Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant, which opened on Brickell Avenue just two months ago, currently is hosting downtown’s hottest Friday after-work party, drawing the same mass of young professionals as last season’s sizzling Firehouse Four shindigs. This is the sixteenth such microbrewery/restaurant that founders Dan Gordon and Dean Biersch have launched…
Manuel Martinez came up with a novel idea: to re-create the town square of La Mancha, circa 1605, as the setting for his Spanish Don Quixote Restaurant. Martinez, a fan and scholar of the Cervantes masterpiece (his production of the play runs at South Beach’s Colony Theater this month), forwarded…
When Dubliners enter their local pub, the feeling is one of immediate comfort, like slipping into a pair of well-worn shoes. The spacious interior of the Playwright Irish Pub & Restaurant handsomely mimics the antique look that comes naturally to those ancient, tin-ceilinged, gas-lamp-adorned drinking establishments, but it’s still too…
Russia is not the best place to be right now, as we were reminded by the not-so-subtle sub metaphor for a nation sinking fast in an ocean of corruption and economic chaos. Still, I’d rather be there than in Colombia, that spot rife with right-wing paramilitaries, left-wing guerrillas, drug militia,…
Seating prospects at the lunch spot we had just entered didn’t look good. I suggested we leave and eat somewhere else, though admittedly I was more put off by a sign on the window reading “Gourmet Sandwiches” than at having to wait for a table (I distrust any place that…
Tom Tresh was a talented baseball player, but he was never able to live up to expectations that he could be the next Mickey Mantle. The same hopeful hype would haunt about as many other subsequent Yankees centerfield prospects as there are South Florida neighborhoods that have failed to become…
My most memorable dining experiences often have occurred outdoors, which doesn’t mean on the patio. There was that chardonnay and chilled oysters experience out in the Everglades one sunset; or the simple yet perfect taste of a sliced mango in a Puerto Rican rain forest following a light rain; or…
When I first moved to South Beach almost a decade ago, I was afraid to walk down Lincoln Road late at night. And by late I mean 10:00 p.m. Although the bohemian-style walking mall, with its cracked sidewalks and bizarre art galleries and fledgling cafés was full of character, it…
The crowd that gathers at Opium is attractive and mostly dressed in black. Many talk on cell phones. Handsome bartenders and waiters also are clothed in black, while comely barmaids pretty much wear the same outfit that Gwen Verdon or Shirley MacLaine (take your pick) wore in My Sweet Charity…
Pulcinella’s Marketplace & Café is a large, bright, white gourmet marketplace, a “purveyor of fine foods,” as they put it. It also is a café, which, if you come in from the front as opposed to the side entrance, is what you’ll encounter first. The décor is casual: green marble…
Alice Waters is the person most often credited with pioneering, in this nation, the notion of fine cuisine as fresh, high-quality, locally procured foods prepared as simply as possible. That’s just what she served at her Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, which opened April Fool’s Day 1980 and coincided with…
He’s got the best rock-star name of any local chef: Johnny V. And the coolest dub: “Caribbean Cowboy.” Never mind that Mr. Vinczencz is from St. Louis, Missouri, the important thing is that he’s come back in the kitchen of Astor Place, where before leaving in early 1999 he had…
Years ago, before moving here, I found myself on Douglas Road in the Gables, half an hour early for some business meeting I had flown down to attend. With time to kill, and my knees practically buckling from the relentless intensity of the summer sun, I stumbled into an unassuming…
Bissaleh Café is a kosher Israeli dairy restaurant/pizza place/ juice bar/coffee bar. Not, you might say, your typical, everyday dining establishment. The décor can best be described as a Yiddish Vacas Gordas, with more space between the tables. Like that Argentine parillada, it’s a small, informal room with 30 to…
This review will only be of interest to those who plan on heading out to catch a Marlins baseball game. All 60 of you. Of course the Fish, as the team is endearingly called, cannot hope to contend this year because their player payroll is only slightly higher than what…
The Palm Plaza Shopping Center is just another nondescript strip mall, one of hundreds, maybe thousands, marring Miami’s landscape. My feeling has always been that if you’re going to uglify a neighborhood, the least you can do is offer good food, and Palm Plaza does just that. It’s got Chinese,…
Key Biscayne and Virginia Key boast breathtaking views of sunsets over the bay and of Miami’s skyline as it transforms first into dusky silhouette, then into glittering lights as night falls. Naturally there are seafood restaurants eager to take advantage of such snapshot vistas, the Rusty Pelican probably being the…
I’ve lately found myself insisting, to whomever will listen, that when it comes to dining in ethnic restaurants I’m no nitpicking stickler for authenticity; I simply wonder why those who serve watered-down, clownlike mockeries of such cuisines even bother at all. When those who will listen happen to be the…
The Palm premiered in Bay Harbor Islands in 1986, but it has the Joe’s Stone Crab, old-timey feel of an institution that’s been around forever. The original Palm in New York does go back pretty far — to 1926, which is when John Ganzi and Pio Bozzi, two immigrants to…
It was on the drive to Tequila Sunrise that one of my dinner guests inquired as to what sort of place we were headed. “Mexican,” I replied, though it turned out she had already surmised that. I really didn’t know any more, other than having been told by someone who…
Deborah Calderon is the “D” and Clare Kelley the “Clare” of I Do D’Clare, a cozy 65-seat breakfast and lunch spot on Ponce de Leon, just off South Dixie Highway in the Gables. The same location used to house another restaurant, Loffler’s, where Deborah cooked and Clare waited tables. Two…
Like many curious New Yorkers whose acquaintance with Cuban food was largely limited to the tasty but pretty basic mom-and-pop Cuban/Chinese joints that once sprouted on every block of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I devoured the New York Times piece that came out shortly after Douglas Rodriguez’s Yuca first opened…
