If you haven’t explored Cuban dining recently, you’re in for some surprises. The fare offered in many of the newer restaurants goes well beyond ropa vieja and boliche, and the ambiance is elegante. La Casona, a villa-style restaurant that opened a couple of months ago on Calle Ocho, is a…
Next door to the refurbished Century Hotel on the 100 block of Ocean Drive, the Century is giving folks a reason to stray from South Beach’s beaten path. With a sleek look and menu, the restaurant is a welcome – and increasingly popular – addition to the SoBe scene. The…
Not since the short-lived but intriguing Clowns has an area restaurant so wholeheartedly followed its own muse. While the cuisine at the defunct Clowns leaned ever so slightly toward the Caribbean islands, Brasserie Coral Gables turns subtly toward South America, particularly in its European traditions. But like its quirky predecessor…
Even in Miami, restaurants don’t come much funkier than Kon Chau. Looking very back-lot Warner Brothers, a big, square room covered in well-trodden red industrial carpeting is flanked by vinyl banquettes of the same vintage as the seats in a 1955 Chevy – right down to the stuffing poking out…
Time was when the name of a restaurant gave you a pretty good idea of what sort of fare it offered. When I was a kid you didn’t go to the Burger Barn to satisfy a craving for Chateaubriand, nor did you visit the Six-Pack Saloon for champagne cocktails. In…
When a journalist friend returned to the United States recently after spending a few years in Berlin, my dining companion and I were sure she’d be longing for such all-American favorites as Southern fried chicken, T-bone steaks, mashed potatoes and gravy, juicy burgers, and apple pie. But when we invited…
Tony Chan’s Water Club is no choose-one-from column A, choose-one-from-column-B Chinese restaurant. Nearly 200 dishes are offered in the restaurant’s large, narrow room overlooking Biscayne Bay in the Grand Prix Hotel. But the ostentatiousness – and ultimately, the inefficiency – of the staff made our party of three want to…
Don’t bother telling anyone in Miami that Italian food is passe. When Miamians want to eat healthy and light, they think pasta – the new “health” food – and, in turn, Italian restaurant. It’s a simple formula, but it works. And in these hard economic times, chichi spots that serve…
You know the place: Low-pile carpeting, travel-poster art, fake flowers on the tables, menus with a few misspellings, banquettes in only slightly better condition than old auto seats found in a junk yard. But all of these are forgivable because the food is good and the prices low. And sometimes…
No sooner did I master such words as fufu, the Cuban dish of mashed plantains mixed with pork rind, than I was confronted with mangu, its Dominican equivalent – except the Dominicans serve onions with mangu, and call the dish containing pork rinds mofongo. I still have a few things…
Just when I thought it was not in the cards for an upscale Mexican restaurant in Miami, I discovered one with food so good I almost leaped from my chair to perform a Mexican hat dance in the middle of a weekday afternoon. I restrained myself. Mostly because Las Puertas,…
Rome wasn’t built in a day, but Miami’s reputation for outstanding Indian cuisine seems to have developed overnight. The apparent meteoric rise is due largely to a dynasty of restaurateurs who chose our city to branch out from its firm base in Great Britain. First came the Miami branch of…
One of the quietest explosions to hit Miami in the past two years has been the proliferation of Japanese restaurants. Suddenly a scene that consisted mostly of chain operations (Benihana, Samurai) and mainstays (Tani Guchi’s Place, Sakura, Kampai) was joined by at least eight newcomers. Nine months ago one of…
Coral Gables has always been the place to go when you can’t quite decide what it is you’re craving. In the City Beautiful you will find French, Italian, Indian, Cuban, Spanish, Chinese, Thai, Continental – it’s a veritable United Nations of dining. But until the past few months, there’s been…
I hadn’t thought about Anna Maria Alberghetti in years. It’s been that long since the petite Italian woman would appear on the tube, sprinkle a little salad dressing over an antipasto, and exclaim, “Now that’s Italian!” The only reason most viewers, including myself, knew of her at all was because…
This past July, one of Miami Beach’s landmark restaurants, the Forge, spewed more smoke and soot than in the Roaring Twenties, when the site was an ornamental blacksmith’s shop. A fire had started in the restaurant’s new automatic wine dispenser – said to be the world’s largest – and before…
If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to eat less red meat, you’re probably already planning to explore more seafood restaurants. If another of your goals for 1992 is to keep a tighter rein on the old purse strings, you’re in luck. Bahama’s Fish Market & Restaurant, nestled in…
It seems impossible that another year has passed, but by next week 1991 will be as dead as many a Miami restaurant trend (not to mention many a Miami restaurant). So many culinary fancies come and go each year that it’s easy to miss them if you’re not paying close…
In 1990 we saw the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1991 we’re bidding farewell to the Soviet Union. In the midst of an era of great change, it seems not even Miami restaurants are spared. Seldom does a dining establishment survive turnover in ownership, management, and chef, but Cafe…
The bad news in the Grove is that B.C. Chong moved to Miami Beach earlier this year. The good news is that Susie Cheng’s, the restaurant’s successor on Commodore Plaza, continues B.C. Chong’s tradition of serving outstanding Chinese cuisine. Little has been altered in the small, friendly room on one…
Barocco is the style of art and architecture typified by scrolls, curves, and other elaborate ornamentation. In English, we call it baroque, having stolen that word from the French as we did with so many haute things. But even the French are not above such linguistic appropriation – they lifted…
With Thanksgiving Day – and all the eating that it entails – looming large, the last thing my dining consort and I wanted was a huge meal. So we headed to a couple of new eateries with scaled-down menus but, as it turned out, not scaled-down calories. Our first stop…
