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…
So here’s my dilemma: I had dinner at Vin Brule the other night. It’s a cute little place — cute as a button, in fact — almost at the downtown Miami end of Coral Way. Nothing fancy, just your classic neighborhood café. Handful of tables on a terra-cotta tile floor,…
During the sultry stretch of summer between early July and early September, Siruis, the Dog Star (and brightest in the sky), rises and sets in sync with the sun. The Latin term for this is dies caniculares, or dog star days, which has since been modulated to dog days, or…
WYSIWYG, in computer parlance, describes an interface that allows users to see an onscreen document as it will appear once it’s printed rather than having to guess at the end result: What You See Is What You Get. In the food world, menus listing daily specials are WYSIWYG — or…
There are cakes. Carrot. German chocolate. Cinnamon bundt. Coconut buttercream. Cakes, cakes, and more cakes. Plus cupcakes, and cookies the size of hubcaps, and chocolate ganache truffles piled like miniature cannonballs, and six types of brownies — all rich, fudgy, and gooey. Did you say pies? Key lime, pecan, apple…
Regis Philbin has returned to prime time. The Mets have once more found their way to first place. Joe Lieberman faces forced retirement back to private life. And The Oasis Restaurant is again dishing humble, healthy, mostly Mediterranean fare at its former storefront location in Miami Beach. All happy homecoming…
I have seen the future of fast food, and it is in Kendall. Kendall? Are you kidding? Kendall. I am not kidding. The future of fast food is a pinhole-in-the-wall storefront in a typically behemoth suburban shopping center a couple of impossibly jammed intersections off Florida’s Turnpike. Bearing the somewhat…
The goose is nothing, but man has made of it an instrument for the output of a marvelous product, a kind of living hothouse in which there grows the supreme fruit of gastronomy. — Charles Gérard, L’Ancienne Alsace à Table The question is not “Can they reason?” nor “Can they…
You can’t please everyone, but try telling that to restaurateurs. It is just a matter of time before “sushi tapas” begin showing up on Spanish menus — or, for that matter, Japanese menus. Or Chinese. Or Thai. Or at Sushi Bali, an Indonesian-Japanese-sushi restaurant that, for good measure, also offers…
Argentina and asado (beef barbecue): synonymous? Not only in Miami but also everywhere in Argentina — with the exception of cosmopolitan Buenos Aires — it seems that nation’s cuisine consists of grilled beef, more grilled beef, the occasional pizza (often grilled, on the same parrilla as the beef), and then…
Drive along the turnpike through Homestead and Florida City these days and you cannot help but recall the lyrics to “Little Boxes,” Sixties-era folk singer Malvina Reynolds’s famous tune: “Little boxes made of ticky tacky/And they all look just the same.” Well, yes. For those of us who cannot afford…
My wife has more than once accused me of being narrow-minded when it comes to the hot-button topic of immigration. She has even called my main talking point on the issue simplistic. I admit nothing of the sort, although I acknowledge the slogan “No Mexican immigrants, no Mexican restaurants —…
Maybe it’s the typically drab décor of neighborhood Chinese restaurants that puts you off. Perhaps it’s the frustration of not being able to translate the menus on the wall or comprehend the nightly specials as inventively enunciated by your Chinese waiter. Is it possible you are creeped out by murky-water…
Despite many mediocre meals and the occasional dangerous one — food poisoning is an occupational hazard — food-writing is fun. Rarely does a dish move me to thoughts of murder and mayhem. That level of ire generally seems a more appropriate reaction to, say, our president than an equally clueless,…
We hear it over and over: Americans are too fat. Even the numbers are becoming familiar: 64 percent of the population is overweight, 30 percent of whom are obese. A recent 136-page report blames the nation’s 900,000 restaurants and food-service establishments. The paper, prepared by an education group called the…
Less is more — or is it? With apologies to modernist architect Mies van der Rohe, less seems more like loss, at least with regard to the removal of the humongous high-heel shoe sculpture that formerly occupied the Melin Building’s courtyard. Thanks to this festively mirror-festooned, two-story-tall, Cinderella-like slipper —…
An instrumental version of “Send in the Clowns” was playing as we entered Casa Nostra, an Italian restaurant at the intersection of Mary and Oak streets in Coconut Grove. It’s the sort of schmaltzy song you might hear in a neighborhood Italian joint in Brooklyn or Jersey, which is what…
Some of the best tapas in Miami can be found at a gas station. “Right,” you say. “I want some of what he’s been smokin’.” My response is simple: Yes, that’s right. And, no, you can’t have any. If you don’t believe me, then join the sludge of traffic oozing…
The good old days ain’t what they used to be. Take Fox’s Sherron Inn. Created in 1946, its scruffy, blue-collar ambiance; midnight-in-an-inkwell lighting; and jukebox full of tunes by Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, and Patsy Cline say “bygone era” the same way Dick Cheney’s lip-curling death leer says war-mongering greedhead…
