It’s easy to criticize the service in South Beach restaurants. Too many waitstaffs are rude and clueless, too many managers uncaring, and too many restaurateurs oblivious to the way an eatery should be run. In short too few people seem dedicated to serving fine food and creating a fine-dining experience…
If I were to open a restaurant, I’d invite everyone I know to come and eat for free the first few weeks — their parents and their friends, too — just to ensure a full house. Maybe such a scheme would help stanch the relentless parade of restaurants that come…
Season has returned to South Beach. I know this not because Lincoln Road is so jammed with tourists that shopkeepers routinely ask, “Where are you from?” (God forbid you should have a semblance of a sunburn: Automatically you’re assumed to have fled the Midwest.) I know it not because jogging…
Traditionally spas have served as tranquil retreats where the well-to-do go to shed a few pounds while being pampered with facials and massages. The pampering part was, and is, pleasant, but the dieting used to be somewhat torturous, given that spas had a reputation for offering what was pejoratively termed…
Even if a character in the 1989 movie When Harry Met Sally hadn’t declared something about restaurants being akin to theaters, the analogy would have found its way into the dining public’s consciousness sooner or later. That’s largely because, as with most cliches, it’s rooted in truth. Judith Stocks, a…
Try convincing half a dozen confirmed South Beachers to venture to the mainland for dinner. Several of these friends don’t go anywhere they can’t get to on Rollerblades, and seldom find themselves heading over the causeway unless they’re heading to the airport or, perhaps, Home Depot. Still, somehow I managed…
Note: No animals were harmed in the writing of this article. But a helluva lot of plants went down screaming. You see, Wish, the new, high-end eatery located in the Tony Goldman-owned property known simply as the Hotel (the refurbished Tiffany Hotel) on Collins Avenue in South Beach, doesn’t serve…
Humor writer Dave Barry admits he loves sushi. But he can’t help making fun of it. In a recent Tropic magazine column he defined sushi as “a type of cuisine developed by the Japanese as part of an ancient tradition of seeing what is the scariest thing they can get…
As usual, when I’m writing about food I get hungry. So while I was working on this review, before making my second visit to NOA, a new noodle shop on South Beach, I was overcome with a desire for something Asian, something light and spicy. This craving was exacerbated by…
Diners are a hybrid of two distinct American eating concepts, one born in luxury, the other in relative poverty. The former notion was realized in the late 1860s when the Union Pacific Railroad premiered the Delmonico, the first dining car to feature fine linens, Turkish carpets, plush velvet chairs, and…
Up ahead we saw the revolving spotlights — the kind that cast wasted energy into the night sky in honor of a nightclub opening or a movie premiere — almost immediately after we turned left on Ponce de Leon Boulevard from Miracle Mile in Coral Gables. “Ohmygod,” my husband groaned…
The strangest item I ate in the Peruvian Amazon river basin, where I once spent a week, was not the piranha we’d caught in a tributary off the main river and then deep fried. It was not the capybara, a tailless rodent that can grow to four feet in length,…
The Purple Dolphin. The phrase brings to mind (1) a psychedelic Sixties rock band that once opened for Moby Grape, or (2) a seedy seaside disco lounge, or (3) Dan Marino after a bevy of hard sacks. In fact, the words are reminiscent of almost anything but a restaurant that…
The costliest real estate is that which sits vacant, unleased, or unsold, generating no income for its owner. No one knows that fact of life better than the city of Miami, landlords of Firehouse Four restaurant. Government officials took four long years to approve new tenants for the empty eatery…
Heard this before? “It’s the next South Beach!” How about “It’s another SoBe!” At one time or another people have made such declarations to me about downtown Hollywood, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach. Even Savannah. Depending on the person making the claim, it was meant as a boast or…
My recent panning of some of Miami’s Hispanic eating establishments seems to have gotten folks wondering if I’m a bigot. After my negative reviews of the new (and dreadful) Malaga and the historic (and dreadful) Botin, the mail poured in. In a letter to me, Donald Berger of Hollywood was…
Back in the non-foodie Fifties, when I was a pre-adolescent child in a lower-middle-class, aspiring-to-the-stars family, I ate a great deal of chow at resort hotels — food that signified my clan’s efforts at upward mobility. And I adored the stuff. Not for its taste, mind you, because frankly it…
No doubt the name causes many people to do a double take: Sango Jamaican and Chinese Restaurant. Jamaican and Chinese? Does the place serve General Tso’s jerk chicken? Natty Dread egg rolls? What gives? A little history goes a long way toward understanding how national cuisines evolve, and in this…
A few years ago New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl postulated that because Italian restaurants are so common, new ones need an angle in order to attract customers. At the time she was reviewing yet another mediocre Manhattan caffe, this one attempting to distinguish itself from the other strands…
Just recently I was sipping a martini at the Deco Bar in the National Hotel during happy hour when a woman approached me, crossing over from the other side of the room to do so. “Is that your baby?” she asked. “Yes,” I answered with a smile, full of justifiable…
I grew up in the kitchen. It started with miniature cakes in an Easy-Bake Oven, which cooked by the heat of a standard light bulb. Inspired by a talented mother, I soon moved on to the real stuff. Most days after school I tied an apron over my plaid jumper,…
Something terrible has happened to Victor’s Cafe. I feel sick to be so blunt about it, but not any more nauseated than I was during a recent dinner at the restaurant. Since it opened on SW 32nd Avenue eight years ago, I had always considered Victor’s, the Miami outpost of…
