A friend recently filled me in about the oily origins of bruschetta. It seems that official olive oil tasters roaming the Umbria region of central Italy years ago were getting a little nauseated dipping directly into huge vats of the pungent stuff, so they resorted to drizzling it onto pieces…
Tung Nguyen came to the United States in 1975, one of seventeen Vietnamese refugees sponsored by Kathy Manning through the St. James Lutheran Church in Coral Gables. Five years later the two women opened Hy Vong (which means “hope”) on Eighth Street. The place became renowned for solid home-style Vietnamese…
South Florida-based cookbook author Steven Raichlen’s office looks pretty much like you’d expect. Located in a rectangular cottage behind the Coconut Grove house he shares with his publicist wife Barbara Seldin Raichlen, the office features an entire wall given over to Raichlen’s cookbook collection. Galleys for his new book, The…
Balinese Fish Mousse Sates Sate lilit rank among the most exquisite of Indonesia’s sates. Their birthplace is Bali, where they are used in and served at religious festivals. To make them, delicate mousse is flavored with explosively aromatic spices, then enriched with coconut milk and grilled on fragrant lemongrass stalks…
France today possesses what is probably the most intelligent collective palate. [Whatever] France eats she does it with a pleasure, an open-eyed delight quite foreign to most people…. There is a gusto, a frank sensuous realization of food, that is pitifully unsuspected in, say, the … corner cafe of an…
Walk into the food court of your average mall and you can order fast Chinese, fast Mexican, fast Italian, fast Middle Eastern. There are certain cuisines, however, that have stubbornly refused to become fast. Indian cooking, with its intricate tapestry of spices and arcane cooking methods, has epitomized “unfast” food…
In South Florida chefs sometimes mimic the occupational track of major league baseball managers. Get fired from or quit one team/restaurant, hire on at another, then another, and occasionally even wind up back where you started. In 1996 chef-proprietor Robert Guerin sold his Coral Gables restaurant Louisiana — which he’d…
As sons and daughters of exiles, some members of the first generation of Cuban Americans to be raised in Miami no doubt feel somewhat cheated — especially those sensitive artist types. Some can’t read, write, or speak Spanish as well as their parents do. Others have lost ties with relatives…
South Beach neighborhoods are not born. They’re made. Witness the latest area to catch developers’ fancy: The triangle of land wedged west of Alton Road, north of the Venetian Causeway, and east of Biscayne Bay is quite literally on the rise. One condominium building and some townhouses have already been…
“Miami is a big city but a small town,” observes Jake Klein, the 26-year-old chef-proprietor of the new South Miami restaurant JADA. He is referring to the six-degrees-of-separation phenomenon that seems to dog him. Only in Klein’s case (he’s the “JA” of JADA) it’s more like two degrees of separation:…
Here’s a deeply flawed syllogism. Major premise: Miami is known for its Spanish-speaking population. Minor premise: I live in Miami. Erroneous conclusion: I speak Spanish. Here’s the unvarnished truth: Miami has many Spanish-speaking residents. I live in Miami. I am not one of those Spanish-speaking residents. And at the risk…
Talk about your cross-cultural referencing. For a textbook example of good ol’ American capitalism in action, look no further than the local Italian restaurant scene. Approximately a dozen new caffes and trattorias open here each year, more than half of which somehow survive. The competition is keen, which in general…
I’ve learned not to take too seriously anything that comes my way via the Internet. Petitions, virus hoaxes, chain letters — not only are they not worth reading, but I would never, as suggested, mail the garbage to everyone I know. But then there’s the “Neiman-Marcus cookie” story, about a…
Alejandro Garcia, co-owner of the six-week-old Mexican restaurant Divina, understands that a menu should be more than a utilitarian way to convey information. He realizes that a menu’s look, its presentation, its feel contribute significantly to a patron’s first impression. As a result, each item on Garcia’s oversize, raffia-tied menu…
Thank El Nino for providing us with an all-purpose scapegoat. The unusually potent storms associated with the weather phenomenon have wreaked havoc all over the country, handing us a ready excuse for just about everything. Late to work again? It’s El Nino’s fault for knocking out the electricity and rendering…
“There’s no such thing as Dutch food,” an acquaintance informed me when I mentioned I was on my way to Kendall’s Goodies from Holland Cafe, a Dutch market and restaurant. “Holland’s got beer and cheese — that’s it. All I do when I go there on business is lie on…
Newly licensed drivers are accidents waiting to happen. At least that’s how insurance companies think of them. In theory, the fewer miles a driver has logged, the more likely he or she is to err on the road and damage persons or property. So companies are probably justified in charging…
A funny thing happened on my way to becoming a restaurant critic — friends stopped inviting me over for dinner. It didn’t happen gradually or politely. One day I was a welcome guest who always brought a bottle of wine; the next I was persona non grata. A case of…
My office mail has been especially interesting lately. In a letter that he penned completely in French, a chef by the name of Charles Salliou recommended a Sunny Isles restaurant called Cafe Vicko. Salliou had no way of knowing, though he might have surmised from having read my columns, that…
Sedate. Restrained. Understated. Hardly terms one usually uses when describing a South Beach restaurant. And certainly not adjectives you’d normally associate with chef Geoffrey Murray, who for the past six months has been quietly impressing diners at the Tiger Oak Room in the Raleigh Hotel on Collins Avenue. When chef-proprietor…
My wife turns to me and notes that we are walking on grass, noteworthy, I suppose, because we’re inside a restaurant. “If the menu has a Hee Haw theme, we’re outta here,” I tell her. But as the words leave my mouth I start taking in the room and see…
In an effort to create the quintessential bistro, the owners of La Fontaine, the newest addition to Coconut Grove’s Streets of Mayfair theme-restaurant conspiracy, have attempted to cram virtually every element from every known bistro into one place. Proprietors Craig Liman (a Johnson & Wales grad and former China Grill…
