It took a face-to-face meeting with R. Michael Mondavi, chairman of Robert Mondavi, A Family of Wines, to confirm a suspicion I’ve always had about myself — no matter how large, new, or luxurious the cruise ship, I will get seasick. It’s true that I operate under Kavetchnik’s Law: If…
The bright, minimalist, metallic-cool interior of Café 71 stands out in this grim, brown Biscayne block like a comic strip plunked smack-dab in the middle of a James Joyce book. Motorists going by the corner of 71st Street look over at the contemporary cafe with disbelief in their eyes: What’s…
It was not for food that I first, about a year ago, went to Wah Shing Chinese restaurant. It was for karaoke, which had suddenly become hugely hip among my younger friends. I’d never done this singing-to-vocally-zapped-recordings thang myself, maybe because I spent a young adulthood playing in actual live…
To my knowledge, I only cried twice on the job in the years I was a waitress. The first time occurred when my closest girlfriend, a fellow server at a certain deli in my hometown, informed me that she was sleeping with my then-boyfriend, who also worked there as a…
Not the way I like to think about starting the new year: Marina Polvay, food writer, cookbook author, and PR rep for local restaurants, passed away on December 2. A colorful figure with strong, honest opinions, she claimed a background of Russian royalty and was known for her expertise on…
South Beach’s favorite (and only) Austrian/German pub and eatery, formerly a teeny, cavernous room on Alton Road and Ninth Street, is now housed in a far roomier space two blocks north, just up the street from Wild Oats Market. Most everything else about Dab Haus remains the same — the…
Like all good gourmands, I appreciate excess. And our friendly, neighborhood Disney World (oh, okay, so it’s four hours’ drive time) is the epitome — ironically in the land of “It’s a Small World,” everything is bigger, longer, brighter, hotter, and more expensive than its counterpart on the regular ol’…
Those who know of Barton Gerald Weiss’s reputation as the event impresario with an inclination for multisensory, over-the-top theatrics will probably be surprised by the subtle brown and bronze earth tones that swathe the tasteful, relatively restrained décor of Barton G the Restaurant. I say “relatively” because the 155-seat dining…
Although the cuisines of different but neighboring Latin American countries certainly differ more than the cuisines of, say, Vermont and New Hampshire, many individual dishes seem like variations on a similar base. Thus El Salvador’s pupusas (stuffed cornmeal pancakes) are somewhat like a cross between Mexican corn tortillas and Venezuelan…
Maybe it’s due to Dickens and Tiny Tim, maybe it’s all those British-origin Christmas carols full of hearty tidings of comfort and joy — the warm ‘n’ fuzzy fascination with Merrie Olde England felt by most Americans (including Latin Americans, if the astonishingly positive feedback to a review I did…
I have to admit my appreciation for Arab culture skyrocketed when I discovered that they invented sorbet. It’s true — the Chinese taught them how to make sweet syrup from puréed fruit, and the Arabs took this knowledge to Sicily, combined these syrups with snow from Mount Etna, and called…
Perhaps it’s the fact that Hanukkah happens so early this year. Or the amount of spare time I’ve suddenly had in the evenings after I canceled out on several events, the result of a terrible case of asthma-inducing bronchitis. (An illness that one deserves after a weekend skipping around Disney’s…
This original low-rise Deli Lane (there’s a newer branch on Brickell, on the ground floor of one of downtown’s skyscrapers) has been around since the 1980s, making it one of Miami’s first purveyors of gentrified yuppie food: quiches and similar light entrées, vegetable salads consisting of lettuces other than iceberg,…
One of the world’s less-pleasant sounds is the dismissive grunt of a New Yorker as he or she proclaims the pizza in some part of America to be an inedible parody of the real thing that they, thank God, are privy to in their great city. It’s not that this…
What the world needs now is love sweet love, but what Miami Beach needs is affordable restaurants. The recently opened Alton Road Café fits the inexpensive bill, though it’s more diner, or coffee shop, than restaurant or café. The space was previously an IHOP (attached to the 41st Street Howard…
The days when Florida was the last to get wind of a trend are over. So over, in fact, that folks like Cyril Camus, fifth-generation cognac producer, chose Miami over New York and Los Angeles to launch the “new generation” product, Camus 4U. The 31-year-old marketing and development director of…
By definition, fine-dining chefs aren’t your average day-jobbers. Their hours are mostly converse to those experienced by the rest of the vocational world. Their kitchen society is a caste, made up of which group has the right to instruct another bunch on how to chop onions. Their duties can range…
It seemed not inappropriate to me that the recent opening of Jerry’s Famous Deli, in the sleek South Beach space long occupied by the nightclub Warsaw, was accompanied by the kind of media brouhaha normally reserved for the premiere of exclusive restaurant/lounges co-owned by celebrities. The prospect of great hot…
Yep, holiday gift-giving season has arrived, want it or not. And what will all of you workaholics who’re too busy to shop be giving this year — a bouquet of flowers … again? Since this isn’t the flora but the food section of the newspaper, let’s talk about fruit flowers,…
The townhouse was a novelty on South Beach. The first of its kind to be conceptualized, it was one of only five units. With three bathrooms, three bedrooms, two balconies, two covered parking spaces, and a location two blocks north of then-burgeoning Lincoln Road, the numbers made so much sense…
You wouldn’t think that giving diners what they want would be a particularly unique strategy for operating a restaurant. Even those with no experience in the hospitality field would no doubt assume that pleasing customers is something every potential restaurateur would seriously focus upon from day one. Yet this apparently…
For perhaps the tenth time in the last month, I opened a bottle of tainted wine a few nights ago. The 2001 Sauvion Pouilly-Fumé, a generally reliable white wine made from Sauvignon Blanc grapes grown in the Loire Valley, had clearly gone off. The cause, most likely, was either oxidation…
