I find it fitting that very few of Miami’s top chefs and restaurateurs were actually born here. Even those chefs who embrace New World cuisine, the fare that has come to represent South Florida, hail from Texas, Illinois, New York, California — anywhere but the region with which they have…
You wouldn’t know it by the weather, but autumn is approaching. The biggest clue: the department stores and boutiques, which all feature “back-to-school” three-piece pinstripe woolens and nubbly mohair weaves, tempting consumers to replace their outdated, summertime wardrobes. For fashion-conscious folk in other parts of the country, where the first…
Restaurant owners must remedy health-code violations before their next inspection. If a violation is considered critical to public health — for example, if the pantry is infested with rodents — a followup inspection may be scheduled within a week or less. Restaurants that consistently fail to correct violations are subject…
People often compare New World cuisine restaurants Chef Allen’s and Mark’s Place. The reasons are fairly obvious. Both rank consistently as Miami’s top restaurants; both, in fact, have won national recognition. Friendly rivals, both opened in the mid-Eighties and are named after the pioneering chefs who operate them. And both…
Unruly children can be the bane of a restaurateur’s existence. Not surprisingly, some restaurants ban kids altogether, a policy that is discriminatory to well-behaved youngsters and their parents. This summer the Palm Grill in Key West, a high-end but by no means overly tony eatery, refused to take our reservation…
Years ago my family frequented a restaurant that was actually two in one. Same owners, same kitchen, but the right side served Chinese food, the left side Japanese. Moreover, what you ate depended upon where you sat. If you were dead-set on swinging, you could sometimes persuade a waiter to…
Forget hot dogs. Forgo chicken. And deep-six that undersize dolphin you caught in the bay. Summertime means steak: flavorful flank, roasted rump, or filet mignon as friendly to the butter knife as perfectly ripe seasonal fruits. Rub a cut with spices, glaze it, or marinate it, then char it over…
On Thursday nights I watch TV. Sit-coms, to be precise. There, I’ve confessed. An almost-comatose couch boniato, I munch from a bag of chips and snicker until my cats meow in chorus, begging me to stop the high-pitched wheezing. Okay, so the chips are more likely to be gourmet spiced…
After a disquieting clip in the Herald and a few subsequent days of radio and TV news factoids about the health horrors associated with Mexican-American food, I was hard put to find willing dining companions for a taco stand roundup. Friends who don’t bat an eye at a Big Mac…
In the June 30 issue of the Wine Spectator, food writer John Mariani claimed that Miami’s “overly hyped restaurant scene is deflating…fast.” To prove his point, he cited the departures of some of our most noted chefs: Douglas Rodriguez (from Yuca), Kerry Simon (from Starfish), and Norman Van Aken (from…
Health experts advise that establishing a solid relationship with your physician is vital to maintaining your health. So I treat my doctor to dinner. Young, good-looking, and possessed of a dry sense of humor, Dr. B is an excellent date, and I’m not just saying that because he writes me…
Animal-rights activists make poor dining companions. They boycott tuna for the dolphins and shrimp for the sea turtles. They object to chicken, beef, and veal on hormonal or moral grounds. And, like a guest of mine did recently, they ask servers who are better equipped to describe the pesto butter…
Revitalizing a restaurant is one of the most difficult tasks a proprietor faces. Once a place earns any kind of a reputation (good or bad), it’s hard to alter; ad campaigns or lower prices aren’t likely to change the dining public’s established perceptions. One popular ploy is simply to rename…
Though I hadn’t thought much about eminent domain since I learned about it in the sixth grade, the term took on new life for me when the decade-old Gourmet Diner fell victim in the fall of last year. The 40-seat North Miami Beach fixture was leveled to make way for…
South Beach’s high-profile, high-price restaurants are scared. Facing the summer after a slow-starting and not particularly profitable season, some eateries are following the long-standing Joe’s Stone Crab policy and taking a vacation. (At Joe’s, of course, the practice is timed with the stone-crab season.) But around these parts, temporary closings…
I take a surreptitious interest in watching my dinner guests eat, if for no other reason than the fact that I enjoy people who also love food. So I can understand why, at Hallandale’s two-month-old Club Dynasty, the multitude of cooks (master chef O.A. Chu and his thirteen assistants) deserted…
According to a recent issue of a la carte, a food-industry newsletter, American consumers choose French restaurants over any other. Though by and large willing to eat sauteed dirt if they’re told it’s a delicacy, most restaurant critics also admit to preferring a particular ethnicity when it comes to dining…
Emily Post probably wouldn’t have enjoyed dining with me. Oh, I can etiquettize with the best of them, elbows off the table, napkin on my lap, spine stiff as a carving board. I know which fork to use when, on what side of the place setting my bread plate appears,…
Thanks to an uncommon surname, I’m a target for small-world coincidences. Handy players of Jewish Geography easily mark me as the daughter of a man with whom they were schooled, the niece of a woman they knew way back when. So it was with no real surprise that I listened…
In a capitalist system competition allows the strong to prosper and the weak to fall by the wayside. Thus an aspiring restaurateur might gamble on success by opening his eatery near other eateries, hoping that by offering a superior product and service, he might become one of the winners. A…
Of all the ethnic cuisines popularly available in the U.S., Indian seems to be the least appreciated and the most misunderstood. Nowhere is this truer than in Miami, where we feast on Asian cuisines A Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean A but tend to overlook their neighbor, represented locally by only…
For the past six months, Coral Gables eateries have been playing the restaurant version of leap-frog, musical chairs, and hide-and-seek. Didier’s gave up its Alcazar Avenue location to Mozart Stube, only to resurface months later on Ponce de Leon Boulevard. Justa Pasta, whose husband-and-wife ownership team Doug and Maureen Cogen…
