Legendary chef Auguste Escoffier and César Ritz, “the king of hoteliers and hotelier to kings,” first teamed up in 1890 at the London Savoy. Eight years later César was managing his new namesake hotel, Hôtel Ritz, in Paris, as well as the esteemed Carlton Hotel in London, with Auguste lending…
Until early this year, Café One Ninety was a blissful little bohemian eatery on the northern fringe of the Design District. Owners Alan and Donna Lee Hughes offered appealing food at affordable prices in an amiable ambiance. Add to the mix an expired lease and a greedy landlord, and it’s…
I don’t mean to put any pressure on it or anything, but the future of Miami as a serious restaurant town rests on Bistro Bisou. Okay, so maybe that is a little pressure. And maybe a bit overstated too. But the point is still a good one. See, just about…
When Manuel Martinez, a Cervantes scholar, opened the Spanish restaurant Don Quixote in Coconut Grove five years ago, he expended considerable money and effort on transforming the dining room into a semblance of the town of La Mancha. If the food had been re-created with the same passion, I probably…
This is the motto at Giardino Gourmet Salads: “Real, simple food.” That, however, makes the place sound a lot simpler than it is. With the exception of a soup of the day, a stuffed baked potato, several desserts (including some fabulous seasonal fruit mousses), and some nonalcoholic beverages, salads are…
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that you’re not familiar with Preston’s, even if it has been situated in the high-profile Loews Miami Beach Hotel since 1998. It’s the fate one might expect to befall a property’s number two dining option, especially when the signature restaurant is named Emeril’s. Preston’s…
Now I know what my car feels like when I take it in for an oil change. It’s been days since my dinner at Jumbo Chinese Restaurant, a depressing little dim sum joint in North Miami Beach, and I can still taste the grease from just about everything I ate…
Bice has branches in Barcelona and Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Montreal, Dubai and Delray Beach — about two dozen restaurants in some twenty cities, with another fifteen slated to open for business by 2006. Beatrice Ruggeri (nickname: Bice) began it all by opening her eponymous trattoria in Milan in…
It’s more than just a little bit unusual for a restaurant’s grand opening to be announced by a banner that trumpets not only the date it commences business — in the case of Le Marais Express, this year’s Jewish holiday Passover, several months ago — but also when it intends…
Having eaten at my share of bookstore cafés over the years, I must admit that while the melding of good books and good food is sometimes a great notion, the result usually is more bone in the throat than budding prospects. As restaurateurs, most booksellers are great … booksellers, typically…
Restaurants representing Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, Colombia, Uruguay, and just about every other Spanish-speaking nation can be found within the corridor of strip malls along Bird Road in West Miami-Dade. Few have been around as long as the Spanish Solmar Restaurant, operated by the Olivira family since 1981. It doesn’t appear…
If I had to choose one nation as my favorite food source, it would be China. Over the years and around the world, I’ve found a reliable indicator of great Chinese restaurants is the presence of fish tanks. Not the decorative kind but the sort in which sea creatures are…
Having once been stung by a man-of-war, I was less than excited to be seated with my back to a tall, narrow tank filled with gracefully flowing jellyfish, glowing translucently in blue neon light. The waiter’s chatter about chef James Wierzelewski’s concept of global cuisine and how the kitchen crew…
Ogbe and Felitia Guobadia, he from Nigeria, she from Virginia, met at Rutgers University and married in Nigeria’s former capital Lagos, where they opened an American fried chicken joint. Political turmoil prodded the two back to New Jersey, where they operated a successful African art gallery/Ethiopian restaurant. They next landed…
“Give me liberty or give me Parrilla Liberty.” I think a famous freedom fighter said that. If he didn’t, he should have, because a meal at Parrilla Liberty — an ink spot of an Argentine steak house just blocks from Lincoln Road — will definitely set you free: free from…
I have long maintained that if the axiom “you are what you eat” were true, the language among Argentines would be reduced to only one word: moo. The Knife and Matador, a pair of all-you-can-stuff-your-gut-with Argentine steak houses that have recently set up ranch in these parts, reinforce the notion…
A house alone is not a home, according to the saying. For that transformation to happen, a building needs life. And for the same reason, neither is Miami’s “square mile of style” (a nickname from the Seventies) a neighborhood. Revival efforts over the last decade have made the Design District…
Jaguar Ceviche Spoon Bar & Latam Grill is a mouthful of a moniker to pronounce, yet if the aim was for a definitive nomenclature, it should be called Jaguar Ceviche Spoon Bar, Latam Grill & Mexican Restaurant. Now all you need to know is that Latam stands for Latin American…
Wouldn’t it be nice if every restaurant were named as truthfully as Le Bon (an Italian dialect for “it’s good”)? Then we’d be seeing restaurant names like these: “It’s Okay: We suck only a little bit.” “It’s Mediocre: We suck a lot but the tourists don’t know the difference.” “It’s…
Our life is frittered away by detail … simplify, simplify,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden. But that was more than 150 years ago, a time when life’s big basics could be altered by an individual, rather than being bureaucratically locked on a course way beyond our control. These days,…
Sugo is a new Italian restaurant situated inside Sanctuary, a recently opened spa/salon/boutique hotel on James Avenue in South Beach. With Casa Tua, Blue Door, and Nobu nearby, this neighborhood is becoming something of an epicenter of epicurean cool. Sugo owner Tommy Billante might seem like the new kid on…
Editor’s note: Periodically we will publish capsule reviews like those below in addition to our weekly full reviews. Contributors to this installment include Lee Klein, Pamela Robin Brandt, Greg Baker, Becky Randel, and Karen Figueiredo. More than 430 capsule reviews of local restaurants can be found by clicking on Dining…
