Best Free Parking

Parking on Las Olas Boulevard is a renowned pain in the derrière. The finicky, quarters-only meters prompted one restaurateur over the holidays to hire an 18-year-old fellow on a full-time basis to stand around a side lot making change for customers. The ravenous meters on the street slurp down spare change like Pac-Man gobbling power pellets. Fail to feed these steel sentries and your reward is a $25 ticket, which, come to think of it, would buy you a mere 20 hours of street parking anyway. The only chink in the system is to hit the meter spots on the side streets after dark, when those meters aren't monitored. Maybe it's the fear of parking a $60,000 SUV slightly off the beaten path that keeps the gentry coming back to the expensive spots along the main drag. Whatever. If you're hitting the Floridian for a slab of pie after a night of wine-fueled suck-face, you deserve at least the option of gratis parking on somewhere south of Las Olas. Because you, dear friend, are keeping it real.