Food & Drink

I was wandering around the Wines of Spain Pavilion at the South Beach Food & Wine Festival when I saw the Forever Cheese sign. Nice name, I thought as I speared a couple of cubes with a toothpick. The cheese tasted expensive, not like the stuff I get at the…

The South Beach Food & Wine Festival offered more than cheese trays and grape juice. What are we talkin’ ’bout? Booze, glorious booze, and there was plenty of it. I saw brandy, absinthe, vodka, tequila… it was like that scene in The Warriors where every gang in the city shows…

“You have to respect your ingredients. You have to respect the food.” This according to Top Chef Ilan Hall is the recipe for success. Other advice to amateur foodies included the typical “start at the bottom, even if it means peeling garlic.” And then keep a clean workspace. However his…

Porcini Cream of Mushroom Soup from Miami New Times on Vimeo.Odel Arencibia is executive chef of and partner in The Capital Grille Miami. His restaurant has just teamed up with Tuscan winemaker Castello Banfi and is offering a special promotion from February 23 to April 5, 2009, to celebrate. They…

I heard the sound of an excited crowd and saw Paula Deen get introduced onstage at Sunday’s South Beach Wine and Food Fest. In a tent at 13th and Ocean, I maneuvered  close for an angle to shoot video.Paula Deen is a funny lady. I don’t own a TV and…

Chef Dean James Max of 3030 Ocean in Fort Lauderdale had a table set up at the Food & Wine Festival serving the best grub I tried in the whole place. I didn’t know what the hell it was, so I waited around till Chef was done schmoozing his many…

If Sunday was any indication of how well the South Beach Wine & Food Festival did, then it was a resounding success. Tons of humans tore through hundreds of thousands of portions of grub and massive amounts of alcohol, grape-based and otherwise. Celebrity chefs led cooking demos, signed books, worked…

Saturday and Sunday marked the South Beach Wine & Food Fest’s premier event, the Grand Tasting Village, which cordoned off a huge strip of South Beach the size of three or four football fields and filled it with hundreds of restaurants, distributors, wine vendors, and wineries, all flinging so much…

We’re referring to Mario Batali being “up there” on stage at the SBWFF’s Wines and Food of Spain dinner. You’ve probably heard that he dropped a couple of F-bombs in front of the royal company. And speaking of F-bombs: What the fuck was he even doing on that platform welcoming…

Friday’s Trade Tasting event at the Grand Tasting Village on the Beach brought out salespeople, restaurateurs, and a barrage of folks tenuously tied to the food and wine industry — a frolicking fellowship of flaks, frauds, food bloggers, and so forth. There was no shortage of beverages — coffee drinks,…

Inveterate radio jocks Paul Castronovo and Ron Brewer of Big 105.9 and 97.9 got all up in the SoBe Wine & Food Fest’s businazz this morning, hosting an Iron Chef style cooking challenge live from the Fontainebleau (holy crap, did I spell that correctly?). The pair tested their cooking skills…

The South Beach Wine & Food Festival is already in full swing, and last night, everyone’s favorite quasi-cook and abbreviator, Rachel Ray, hosted the third annual Amstel Light Burger Bash at the Ritz-Carlton, South Beach. Our cameras caught all the beefy action, including celebrity chefs Bobby Flay and Michelle Bernstein.However,…

Food & Wine 2009 is almost upon us. You know what that means. The culinary throngs descend on South Florida, feast on its tropical flesh in a media-driven frenzy, and hopefully dump enough money on our shores to keep us goin til next year. Aaron J. Michaels from Culinary Convenience…

I cold-called Escopazzo out of our restaurant database and said, “Hey, I’m from the newspaper, what are you doing for Wine & Food?” Sommelier Rich DiGacomo had great answers for me. He talked about the Food Network, Rachel Ray, Key West prawns and drinking. Here’s what he had to say:…

I cold-called OLA at Sanctuary to find out if they got anything going on for the Food Network South Beach Wine & Food Festival 2009. I spoke to a real cool dude, sommelier Albert Omahen about fish tacos, wine, and the smoker’s palette. Here’s what he had to say:…

Series 2 of Gordon Ramsey’s F Word comes out on DVD on March 17 (you can advance order it here), and the flaks are pushing it as totally uncensored. The claim is about 99.99 percent true.  I previewed the show, and in the course of the season chef Ramsey utters…

It is early Wednesday morning, and I am standing in a kitchen area in the Miami-Beach Convention Center, watching some 50 FIU students getting to work on food prep for Friday nights’ Perrier-Jouët BubbleQ event at the South Beach Wine & Food Festival. I am not the only one looking…

Eating an oyster is like taking a spiritual log flume ride. The thrill of the plunge takes place within, not outside, the body. An über-plump Island Creek oyster at Area 31, misted with a light sheen of golden balsamic vinegar and olive oil and dotted with specks of alligator peppercorns,…