In the mid-1800s, a huge wave of Chinese immigrants, approximately 100,000, most from Guangdong province around Canton, came to Peru to work. They worked in virtual slave-labor jobs — mineral mining, migrant farm work, railroad construction, and shit shoveling (literally: bat guano was a major Peruvian industry 150 years ago)…
The first impression was the worst. I’m not talking about the creamy white interior of the refurbished Nash Hotel. That was the second impression. The third would be the restaurant itself, Mark’s South Beach, and how the walk downstairs to a sleek, contemporary dining room, with outdoor seating by a…
The Pelican Hotel on Ocean Drive has 25 uniquely themed rooms, from the safari-designed “Me Tarzan, You Vain,” to the sparser “Jesus Christ Megastar,” which, if nothing else, is the only hotel room to ever advertise with the slogan “A man’s life consist not in the abundance of the things…
As a food writer, my best moment this millennium came during an interview with chef Andrea Curto last month, when I asked for the usual sound-bite definition of her dishes at SoBe’s Wish. “Fusion,” she declared immediately, “because that way I can cook whatever the heck I want to.” Honesty…
“Never give a sucker an even break” is, I believe, the philosophical impetus propelling the recent rash of “consulting chefs” that has been spreading rapidly in these parts. This public-relations ploy is akin to culinary karaoke, wherein one chef or another follows the bouncing boil and cooks along to a…
In SoBe it’s easy to get spoiled when it comes to sushi. Great grub of most other Asian nations isn’t easy to find in Miami, but visiting know-it-alls from New York, or even Asian food mecca San Francisco, are unusually impressed by my Japanese-food tour de force — a strolling…
There were two undying rumors about Big Fish back when I moved to Miami six years ago. One was that this renovated shack-complex-turned-restaurant on the Miami River had once dispensed the best cheapo fish sandwich in town. Wait: “Best”? Legendary! Mythic! To hear it told, neither Jesus himself nor even…
The small, cluttered, always crowded L’Entrecote de Paris debuted on Washington Avenue, just south of Fifth Street, in 1993. The restaurant seemed old from the start, in a good way, as though it had been there forever. That was part of its appeal. Much of the clientele was made up…
I have never dipped my feet into the cool blue waters of Portugal, but I did once put them in my mouth by suggesting to a Portuguese fellow that his national fare was pretty much the same as Spain’s. His brief but emotional lecture enlightened me as to a few…
Tonino Doino grew up in Italy, quite poor, yet as the story goes, he would become the first person to resign from the waitstaff of Bice in New York City. The reason that no waiter before him had ever considered quitting is probably because each was earning roughly $100,000 per…
In terms of cultural crossovers, few cities have got anything over Miami. There is, of course, the music, which often mixes Latin, Afro-Caribbean, and rock roots. And the city’s two primary tongues, which for better or worse have produced hybrids such as lunchear (to meet for lunch) and faxear (to…
The “mall experience,” for me, is pretty much defined by the quality of my trudge from parking lot to movie theater and back out again. Even from this admittedly limited perspective, though, I’ve been able to glean the obvious: To succeed as a mall restaurateur, you must either be part…
Tuscan steak. The very words bring back memories of a weekly carnivorous ritual during my couple of deliciously decadent decades in Italy. Living in Rome had its pluses and minuses, to be sure, but dining almost daily around the city, with its more than 3000 restaurants, became a passionate pastime…
About a year and a half ago, Andrea Meza decided to turn her Meza Fine Art Gallery in Coral Gables into a gallery café that would feature fine art, fine music, and fine “global” food. A fine idea. The handsome gallery/dining room of Meza Fine Art gallerycafé, which seats about…
In Coconut Grove, where commerce and nature have wrestled over square footage for decades, The Last Carrot juice bar remains a tribute to hipper, or hippier, days. Those would be the Seventies, when “the Grove” implied folksingers, incense, McGovern bumper stickers, and pottery classes. When the Last Carrot opened in…
While we were dining at Fiedele’s Seafood Restaurant, a Haitian-Caribbean seafood restaurant on Biscayne Boulevard and 72nd Street, hundreds outside the INS building seven blocks north were protesting the U.S. government’s treatment of Haitian immigrants vis-à-vis people coming from that other island nation. I’d love to weigh in on the…
Last Night at the S&S Diner, the 1987 Mel Kiser/Corky Irick flick about pretrendy Miami, brought national fame to this classic counterspace-only eatery, along with an unending rush of trendy directors seeking instant authenticity. Most recently scenes for The Versace Murder were shot there. But the S&S Diner had been…
Those who believe in unlucky restaurant locations would probably consider the National Hotel one such site. They could trace the origins of the curse to the Oval Room, which opened three years ago in the ravishingly renovated hotel. I still remember their “butternut squash risotto-style,” which I misread as being…
It’s high season, time once again for the ravenous hordes from the North to descend. Time again to schlep the ravenous hordes out to the Everglades, for the obligatory gator-gaping expedition. And time again — assuming they don’t get eaten trying to stump-jump their rental bikes over Shark Valley’s snoozing…
Of all the significant trends in the food world over the last decade of the last century, the most exciting for travelers was the revolution in hotel cuisine. And encouragingly, it wasn’t just in sophisticated cities that hotel restaurants transformed from lowest-common-denominator food factories for tasteless (presumably) tourists into kitchens…
Fast food is, in essence, a less expensive mockery of real food. In the case of the Texas Taco Factory, the fare is twice removed from reality. It caricatures Tex-Mex, which is itself a bastardization of Mexican. In a way this extra degree of separation works to its advantage: The…
