Dining on Cuban food often dictates a choice between dirt-cheap dives dishing out decent fare and upscale establishments that serve nuevo Latino cuisine as incongruously overgarnished as Fidel Castro in a tuxedo. Havana Harry’s, a 200-seat family-style Cuban restaurant on Le Jeune, one block west of South Dixie Highway, falls…
Read Part 1 or Part 2 Flattery easily can turn a restaurateur’s head. Too easily, as it turns out. In 1997 snowbirds loyal to Dennis Max convinced the man and his company that the Northeast was ready for his concept. Specifically this group of investors wanted Unique Restaurant Concepts to…
It was while sitting at home, watching the presidential debate on TV, that I suddenly found myself seized by an insatiable craving for jerk chicken. Go figure. So I headed to Jerk Machine, located in North Miami (other locations include Sunrise, Opa-locka, Coral Springs, and Hollywood), a place whose motto…
Rodz of South Beach, a restaurant and lounge nestled in the center of Española Way, serves cuisine that is self-described as “Pan Asian, Continental, and Mediterranean, with an American influence.” Whenever I come across such globally ambitious concepts, a little warning flag pops up: cooks of all countries, masters of…
When restaurateur Mary Anne Richter initially dined at Café Max in Pompano Beach, about three days after it opened in 1984, she was hardly impressed. “I went in for dinner with two friends, and everything that could have gone wrong went wrong,” she laughs. “They lost the exhaust, you couldn’t…
Prologue: About six weeks ago, in Bal Harbour Shops, a restaurant called Max’s Place opened in the space where Petrossian formerly held court. It was only a few months after Petrossian had gone out of business, and the entire space needed to be revamped to fit the new concept. But…
Back in the days when cars had tail fins and Elvis was a hound dog, the Morris Lapidus-designed Eden Roc hotel was one of the hottest celebrity hangouts in town. But cars got smaller and Elvis got fat and, like a lot of Miami Modern structures, the Eden Roc went…
Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant, which opened on Brickell Avenue just two months ago, currently is hosting downtown’s hottest Friday after-work party, drawing the same mass of young professionals as last season’s sizzling Firehouse Four shindigs. This is the sixteenth such microbrewery/restaurant that founders Dan Gordon and Dean Biersch have launched…
Manuel Martinez came up with a novel idea: to re-create the town square of La Mancha, circa 1605, as the setting for his Spanish Don Quixote Restaurant. Martinez, a fan and scholar of the Cervantes masterpiece (his production of the play runs at South Beach’s Colony Theater this month), forwarded…
There’s an old restaurant joke currently recirculating: Three restaurateurs are chatting about old times. The first recalls a fire in his place. Rather than reopen he decided to take the insurance money and retire. The second remembers how robbers broke in and vandalized his eatery. He, too, got out of…
One Rascal is never enough, it seems. Jerry’s Famous Deli Inc., a.k.a. the Starkman family, which also runs Wolfie Cohen’s Rascal House and Epicure Market, has leased the space at 1450 Collins Ave. The location will be developed as a Jerry’s Famous Deli. According to Jason Starkman, operating proprietor of…
When Dubliners enter their local pub, the feeling is one of immediate comfort, like slipping into a pair of well-worn shoes. The spacious interior of the Playwright Irish Pub & Restaurant handsomely mimics the antique look that comes naturally to those ancient, tin-ceilinged, gas-lamp-adorned drinking establishments, but it’s still too…
Russia is not the best place to be right now, as we were reminded by the not-so-subtle sub metaphor for a nation sinking fast in an ocean of corruption and economic chaos. Still, I’d rather be there than in Colombia, that spot rife with right-wing paramilitaries, left-wing guerrillas, drug militia,…
Blame it on The Spitfire Grill. In that 1996 film, an ex-con persuades an aging restaurateur, whose eatery has been on the market for ten years, to run an essay contest. Entry fee: 100 dead presidents. Prize: the Spitfire Grill, a rustic diner in backwoods Maine. Four years later, thanks…
Seating prospects at the lunch spot we had just entered didn’t look good. I suggested we leave and eat somewhere else, though admittedly I was more put off by a sign on the window reading “Gourmet Sandwiches” than at having to wait for a table (I distrust any place that…
Marvin Woods, author of the recently released The New Low-Country Cooking, sounds mildly surprised when asked about his reception here in South Florida. “I’ve got nothing but positive writeups and warm welcomes from the people here,” he says. “My best book signing was in Pembroke Pines. I sold 55 books,…
If you’ve ever danced on a table at Mezzanotte, the Italian restaurant hailed for breathing new life into South Beach back in the late Eighties, consider it a treasured memory: The twelve-year-old Mezzanotte finally has closed up shop. But chair-jiggers shouldn’t despair. The new owner of the location is Tim…
Restaurateur Mark Soyka shocked just about everybody in the restaurant industry when he announced this past June that News Café, his inaugural eatery that helped revitalize Ocean Drive, would be moving from its location on Eighth Street and Ocean Drive. This fall the 400-seat News Café will be reinvented on…
Tom Tresh was a talented baseball player, but he was never able to live up to expectations that he could be the next Mickey Mantle. The same hopeful hype would haunt about as many other subsequent Yankees centerfield prospects as there are South Florida neighborhoods that have failed to become…
My most memorable dining experiences often have occurred outdoors, which doesn’t mean on the patio. There was that chardonnay and chilled oysters experience out in the Everglades one sunset; or the simple yet perfect taste of a sliced mango in a Puerto Rican rain forest following a light rain; or…
One of my editors recently wanted to celebrate a special occasion with his wife at a new, stylish restaurant. So he made a reservation at one of our celebrated chef’s outposts. But he was concerned about the noise level and the hustle and bustle. Perhaps, he asked me somewhat anxiously,…
My “Dish” column about why service is so bad in South Florida (“Shirt, Shoes, but No Service,” August 17) seems to have struck a nerve. Via e-mail I’ve received both complaints (think customers leaving restaurants with stains on their clothing) and compliments (try Basilico, and bring along those picky visitors)…
