Just because something is fast food doesn’t mean it has to be bad food. What’s invariably bad is food that has no individuality, no regional identity, no pride behind it — in other words, when it’s safe, standardized food that aims for the bottom line. In fact even chain-restaurant food…
Dining establishments tend to be busiest at night, more relaxed and inexpensive during lunch. La Loggia Ristorante & Lounge is the opposite, which can be attributed to its location across from the county courthouse in downtown Miami. If you enter the restaurant around noon, a buzz will tickle your ears…
Few things are scarier, early in the morning, than glancing blearily over one’s coffee cup and seeing a plate of big sunny-side-up fried eggs staring back at you, all bright-eyed and chipper. Somewhere between 11:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m., though, such breakfast food somehow seems like a fabulously comforting idea…
A truly authentic ethnic restaurant can be like an acid flashback — a good one, that is: A diluted but still evocative sensory return to a foreign country you once visited. When the visuals and sounds, as well as the smells and tastes, are vivid enough, it’s almost a mini…
While “appetizer” is generally used as a synonym for “hors d’oeuvres,” it really isn’t synonymous. The French term means “outside of the work;” originally it was an architectural term for outbuildings. So at a meal, it’s any other bit of food except the main dish, whether the hors d’oeuvre stimulates…
Arranged on a white plate, the slender four-ounce medallion of American Kobe beef tenderloin and the dwarfish five-ounce standing rectangle of American Kobe meat loaf, with an insubstantial squirt of white potato purée in between, looked to me like a domed sports stadium and an office building side by side,…
There is no plant on earth that promises a broader plethora of purportedly restorative properties than sage, which comes from the Latin “salvia,” meaning “to cure.” As far back as Greek and Roman times this pebbled, silvery green leaf has been used to treat snake bites, sweating, anxiety, infections, epilepsy,…
Just as herbs and spices season food, so does history. Thus “Caribbean cuisine” is a misnomer, more convenient as a sound bite than useful as truth. What the islands’ cuisines historically had in common was influence from their African slave populations, which was strong. It was also beneficial, especially in…
When Julia Child died last month, two days from her 92nd birthday, obituaries naturally focused on the great food writer’s professional contributions. Her two volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and long-running TV show The French Chef had, after all, revolutionized American cuisine. Millions who learned to cook…
Our initial twenty minutes at La Gastronomia foreshadowed nothing more than a middling dining experience at a moderately priced Italian restaurant. The 50-seat room was comfy enough — bright yellow walls adorned with scenic, blue-hued photos of Italy that conspire with tiled floors, painted vases, hanging plants, wooden tables, and…
No one has a problem when it comes to finding appealing ethnic joints in this town, where authentic foods are cooked with gusto and spirited to your table for only a song. Tourists or locals seeking that special night out are also in luck — we’ve got plenty of fine-dining…
If life were fair and rational, every corner in Miami where a Dunkin’ Donuts now stands would instead house a churro shop. In a burg whose population is more than 50 percent Hispanic, there’s no excuse for eating fried sawdust. It was the Spaniards, after all, who invented the heavenly…
According to an old dining axiom, a restaurant’s bread basket is an indicator of the rest of the meal’s quality. At Duo the bread reached even beyond the heights of the restaurant’s ceiling, which is very high indeed. The ambiance is informal at this seven-month-old eatery, as is the place’s…
For those who have had it at its best, pho is more than mere food. It is a drug, and a very addictive one. No, no — don’t get all excited. The ingredients do not include any of the excellent if illegal substances carried into the USA with returning soldiers…
Atrio restaurant sits off the 25th-floor Sky Lobby of the new Conrad Miami hotel, located in the Espirito Santo Plaza high-rise, that indented glass monolith on Brickell Avenue. Conrad is Hilton’s upscale line of hotels; the pedigreed corporate surname is conspicuously absent from the premises. Atrio’s décor reflects the sleeker,…
For twenty years the Sun Inn has been operating in Edgewater, north of downtown. And for the eleven years I’ve lived in Miami, I’ve been wondering about it — but only wondering. There was something scary about the place. Maybe it was the location on an evidently soon-to-be but definitely…
Michael Collins is the warrior who in 1919 led the Irish Volunteers in their revolt against the British Empire. He has inspired a movie (Neil Jordan’s eponymous biopic) and the Michael Collins Grill on Lincoln Road. Actually one of the owners of the grill is also named Michael Collins, which…
From the front the Charlotte Bakery doesn’t look much more encouraging than any of the many other sources, on this still relatively ungentrified stretch of Washington Avenue, for empanadas. But some of the fare inside is uncommonly tasty. This is especially true of savory pastries such as the $1.50 “mini-lunch”…
For as long as I’ve lived in Miami Beach, sushi bars have been more common than Madonna sightings — and back in ’93 that girl used to show up at local gas station openings. Near my condo were three sushi sources on one block alone, four if you count the…
It’s been somewhere between a few decades and a century since South Florida was considered part of the American South. Still it’s easy to find most Southern regional cuisines here. In fact, hearty Cajun cooking, originated by French Canadian “Acadians” who migrated to southern Louisiana’s bayou country, has been so…
At most restaurants it’s not a good sign when chefs come and go every few years. It’s often a sign of management instability, or that something other than inspired food is the place’s priority. Sometimes it’s followed by increasingly empty tables, which soon leads to shuttered doors. This is especially…
A time-honored theory among ethnic-restaurant mavens goes like this: The best Chinese food is to be found in the worst dumps. As a business acquaintance who’d grown up in China once told me: “If I walk in and there’s a tuxedoed guy behind a maitre d’ stand, I really start…
