juice.

Best Restaurant When Someone Else Is Paying

Petrossian

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Can you say beluga, sevruga, osetra? Petrossian can: It's the largest importer of Russian caviar in the world. Can you say foie gras? Petrossian can: The company's farms in France produce plump, silken specimens. Can you say expensive? Petrossian can, because it ain't cheap to get all that good stuff over here. Indeed you can ply your senses with twenty grams of sevruga for $23, or beluga for $47. But you should be aware that while for drug addicts, twenty grams is a feast, for caviar aficionados it's barely a snort. And if you're planning on accompanying those sturgeon eggs with champagne, be prepared for some bottles to run over the $400 mark. Needless to say the best time to dine at Petrossian is when you have grateful guests in the house. Allow them to think of the dinner check as room and board, and in the end, everyone -- especially your waiter (what's fifteen percent of $400?) -- is more than sensually sated.

Best Medianoche

Little Farm Store diner

Chef Pepin -- no, not the famous one, just a hardworking Cuban cook named Pepin -- has been a fixture at Little Farm Store's diner for the past twenty years. More than a fixture; Little Farm Store cognoscenti prize Pepin's homestyle Cuban dishes. But especially his medianoche. Now what is it that makes Pepin's sandwich a cut above? How would he know? Does an artist know what drives him to the canvas? Pepin throws generous portions of pork, ham, Swiss cheese, mayo, and pickles (amount will vary at your order) on some of that soft egg bread, grills it just right, and there it is. Another masterpiece to go. Invest now while you can get one for $2.50.

Best Restaurant To Reinvent Itself Again

Big Fish

This restaurant has had more lives than Shirley MacLaine. And part of the eatery's perseverance has to do with its location. As one of the only, and certainly just about the oldest, riverfront restaurants in Miami, we almost owe it our patronage. In fact we've seen this place through good times and bad, through Twenties' gas stations and fish sandwiches (courtesy of its first owner), through gondolas and gigantic sculptures of animals standing on each other's backs (courtesy of the previous owner). It's almost like a marriage that way -- love it or leave it. And we love it. We can't help ourselves. Some glitches will always affect this restaurant: It's hard to find; the neighborhood could be better; the river traffic could be less noisy. But as far as landmark bars built around banyan trees go, we'll take this one. And we'll drink martinis here and eat fish sandwiches (okay, maybe just one, since they're currently so big) no matter who owns it, or cleans it up, or installs weird artwork, or dirties it again. That's a promise.

Best Key Lime Pie

Epicure Market

Tart enough. Sweet enough. Mellow yellow filling, almost ecru. Velvety texture. Moist, crumbly graham cracker crust. Outside edge daintily adorned with a ring of whipped cream. Center garnished with more cream and a twisted lime slice. Ideal to serve to your friends, but at close to ten bucks, certainly not meant to throw at your enemies.

Best Pizza

Steve's Pizza

All you have to do is walk into Steve's and you know you've entered pizza nirvana. For one thing the whole place, really just a glorified stand, smells like the pizza shops in Milan. Then there are the New York-style pies, wafting just a hint of oregano toward you, that are constantly coming out of the oven. The oozing mozzarella, the tangy marinara, the dusky, charcoaled crust -- it's enough to make you drool just standing there. But we should warn you: Hold on to your patience. Even Steve's isn't worth that nasty blister that pops up when you sink your teeth too soon into a slice. Or ith it? Ith really hard to thay, after all.

Best Sommelier

Laura DePasquale at Norman's

It's tough to impress the dates these days but you can do it. You score a reservation at Norman's, pick said date up in your new Lexus SUV, and then nonchalantly toss the keys to the valet when you get there. So far, so good. Once inside you relax with a Cosmopolitan at the bar, and voilà! -- the table is ready. You seat your date, then yourself. You open the menus and begin to discuss the food. Here's your chance, you think. You explain some of the more outlandish dishes, then look around for the waitress. Spotting a female striding around the floor, you beckon to her. When she reaches your table, you begin to order: "My date will have the seared ..." "I'm sorry," said female interrupts smoothly. "I'm not your server. I'm the sommelier. Would you care for a suggestion on a bottle of wine?" Congratulations, you've just insulted Laura DePasquale, one of the only licensed female sommeliers in the State of Florida. Don't feel too bad. Even in Miami, when you can't always tell who's female and who's male, gender barriers are still in place. But not for long, thanks to DePasquale and her like. Go, femme!

Best Of Miami®

Best Of Miami®

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