Miami’s Mexican restaurants are, for the most part, utterly predictable: margarita, chips, salsa, burrito-enchilada-fajitas, and the bill, por favor. Usually the only question is whether they’ll make you suffer through a mariachi band. I wasn’t expecting much different from Javier’s Cantina Mexicana and was perhaps even less encouraged than usual…
I admit I was one of the doubters — no surprise there — when I first heard that celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse had been cast as the lead in a television sitcom that would debut this fall. My concern didn’t spring from the proposed plot (a gentle sendup of Lagasse’s…
It was mere weeks, not the usual months or years, after becoming Wish’s executive chef in 1999 that Andrea Curto began garnering national awards and great reviews as the hottest food thing in South Florida since Scotch bonnet peppers. And the very first national rave, a pick of Wish in…
Even before the catastrophic events of the past weeks, culinary forecasters — New Times among them — have been predicting the decline and fall of the South Beach scene. Our seasonal mainstay of models, photogs, and film crews largely declined to shoot around town last year, but prices in restaurants…
I returned home hounded by two nagging questions: What is Zür New World Cuisine restaurant really all about? And what, exactly, is a zür? The latter query was answered easily enough by asking over the phone. Turns out zür means “nothing in particular.” As for the first, more relevant question…
“Astonish me!” the impresario Diaghilev commanded then-nobody writer Jean Paul Sartre on a Paris street corner back in the Thirties. And soon-to-be-somebody Sartre did just that. But according to my friend Robert, a lifelong Southern Florida native I originally met because he’s on the board of my life partner’s temple,…
As animals we know instinctively that eating is vital to our existence. Hunger is a primal urge. Without food our bodies can’t sustain themselves. As human beings, however, we may suspect that dining out, and writing and reading about dining out, is somewhat less important. And in the wake of…
South Beach, Sunday, 10:30 a.m. I walk into Tropical on the Beach, on Washington Avenue between Fourteenth and Fifteenth streets. It’s a massive space, with some 200 seats and 50 silver Deco light fixtures hanging from the lofty ceiling. The bulbs are muted now, as more than enough natural rays…
From virtually my first stroll down Ocean Drive in the early Nineties, it was apparent that one of the main foreign languages being spoken was Italian, and the stroll back up Collins and Washington avenues, past designer emporiums, made it immediately clear where all the Italian visitors were outfitting themselves…
The ability of a restaurant to surprise with hitherto unseen and unheard of concepts is becoming increasingly difficult these days, yet Jake’s Bar & Grill, a new eatery located across from the Shops at Sunset Place, recently succeeded in doing just that. While waiting for a table at a large…
Most of us remember the shooting death of Gianni Versace at his Miami home, Casa Casuarina, the way our parents recall the assassination of President Kennedy: as a tragedy of international proportions. Many vividly recall the resulting hordes of tourists swarming the Ocean Drive mansion for the gruesome photo op…
An authentic version of chau mien as they do it in Canton would be reason enough to patronize any Chinese restaurant. And Gourmet Gourmet’s double-yellow gourmet version does largely qualify as authentic. Traditionally chau mien simply was pan-fried fresh Chinese egg noodles topped with quickly stir-fried seasoned meat or seafood…
As someone who has earned a living in two pretty damned privileged fields — writing about food and playing rock music — I’ve always felt as if I was getting away with highway robbery, even in months when I can barely pay the rent. One of my grandmothers, after all,…
The potted palms are empty of greenery. Many of the rooms are bereft of beds. The lobby boasts a silence so profound it’s almost religious in quality. But the Shore Club, along with its dining destination Sirena, is indeed open. More important, Nobu, one of the world’s preeminent restaurants, also…
The version of Thai food one encounters at the King and I restaurant is about as real as the vision of Thai culture one encounters in the Rogers & Hammerstein musical of the same name — which is to say, not very. Not that this is necessarily bad; it just…
The cosmopolitan is dead. I know, I know. I enjoy that particular vodka martini too, vibrant as it is like an Art Deco building on Ocean Drive. But the cosmo is so passé it has become an umbrella drink, and you can get a frozen one at, appropriately enough, Big…
A café, bistro, and brasserie are different from one another. In France that is. Here in the States we tend to blur any distinctions, choosing one term over another mostly by phonetics. An informal French restaurant opening in Okeechobee, for example, will likely go with Okeechobee Café rather than the…
Chien Chung Peng from Hong Kong opened the Chung Hing Oriental Mart on NE 163rd Street and Eighteenth Avenue ten years ago. I can’t imagine anything even vaguely Asian that isn’t on some shelf somewhere in the ten aisles of this sprawling, cluttered grocery. The diversity of foodstuffs displayed from…
What, you believe everything you read? Of course not. As a member of the media, I’m very familiar with what kind of jarred pabulum we’re spoon-fed like babies. I do my best not to contribute to it — I try to present a well-researched, critical point of view. But I’m…
Before even a short vacation in any foreign country, I always try to learn about the food of the place, in the language of the place — nothing really daunting in terms of grammar or vocabulary but enough to cover the basic amenities and practicalities of negotiating a meal. This…
A few weeks ago, when I wrote about the 21-and-over policy at Gatsby’s, I asked you to spare me your vitriolic opinions on kids and fine dining. Of course you haven’t. The responses have been pouring in, and in a way I’m grateful; reading the riotous insults is far more…
While the Murphy bed had yet to be installed, the rest of Rumi was indeed finished enough to open last week, only about ten days later than announced. Invitations for the opening festivities — Romero Britto-designed martini glasses, numbered and signed — were hand-delivered, a luxe touch no cosmo-lovin’ gal…
