Restaurant service sucks in South Florida (see Opium review). It’s a given, almost part of the Miami mystique: Our restaurants are so hospitality-poor we’re darn near proud of it. At least some of us are — those who hate the tourists. Don’t like the way we treat you? Good. Don’t…
Looks as though the Denny’s at 19313 S. Dixie Hwy. in Miami lost something in lawyers’ fees but gained remuneration by way of reputation: A civil lawsuit filed last October by Ronald Flagler and Janet Jones alleging race discrimination has been dismissed by the U.S. District Court. The pair claimed…
The crowd that gathers at Opium is attractive and mostly dressed in black. Many talk on cell phones. Handsome bartenders and waiters also are clothed in black, while comely barmaids pretty much wear the same outfit that Gwen Verdon or Shirley MacLaine (take your pick) wore in My Sweet Charity…
Pulcinella’s Marketplace & Café is a large, bright, white gourmet marketplace, a “purveyor of fine foods,” as they put it. It also is a café, which, if you come in from the front as opposed to the side entrance, is what you’ll encounter first. The décor is casual: green marble…
Two women were seen at La Paloma last Saturday night. Both were so drunk they couldn’t utter a coherent sentence. Both clearly were in no condition to get behind a wheel, and both were headed for a doozy of a hangover the next morning. These two women, however, weren’t companions…
For the average food-oriented consumer, the Internet and Web-related technology have been a blessing for several years now. You can log on to read restaurant reviews, research recipes, order food, and even make reservations on countless sites: Food.com, Epicurious.com, Pheast.com, OpenTable.com, iSeatz.com, iDine.com, ireserve.com, Yougottaeat.com, ad nauseam. There’s so much…
He wasn’t a local but the South Florida food world will miss him all the same: William Garry, the editor in chief of Bon Appetít, died June 29 at age 56. The passage hasn’t yet been reported in the magazine; in fact the August issue features one of Garry’s tongue-in-cheek…
Alice Waters is the person most often credited with pioneering, in this nation, the notion of fine cuisine as fresh, high-quality, locally procured foods prepared as simply as possible. That’s just what she served at her Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, which opened April Fool’s Day 1980 and coincided with…
So how long does it really take a chef to open his own restaurant? According to fortysomething Pascal Oudin, who says he came to the United States from France when he was 24 years old to do just that, it takes two decades. And how much does it cost? “My…
You’ve just finished dining in a new restaurant, and your companion asks if you liked it. The food was good, but somehow you can’t respond that you really liked “it.” Perhaps that element you can’t stab your finger at was that the food arrived on blue plates. Or the restaurant…
He’s got the best rock-star name of any local chef: Johnny V. And the coolest dub: “Caribbean Cowboy.” Never mind that Mr. Vinczencz is from St. Louis, Missouri, the important thing is that he’s come back in the kitchen of Astor Place, where before leaving in early 1999 he had…
Years ago, before moving here, I found myself on Douglas Road in the Gables, half an hour early for some business meeting I had flown down to attend. With time to kill, and my knees practically buckling from the relentless intensity of the summer sun, I stumbled into an unassuming…
Two months ago my husband and I were madly in love. Eight weeks later we’ve lost the romance. The brief affair was with mangoes. Our new house used to be part of a mango plantation, and we have a veritable grove of the fruit trees. Eleven, to be exact. Not…
Generation Chef speaks up: Kris Wessel, chef-proprietor of Liaison in South Beach, objects to my use of the word “fusion” to describe his restaurant. “Liaison’s menu and my style of cooking stem from the strong French influence in New Orleans and a Southern freshness found both in Louisiana and Florida…
What do locals call a restaurant that has a floor composed of live grass, screens the movie Kama Sutra almost constantly, and labels its cuisine “aphrodisiac?” An eatery where prices for main courses hover around the $40 mark? Where patrons dance in the aisles and get jiggy with it atop…
Bissaleh Café is a kosher Israeli dairy restaurant/pizza place/ juice bar/coffee bar. Not, you might say, your typical, everyday dining establishment. The décor can best be described as a Yiddish Vacas Gordas, with more space between the tables. Like that Argentine parillada, it’s a small, informal room with 30 to…
This review will only be of interest to those who plan on heading out to catch a Marlins baseball game. All 60 of you. Of course the Fish, as the team is endearingly called, cannot hope to contend this year because their player payroll is only slightly higher than what…
South Beachites, don’t panic. Despite Chrysanthemum’s darkened quarters and restaurant-for-sale sign on the front door, the Beach’s finest flower has not dropped its petals. Rather the gourmet Chinese eatery has moved to Coconut Grove. Despite a very successful run on Washington Avenue, the owners chose not to renew their lease…
Here are the rumors: Bicoastal celebrity chef Nobu Matsuhisa may be bringing his pan-Asian talents to Miami — there’s talk of the Shore Club location. Top toque Jean-Georges Vongerichten could be doing the same. And the Big Apple’s Keith McNally, whose Balthazar, which publishes one phone number but keeps a…
I was watching The Newlywed Game. So sue me for bad taste. But to be honest, I wasn’t really paying attention until the bonus round, when after four questions that centered on sexual innuendo, host Bob Eubanks asked the wives: “Of the three traffic-light colors of bell peppers, which one…
The Palm Plaza Shopping Center is just another nondescript strip mall, one of hundreds, maybe thousands, marring Miami’s landscape. My feeling has always been that if you’re going to uglify a neighborhood, the least you can do is offer good food, and Palm Plaza does just that. It’s got Chinese,…
I was reading Italian Fever, author Valerie Martin’s delicious little ghost story of a novel set in Tuscany, and I was getting hungry. Perhaps this isn’t surprising, given that I’m starving all the time these days. But I was stirred by Martin’s exaltations over the fare her protagonist Lucy was…
