Everybody loves Danny DeVito. As Louie De Palma on Taxi, he was hairier, scarier, but just as cute as Knut the polar bear. In most of his films, too, DeVito comes across as a likable rascal, a diminutive Everyman with a conniving dark side — which we laugh at because…
Since its extensive renovation in 1997, the Tides South Beach hotel has anchored the north end of Ocean Drive with a graceful and stately presence. A number of respectable chefs have ably steered the property’s signature restaurant, 1220 at the Tides, but they’ve come and gone like the ebb and…
You know what kind of guy Pilar is. Nice guy. Good-looking, quiet. Dresses well, not flashy. Solid, honest; no cheesy come-ons. Other guys might have more money, a fancier car, firmer pecs. But when it comes time to stand and deliver, well, let’s just say he stands up straight and…
You won’t find people smashing plates and dancing on tabletops at Maria’s. It’s not that kind of place. Rather this snug, 52-seat family-run eatery dishes home-cooked Greek taverna fare free of contemporary tweaking. And that’s it. Maria Sotiriou’s recipes are not likely to inspire Homeric verse, but they aren’t meant…
Waterfront: Miami’s got a lot of it. Twenty percent of the county’s total area is water. Waterfront restaurants? Hmm. If you mean places diners can get up close and personal with nature — where they can virtually feed fish from their table, and the sound of salt water lapping is…
My wife and I were graced with a special dinner guest when we dined at the grandiose new Christabelle’s Quarter in Coconut Grove: Bozhan Arizankovski, our 17-year-old summer visitor from Sköpje, Macedonia, whom we have known since he was a wee lad. He is an extremely smart young man; exhibits…
Miami has a great many things — sun, sand, spectacular ocean views, trolling celebutantes with more plastic parts than an Xbox. One thing Miami doesn’t have much of is great bread. Sure, some of the upscale so-called gourmet markets do a passable variation on the classic baguette, ciabatta, pan au…
When One Ninety closed in early 2005, Miami lost much more than a neighborhood restaurant. Located on the bottom floor of an old house in historic residential Buena Vista, just north of the Design District, the funky, friendly food/entertainment spot was hip in a way that was the antithesis of…
Critics mowed down Grass when it opened in the Design District in 2003, if only for the velvet ropes and snobbery encountered at the door. Despite such grumblings, or perhaps because of them, Grass grew quickly as a club destination with a reputation for passable pan-Asian fare. Alas, the scene…
At age twelve Adrianne Marie Calvo was pulling in $200 a week baking chocolate chip cookies and selling them at school. At sixteen she was voted one of the top ten up-and-coming chefs in Florida. At seventeen she captured the bronze in a national bake-off. Shortly thereafter, Calvo began training…
Are there any two cities more different than Key West and Coral Gables? The self-described “City Beautiful” is as anal-retentive as a bucketful of Imodium AD. There are regulations that tell you what color you can paint your house, what animals you can keep as pets. You have to get…
Natural disasters — tornadoes, tidal waves, whatever — are hardly unique to our little weather zone. Nor is thumbing one’s nose in the face of Madre Nature’s power-tripping. But hurricane parties are a form of gallows humor that distinguishes the Tropics from our left-coast and plains-states peers. The main reason:…
Take one part Stir Crazy, the choose-your-own-ingredients wok-fry chain located in Boca Raton (and elsewhere). Mix two parts Moon Thai & Japanese Restaurant in Coral Gables (and elsewhere). Stir together briskly and — voilà! — Stir Moon. (If you can properly visualize this, there is really no need to read…
“The One and Only! Nothing But the Best for Less.” What restaurant reviewer specializing in cheap eats could resist such a come-on? Especially when it’s plastered beneath the place’s name — Conch Town USA — even more of an enticement, because good conch is harder to find than a good…
Our waiter came to the table and began speaking in a foreign tongue. Granted, we were at La Dorada, a Spanish seafood establishment with a predominantly Hispanic clientele. But one would think that when management determines the language to be spoken by employees, a restaurant’s country of residence would take…
Ever walk down the street in some funky part of town and almost trip over a twenty-dollar bill, pick it up, and think, Hey, God likes me? Walk down Biscayne Boulevard around 72nd Street, definitely a still-funky part of town, where it looks like an army of giant gophers has…
It is the loudest dining room I have ever witnessed. Not only is every one of the hundreds of patrons talking at full pitch, and incessantly, but also the ricocheting acoustics in the large, lofty space make it seem as if they are screeching at the top of their lungs…
Finding Zuperpollo Biztro the first time didn’t take quite as long as it took the starship Voyager, marooned in the Delta Quadrant, to locate Earth again. But it was close. Or at least it seemed that way. Nestled inside an office building — all the way through the long lobby,…
Sasha Issenberg, in his new book The Sushi Economy, implies that to eat raw fish on rice is to become an assiduous participant in 21st-century global capitalism. By way of illustrating sushi’s cultural adaptability, the author cites the California roll of avocado and crab — invented in Los Angeles during…
Cheap restaurant in South Beach” is dangerously close to being an oxymoron. “Good cheap restaurant in South Beach” is so oxy you almost have to be a moron to believe that such a greed-defying miracle actually exists. Well, I don’t mean to sound stupid or anything, but there’s at least…
If you want to feel like a tourist in your own town, go to Balans. It’s on Lincoln Road, for god’s sake. When was the last time you hung out there, oozing along with the flow of bug-eyed Midwesterners in their neatly pressed shorts and Tommy Bahamas, elegantly dressed Latins,…
When it comes to culinary firsts, Miami seldom beats Manhattan. So when an article in New York magazine virtually swooned itself silly last December about the opening of Pardo’s (a twenty-year-old Peruvian rotisserie chicken chain) in NYC, it was hard to believe. There’s been a Pardo’s Chicken in Miami for…
