Renaisa Indian Restaurant, located just east of Biscayne Boulevard, boasts indoor and outdoor tables facing the Little River canal off 79th Street — not exactly a Venetian vista, but diners seem to love sitting by just about any body of water. That’s one reason for Renaisa’s success over the past…
Most locals know NE 167th/163rd Street as a shopping destination, not as a restaurant row. But the roughly three-mile strip between I-95 and Biscayne Boulevard is the closest thing our town has to a Chinatown — though it’s actually more of a Pan-Asiantown. On their way to Home Depot, Wal-mart,…
We received very exciting news yesterday and we just had to share it with you. Now, we know that you Beach dwellers loathe leaving the island. Heck, you don’t even want to leave your condo, since you paid so much money for it and you now realize that with an…
My husband and I had a long-overdue couples’ night with two of our best friends, Jeff and Jessica, one recent Sunday at Origin Asian Bistro, a South Miami restaurant that was Miami New Times’s 2006 choice for Best Restaurant in South Miami-Dade. We love the place: The Malaysian roti is…
After years of working at Norman’s Restaurant, Chef Jeffrey Brana and his wife Anna have opened a place of their own, Restaurant Brana, in Coral Gables (see this week’s Cafe review). Riptide spoke with Jeffrey by phone and asked him a few questions about subjects not covered in the review…
There exists an inherent elegance through simplicity.” That’s one of Chef Jeffrey Brana’s talking points concerning the cuisine at his and wife Anna Elena’s new Coral Gables dining establishment, but he could just as well be describing the 50-seat restaurant’s modest decorative scheme. Pale yellow walls in the tasteful rectangular…
Ask any resident of a major city, from San Francisco to Lima, Peru — or even citizens of not-so-major cities like Portland, Oregon; or Richmond, British Columbia — where the local Chinatown is, and they’ll have no trouble directing you to some dense enclave of Asian culture and businesses, where…
“Where Cuba meets the Far East” is Oriente at Cardozo’s motto, which on paper isn’t a bad idea. The crisp, light flavors and exotic spices of Asia offer a potentially tantalizing contrast to heartier, homespun island fare. A little yin and yang, so to speak. Throw in American-style salads and…
Is there any scarier word on a restaurant menu than healthy? Okay, maybe vegan. “Fat is flavor,” chefs say, which is why a well-marbled steak cuts like butter and tastes like heaven, why a half-pound of butter suspended in an emulsion of acid and herbs is as natural an accompaniment…
A Fish Called Avalon, the long-running seafood restaurant on Ocean Drive, has issued a press release trumpeting its boycott of all Canadian seafood products to protest the clubbing of baby seals. “Canada’s fisheries sell lobster, snow crabs, cod, mackerel, scallops, shrimp, haddock, oysters, herring, perch, mussels, sole, yellow perch, sardines,…
The local media has been mourning the demise of Fu Manchu Chinese restaurant on 71st Street in Miami Beach, which shut its doors after a near record-setting 71 year run (only Joe’s Stone Crab has been going longer). Longevity aside, however, Fu Manchu was a pretty lousy restaurant over the…
Restaurant reviewers find our prey many ways, most of them as unexciting as the way African big-game “hunters” find theirs — by using savvy local guides rather than doing any real hunting themselves. But occasionally one does stumble out of some metaphorical mist and find oneself, accidentally, in Brigadoon. (For…
There’s nothing quite so satisfying as sitting peacefully by a river and composing poetry. Finnegan’s Way? Can’t really say. Maybe that’s not entirely true — dining by a river can be just as rewarding, and even more so for those not as fortunate as I to be blessed with poetic…
The first duty of food is to be really delicious.” Cindy Pawlcyn, one of my favorite chefs in the Napa Valley, made that statement, and it’s God’s own truth. Of course, in our little town, that’s like shouting “Long live Fidel!” from atop the Freedom Tower. Too many local restaurateurs…
Brothers Nicola and Fabrizio Carro are probably a little freaked out right now. Orchestrating the daily culinary operations at a bustling newcomer like Quattro Gastronomia Italiana is a tall enough order, but the two Piedmontese chefs are also busy getting acquainted with cooking in America for the first time. This…
It’s a bit mind-blowing, when one is of an age that one rarely is offered anything but the least serious illegal drugs, to realize one’s place of employment is perceived as a citadel of crunchy-granola neo-hippies. But the proof is right there on the menu of the Daily Creative Food…
When the Clinton Hotel on South Beach’s Washington Avenue first finished refurbishment in 2004, the in-house (or, more accurately, side-of-house) restaurant was the pish-posh Pao Chinese. Pao’s seats were initially filled by foodie fannies, but about an hour later, the fickle SoBe populace was hungering for something else. Enter Aigo,…
Town Kitchen & Bar evokes a decidedly cosmopolitan mood. This is partly attributable to its urban-industrial design, with exposed ceiling pipes and poured concrete floor and walls, one of the latter horizontally striped by a photo-mural of Times Square. Plus there’s a bustling big-city bar scene, where suits and skirts…
We do love our trends here in little old Miami. Unstructured jackets, shoes with no socks? Done that. Velvet ropes, snotty doormen, $300 bottles of crappy vodka? Done that too. Asian-fusion cuisine, Dwyane Wade jerseys, dance music, stupid faux-martinis? We have sooo done all of that. Next up: wine bars…
Like the rest of the Deco properties that dress Ocean Drive, Ocean Five Hotel possesses a pleasantly primped pastel exterior and an in-house restaurant whose tables spill out to the sidewalk. No doubt it draws its share of out-of-towners looking for a spot to stop for postbeach burgers and beers,…
Northwest Seventeenth Avenue in Liberty City is not exactly a “restaurant row” tourist track. It’s not even a volatile developing destination-dining road (like Biscayne Boulevard in the past few years) for car-cruising foodies. It’s more of a reasonably speedy alternative to Biscayne, simply a way to zip north/south faster than…
Anokha isn’t the prettiest restaurant in town. The small, faintly lit, 36-seat room boasts bare beige burlap walls, a black ceiling, and … well that’s about it, other than shiny-top tables and wooden chairs (plus some outdoor seating). You’d hardly know this was an Indian establishment except for a scattering…
