As we entered Chef Curtis’s Village Café in downtown Miami Shores, inattentiveness manifested itself immediately in terminal yellow roses on the tabletops, barely clinging to life in chintzy vases. A coffee-shop counter runs in an L-shape across one long and one short wall in this rather charmless dining room, stainless-steel…
It’s traditional to eat certain foods at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve to ensure good luck in the coming year. This lucky food varies from country to country. Cubans eat twelve grapes. In Germany, Poland, and Scandinavia the first bite is supposed to be herring. For those…
Caramelo Restaurant has beautiful plateware: elongated rectangles of red and clear glass, white teardrops and triangles, bowls that look like miniature Morris Lapidus sculptures. Weighty silverware sparkles atop meticulously crisp white linens, as does impeccably clean glassware. The two main dining rooms in the 200-seat Gables establishment are gorgeous too,…
Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring — except the delivery guy from the Chinese restaurant. Each country has its own age-old Xmas Eve culinary customs. In Italy it’s a multicourse seafood feast for the extended family. In France, a reveillon supper…
Texas and Brazil are both sizable, sun-drenched territories inhabited by cattle, cowboys, and proud, beef-eating people with hearty appetites. Makes sense, then, that the Texas de Brazil Churrascaria chain would post its first restaurant in the Lone Star state. That was in 1998; there are now seven such Brazilian steak…
On the glam sports scale, bowling has always ranked right up there with croquet and badminton. That’s not to badmouth bowling. In fact, it’s probably bowling’s nonglamorousness that makes it nonintimidating as a participatory sport, even for a desk potato like me, whose lifetime average score, out of a possible…
“Axis of evil” status notwithstanding, North Korea, and South too, are actually very good when it comes to provoking a proliferation of potent flavors from their cuisine. This has been the case since the Sixteenth Century, when the Portuguese introduced the chili pepper and Koreans responded with a resounding “Woo!”…
For ethnic food enthusiasts, there’s no greater thrill than finding a very small, very hidden eatery — and no greater compliment than to call it a “hole in the wall.” Sushi Deli takes the compliment almost too far. Located on the bottom floor of a nondescript office building, this is…
Truly tasty kosher food is not easy to find in Miami, especially not at reasonable prices — that is, prices not inflated by all the necessary religious rituals and restrictions. So five-month-old Kemia is a rare treat, a place that serves kosher in the North African/Mediterranean style, and serves it…
Chocolate Fine Argentinian Cuisine is a cheery and colorful spot, its mellow yellow walls and alcoves covered with vivid paintings, the tables topped with crisp white linens, the wait staff dressed in bright orange T-shirts. A dark wooden wine rack toward the far end of the room is amply stocked…
Lila’s Bistro, though only a weekday lunch place, is a find. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to find. It’s not. Not even if some food-savvy friend has been kind enough to provide you with a copy of the menu, which includes these directions: “Inside pink courtyard across from Bank…
He said: I hate little frou-frou plates of stuff, with a drizzle of this and a spit of that all around it. I like a big hunk of meat. With a bone! She said: B-o-r-i-n-g. Honestly I do not believe women are from Venus and men are from Mars. Yet…
Every once in a while diners will come across a restaurant that makes them feel happy the minute they walk in the door. Crabby’s is such a place. A lot of the cheerfulness derives from the homey look: warm knotty-pine paneling reminiscent of a rec room from a more innocent,…
I had figured my wife would be thrilled at the prospect of dining at Benny’s Seafood Restaurant. After all, a reliable source recommended it to me as a “real Puerto Rican joint,” and my wife is a real Puerto Rican gal. As it turned out, her reaction to the idea…
You can buy a Felix Perdomo painting for $5800. Or at Orange Café, a self-described art café that opened earlier this year in the Design District, you can get a Picasso for $6.45. And the latter comes with crinkle potato chips. Unlike the Perdomo, a large, olive-green canvas depicting a…
The history of hotel dining in twentieth-century America was dominated by a period we’ll call the Reign of Duck l’Orange. During this time, which covered many decades, you couldn’t walk into a well-regarded hotel restaurant without encountering this glazed bird, along with steak tartare, trout amandine, and other Continental classics…
A chivito is an Uruguayan sandwich that could give a Philadelphia cheese steak a run for its money — that is, if you’re talking about potential to become a fast-food classic. And if you’re talking about size, a chivito could leave a Philly in the dust, along with the rest…
While it’s true that Chinese food isn’t as favored in this country as it was before the Asian invasion of Thai and Japanese eateries, it remains a staggeringly popular dinner choice. According to a recent article in the New York Times, there are nearly 36,000 Chinese restaurants in America, which…
According to the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield, there was only one piece of advice his mother gave him as a kid: “Never eat a frankfurter from the man on the corner with the orange umbrella. Those hot dogs are made of snakes.” Many of us who grew up in the…
It’s similar to the regular chicken,” a server at Casa Toscana explained, describing a nightly special of sage-stuffed roast chicken breast with porcini cream sauce and gorgonzola. “But with more attitude.” Attitude, at least in a restaurant, is not usually a good thing. And did an already rich sauce flavored…
Some years ago, while living in Boulder, Colorado, I took my parents out for dinner in a former mining town called Gold Hill. After a harrowing car ride up a steep, twisting, barely illuminated mountain road, we arrived at the tiny community. There was no restaurant in sight, but an…
Coffee usually does the trick. But some days it takes a shot of Formosan Gunpowder to get a person going. Since last November it’s been possible to supply oneself even more easily than buying an AK-47 by visiting Lea’s — which is a tea shop, not a gun shop. The…
