We left for Vegas in the early morning light, a cooler stocked with drinks in the back. It’s barely a five-hour drive from LA, but once through the San Bernardino Mountains, most of it’s desert travel. In my ’84 Civic that, among other charms, did not feature air-conditioning, we hoped…
A social couple will often look for another couple that enjoys the same entertainments — dining out, an evening of music, a shared bottle of good wine. They play doubles’ tennis, take vacations together. House keys are exchanged with favors (can you water the plants, will you baby-sit the children?)…
7:47 p.m. Waiting for deliverance — or delivery. I often confuse the two, especially where Charlotte’s Chinese Kitchen is concerned, the sweetest cherry on the Washington Avenue tree. A meal from this restaurant can bridge the hungry gap between the work hour and midnight, when beach folk (praying the tourists…
Rivers have been invested with so much symbolism they’ve become a literary tradition. Samuel Clemens made us all believe a trip down the river was the great American adventure. Joseph Conrad convinced us it was an avenue into the amoral soul. For Norman Maclean a waterway served as the bond…
For centuries wine has been offered in invitation and friendship to visitors of the home. In many households, particularly European ones, wine is the refreshment of choice. Sometimes this wine is actually made by the owner of the home. Perhaps this is how one of my favorite traditions in dining…
Despite the arrival of November and its early nightfalls, the foliage of South Florida typically remains unmarked by the golds and rusts of organic rot. Migratory birds tread the Earth as if they changed their minds about flight. Breezes groove to a tropical beat. As told by the landscape, little…
When Brazil won independence from Portugal and waved for the first time the flag of its own nation in 1822, cities like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo experienced an astonishing wave of immigration. A German contingent was followed by a wave of Italians and Swiss. Even the Japanese were…
When budding chef Sharon Feldman pulled up her Boston roots to move to Miami, she had her doubts. Was she leaving mecca — a position at Cambridge’s prestigious Michelas — for a city barren of opportunity? After all, she recognized only a couple of restaurants’ reputations (Chef Allen’s, Mark’s Place),…
Like caviar and steak tartare, sushi appeared in the early Eighties as an elitist fad. The corporate business world shared it like stock tips; Valley girls served it as party favors. To young urban professionals sushi signified arrival at a certain lifestyle, where food, like life, was consumed at a…
Like others of his time and culture, eighth-century poet Li T’ai-po was convinced that “there is glory in the east-flowing river.” East signified opportunity, beginnings. It meant sunrise, a constant light, and a wind that smelled of home. East was the direction in which one sought visions. In twentieth-century America,…
Members of Italian famiglie are known for their loyalty to one another. And I’m not referring to the stereotypes portrayed in such sagas as The Godfather. The sort of dedication I have in mind is more the loving kind — the relationship of husband to wife, sister to brother, grandmother…
The latest developers’ concoction to come our way — upscale, all-in-one living, — is a lifestyle some Floridians have embraced passionately, almost automatically. The Waterways — homes, shops, and entertainment chained together in a mall-like sprawl — is a turn-on for those tempted by “instant community.” Many couples whose children…
Chinese restaurants are often neighborhood affairs. Key to their survival is food that is more convenient, cheaper, and at least slightly better than what their local patrons might prepare at home. If it doesn’t sell to the folks down the block, it doesn’t sell at all. If the menus do…
I don’t believe I’m sticking my neck too far into the guillotine by contending that children don’t often make good restaurant critics. Their priorities aren’t culinary, and their diet reflects that. The ritualized service and setting are too constricting. They are too easy to please in some ways, impossible in…
The name refers to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Project Administration, the bureaucratic engine set up in 1935 to undertake extensive construction and improvement of roads, bridges, dams, and buildings while providing work for the Great Depression’s vast numbers of unemployed. It was one of the New Deal’s loftiest enterprises and,…
Three years ago, when I sang the praises of the original Casa Larios on NW Second Street near the Mall of the Americas, I deemed its Cuban cuisine some of the most authentic in Dade County, especially taking into account our miserable, multicultural times, when one is never sure which…
If I were forced to pick my favorite literary turn on food criticism, I’d have to go with T. Coraghessan Boyle’s short story “Sorry Fugu” from his 1989 collection If the River Was Whiskey, a marvelous sliver of a book I was introduced to — along with the rest of…
Some notable and rather macabre exceptions notwithstanding, it is not the general purpose of this column to survey tragedies, catastrophes, or natural disasters. But a funny thing happened on the way to this forum… A cataclysm of Hurricane Andrew’s magnitude casts a long and looming shadow over the landscape, so…
With the recent closing down of Coral Gables’s El Cenador de la Villa — an upscale Spanish restaurant that, until its last dying breath, vied with the still-open (and even more expensive!) Ramiro’s, located a block down Ponce de Leon Boulevard, for the “Most Outrageous and Pretentious Hispanic Food in…
Notwithstanding some peculiar (and inaccurate) ad hominems directed at yours truly in the letters section this past week, I’m gratified that the subject of food appears to stir such deep passion and allegiance in the reading — and dining — public. For it can only serve to raise standards in…
One of the greatest ever stories of multicultural misconduct was related by Peter Ustinov some years ago on The Tonight Show. A delightful raconteur and sometime wit, the portly Ustinov captivated a spellbound Johnny Carson with the tale of a wealthy Texan family at a Polynesian restaurant. As an intro,…
Not to raise a nasty terminological conundrum, but the last time I pondered the matter, a frog was most often one of two things: a salientian, web-footed, aquatic amphibian whose mug was considered the opposite of a prince’s and whose legs were traditionally hacked, sauteed, and served in the taverns…
